Summer Preparation: Primary Sources
(adapted from www.tomrichey.net)
Document 1.1 - The Ascent of Mount Ventoux, A Letter from Petrarch to Dionisio da Borgo San Sepolcro
Francesco Petrarch: Father of Humanism: http://petrarch.petersadlon.com/read_letters.html?s=pet17.html
Today I made the ascent of the highest mountain in this region, which is not improperly called Ventosum. My only motive was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer. I have had the expedition in mind for many years; for, as you know, I have lived in this region from infancy, having been cast here by that fate which determines the affairs of men. Consequently the mountain, which is visible from a great distance, was ever before my eyes, and I conceived the plan of some time doing what I have at last accomplished to-day. The idea took hold upon me with especial force when, in re-reading Livy's History of Rome, yesterday, I happened upon the place where Philip of Macedon, the same who waged war against the Romans, ascended Mount Haemus in Thessaly, from whose summit he was able, it is said, to see two seas, the Adriatic and the Euxine. Whether this be true or false I have not been able to determine, for the mountain is too far away, and writers disagree. Pomponius Mela, the cosmographer - not to mention others who have spoken of this occurrence - admits its truth without hesitation; Titus Livius [Roman historian], on the other hand, considers it false. I, assuredly, should not have left the question long in doubt, had that mountain been as easy to explore as this one. Let us leave this matter one side, however, and return to my mountain here, - it seems to me that a young man in private life may well be excused for attempting what an aged king could undertake without arousing criticism.
When I came to look about for a companion I found, strangely enough, that hardly one among my friends seemed suitable, so rarely do we meet with just the right combination of personal tastes and characteristics, even among those who are dearest to us. This one was too apathetic, that one over-anxious; this one too slow, that one too hasty; one was too sad, another over-cheerful; one more simple, another more sagacious, than I desired. I feared this one's taciturnity and that one's loquacity. The heavy deliberation of some repelled me as much as the lean incapacity of others. I rejected those who were likely to irritate me by a cold want of interest, as well as those who might weary me by their excessive enthusiasm. Such defects, however grave, could be borne with at home, for charity endures all things, and friendship accepts any burden; but it is quite otherwise on a journey, where every weakness becomes much more serious. So, as I was bent upon pleasure and anxious that my enjoyment should be unalloyed, I looked about me with unusual care, balanced against one another the various characteristics of my friends, and without committing any breach of friendship I silently condemned every trait which might prove disagreeable on the way. And - would you believe it? - I finally turned homeward for aid, and proposed the ascent to my only brother, who is younger than I, and with whom you are well acquainted. He was delighted and gratified beyond measure by the thought of holding the place of a friend as well as of a brother.
Answer the following questions in ink on lined paper:
Document 1.2 - A Letter from Petrarch to Marcus Tullius Cicero
Francesco Petrarch: Father of Humanism: http://petrarch.petersadlon.com/read_letters.html?s=pet17.html
Your letters I sought for long and diligently; and finally, where I least expected it, I found them. At once I read them, over and over, with the utmost eagerness. And as I read I seemed to hear your bodily voice, O Marcus Tullius, saying many things, uttering many lamentations, ranging through many phases of thought and feeling. I long had known how excellent a guide you have proved for others; at last I was to learn what sort of guidance you gave yourself.
Now it is your turn to be the listener. Hearken, wherever you are, to the words of advice, or rather of sorrow and regret, that fall, not unaccompanied by tears, from the lips of one of your successors, who loves you faithfully and cherishes your name. O spirit ever restless and perturbed! in old age---I am but using your own words---self-involved in calamities and ruin! what good could you think would come from your incessant wrangling, from all this wasteful strife and enmity? Where were the peace and quiet that befitted your years, your profession, your station in life? What will-o'-the-wisp tempted you away, with a delusive hope of glory; involved you, in your declining years, in the wars of younger men; and, after exposing you to every form of misfortune, hurled you down to a death that it was unseemly for a philosopher to die? Alas! the wise counsel that you gave your brother, and the salutary advice of your great masters, you forgot. You were like a traveler in the night, whose torch lights up for others the path where he himself has miserably fallen….
What insanity led you to hurl yourself upon Antony? Love of the republic, you would probably say. But the republic had fallen before this into irretrievable ruin, as you had yourself admitted. Still, it is possible that a lofty sense of duty, and love of liberty, constrained you to do as you did, hopeless though the effort was. That we can easily believe of so great a man. But why, then, were you so friendly with Augustus? What answer can you give to Brutus? If you accept Octavius, said he, we must conclude that you are not so anxious to be rid of all tyrants as to find a tyrant who will be well-disposed toward yourself. Now, unhappy man, you were to take the last false step, the last and most deplorable. You began to speak ill of the very friend whom you had so lauded, although he was not doing any ill to you, but merely refusing to prevent others who were. I grieve, dear friend at such fickleness. These shortcomings fill me with pity and shame. Like Brutus, I feel no confidence in the arts in which you are so proficient. What, pray, does it profit a man to teach others, and to be prating always about virtue, in high-sounding words, if he fails to give heed to his own instructions? Ah! how much better it would have been, how much more fitting for a philosopher, to have grown old peacefully in the country, meditating, as you yourself have somewhere said, upon the life that endures forever, and not upon this poor fragment of life; to have known no fasces, yearned for no triumphs, found no Catilines to fill the soul with ambitious longings!---All this, however, is vain. Farewell, forever, my Cicero.
Written in the land of the living; on the right bank of the Adige, in Verona, a city of Transpadane Italy; on the 16th of June, and in the year of that God whom you never knew the 1345th.
Answer the following questions in ink on lined paper:
Document 1.3 - From Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486)
Retrieved from: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Mirandola/
TO STUDENTS: Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man has been called the “Manifesto of the Renaissance” due to its articulation of the core values held by many humanists. In this preface to his 900 theses on religion and philosophy, Pico employs syncretism (the fusion of the Christian and classical traditions) in his praise of man and of man’s free will.
Most esteemed Fathers, I have read in the ancient writings of the Arabians that Abdala the Saracen on being asked what, on this stage, so to say, of the world, seemed to him most evocative of wonder, replied that there was nothing to be seen more marvelous than man. And that celebrated exclamation of Hermes Trismegistus, ``What a great miracle is man, Asclepius'' confirms this opinion.
… Why, I asked, should we not admire the angels themselves and the beatific choirs more? At long last, however, I feel that I have come to some understanding of why man is the most fortunate of living things and, consequently, deserving of all admiration; of what may be the condition in the hierarchy of beings assigned to him, which draws upon him the envy, not of the brutes alone, but of the astral beings and of the very intelligences which dwell beyond the confines of the world….
God the Father, the Mightiest Architect, had already raised, according to the precepts of His hidden wisdom, this world we see, the cosmic dwelling of divinity, a temple most august. He had already adorned the supercelestial region with Intelligences, infused the heavenly globes with the life of immortal souls and set the fermenting dung-heap of the inferior world teeming with every form of animal life. But when this work was done, the Divine Artificer still longed for some creature which might comprehend the meaning of so vast an achievement, which might be moved with love at its beauty and smitten with awe at its grandeur. When, consequently, all else had been completed (as both Moses and Timaeus testify), in the very last place, He bethought Himself of bringing forth man. Truth was, however, that there remained no archetype according to which He might fashion a new offspring, nor in His treasure-houses the wherewithal to endow a new son with a fitting inheritance, nor any place, among the seats of the universe, where this new creature might dispose himself to contemplate the world. All space was already filled; all things had been distributed in the highest, the middle and the lowest orders. Still, it was not in the nature of the power of the Father to fail in this last creative élan; nor was it in the nature of that supreme Wisdom to hesitate through lack of counsel in so crucial a matter; nor, finally, in the nature of His beneficent love to compel the creature destined to praise the divine generosity in all other things to find it wanting in himself.
At last, the Supreme Maker decreed that this creature, to whom He could give nothing wholly his own, should have a share in the particular endowment of every other creature. Taking man, therefore, this creature of indeterminate image, He set him in the middle of the world and thus spoke to him:
``We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgment and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature. I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.''
Oh unsurpassed generosity of God the Father, Oh wondrous and unsurpassable felicity of man, to whom it is granted to have what he chooses, to be what he wills to be!
Document 1.4 - From Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (1513)
Retrieved from Medieval Sourcebook: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/prince-excerp.html
TO STUDENTS: Niccolo Machiavelli, a diplomat in the pay of the Republic of Florence, wrote The Prince in 1513 after the overthrow of the Republic forced him into exile. It is widely regarded as one of the basic texts of Western political science, and represents a basic change in the attitude and image of government. The Prince is one of the best examples of a Renaissance text focusing on civic humanism – the use of classical studies to produce effective political leaders.
That Which Concerns a Prince on the Subject of the Art of War
The Prince ought to have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else for his study, than war and its rules and discipline; for this is the sole art that belongs to him who rules, and it is of such force that it not only upholds those who are born princes, but it often enables men to rise from a private station to that rank. And, on the contrary, it is seen that when princes have thought more of ease than of arms they have lost their states….
Concerning Things for Which Men, and Especially Princes, are Blamed
It remains now to see what ought to be the rules of conduct for a prince toward subjects and friends. And as I know that many have written on this point, I expect I shall be considered presumptuous in mentioning it again, especially as in discussing it I shall depart from the methods of other people. But it being my intention to write a thing which shall be useful to him to apprehends it, it appears to me more appropriate to follow up the real truth of a matter than the imagination of it; for many have pictured republics and principalities which in fact have never been known or seen, because how one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation; for a man who wishes to act entirely up to his professions of virtue soon meets with what destroys him among so much that is evil.
Hence, it is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity….
Concerning Cruelty and Clemency, and Whether it is Better to be Loved than Feared
Upon this a question arises: whether it is better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you successed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life, and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. And that prince who, relying entirely on their promises, has neglected other precautions, is ruined; because friendships that are obtained by payments, and not by nobility or greatness of mind, may indeed be earned, but they are not secured, and in time of need cannot be relied upon; and men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserved you by a dread of punishment which never fails.
Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated, which will always be as long as he abstains from the property of his citizens and subjects and from their women.
Document 1.5 - From Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1513)
Retrieved from Archive: http://archive.org/stream/bookofcourtier00castuoft/bookofcourtier00castuoft_djvu.txt
TO STUDENTS: In The Book of the Courtier, Baldassare Castiglione aims to instruct young men on how to be an effective presence in the court of a ruler. Essentially, this is a handbook on gentlemanly behavior. As one of the assumptions of humanistic studies is that while the world changes, people stay the same, consider as you read whether you think that Castiglione’s advice is helpful for someone seeking to advance in today’s world.
From the First Book
TO MESSER ALFONSO ARIOSTO:
You ask me then to write what is to my thinking the form of courtiership most befitting a gentleman who lives at the court of princes, by which he may have the ability and knowledge perfectly to serve them in every reasonable thing, winning from them favor, and praise from other men; in short, what manner of man he ought to be who may deserve to be called a perfect Courtier without flaw....
In these books we shall follow no fixed order or rule of distinct precepts, such as are usually employed in teaching anything whatever; but after the fashion of many ancient writers, we shall revive a pleasant memory and rehearse certain discussions that were held between men singularly competent in such matters....
Count Ludovico:
"But to come to some details, I am of opinion that the principal and true profession of the Courtier ought to be that of arms; which I would have him follow actively above all else, and be known among others as bold and strong, and loyal to whomsoever he serves. And he will win a reputation for these good qualities by exercising them at all times and in all places, since one may never fail in this without severest censure. And just as among women, their fair fame once sullied never recovers its first lustre, so the reputation of a gentleman who bears arms, if once it be in the least tarnished with cowardice or other dis- grace, remains forever infamous before the world and full of ignominy. Therefore the more our Courtier excels in this art, the more he will be worthy of praise; and yet I do not deem essential in him that perfect knowledge of things and those other qualities that befit a commander; since this would be too wide a sea, let us be content, as we have said, with perfect loyalty and unconquered courage, and that he be always seen to possess them. For the courageous are often recognized even more in small things than in great; and frequently in perils of importance and where there are many spectators, some men are to be found, who, although their hearts be dead within them, yet, moved by shame or by the presence of others, press forward almost with their eyes shut, and do their duty God knows how. While on occasions of little moment, when they think they can avoid putting themselves in danger without being detected, they are glad to keep safe. But those who, even when they do not expect to be observed or seen or recognized by anyone, show their ardor and neglect nothing, however paltry, that may be laid to their charge, they have that strength of mind which we seek in our Courtier.
"Not that we would have him look so fierce, or go about blustering, or say that he has taken his cuirass to wife, or threaten with those grim scowls that we have often seen in Berto;" because to such men as this, one might justly say that which a brave lady jestingly said in gentle company to one whom I will not name at present ;" who, being invited by her out of compliment to dance, refused not only that, but to listen to the music, and many other entertainments proposed to him, saying always that such silly trifles were not his business; so that at last the lady said, 'What is your business, then?' He replied with a sour look, ' To fight.' Then the lady at once said, ‘Now that you are in no war and out of fighting trim, I should think it were a good thing to have yourself well oiled, and to stow yourself with all your battle harness in a closet until you be needed, lest you grow more rusty than you are;' and so, amid much laughter from the bystanders, she left the discomfited fellow to his silly presumption.
"Therefore let the man we are seeking, be very bold, stern, and always among the first, where the enemy are to be seen; and in every other place, gentle, modest, reserved, above all things avoiding ostentation and that impudent self-praise by which men ever excite hatred and disgust in all who hear them."
Then my lord Caspar replied:
"As for me, I have known few men excellent in anything whatever, who do not praise themselves; and it seems to me that this may well be permitted them; for when anyone who feels himself to be of worth, sees that he is not known to the ignorant by his works, he is offended that his worth should lie buried, and needs must in some way hold it up to view, in order that he may not be cheated of the fame that is the true reward... Thus among the ancient authors, whoever carries weight seldom fails to praise himself. They indeed are insufferable who do this without desert, but such we do not presume our Courtier to be."
The Count then said:
"If you heard what I said, it was impudent and indiscriminate self-praise that I censured: and as you say, we surely ought not to form a bad opinion of a brave man who praises himself modestly, nay we ought rather to regard such praise as better evidence than if it came from the mouth of others. I say, however, that he, who in praising himself runs into no error and incurs no annoyance or envy at the hands of those that hear him, is a very discreet man indeed and merits praise from others in addition to that which he bestows upon himself; because it is a very difficult matter."
* * *
Then the Count said:
"It is a great marvel that in such tender youth, solely by natural instinct and against the usage of his country, he has of himself chosen so worthy a path. And as subjects always copy the customs of their superiors, it may be that, as you say, the French will yet come to esteem letters at their true worth: whereto they may easily be persuaded, if they will but listen to reason; since nothing is by nature more desirable for men, or more proper to them, than knowledge, which it is great folly to say or believe is not always a good thing.
"And if I were speaking with them, or with others who had an opinion contrary to mine, I should strive to show them how useful and necessary letters are to our life and dignity, having indeed been granted by God to men as a crowning gift. Nor should I lack instances of many excellent commanders of antiquity, who all added the ornament of letters to the valor of their arms.
"Thus you know Alexander held Homer in such veneration that he always kept the Iliad by his bedside; and he devoted the greatest attention not only to these studies but to philosophical speculation under Aristotle's guidance. Alcibiades enlarged his natural aptitudes and made them greater by means of letters and the teachings of Socrates. The care that Caesar gave to study is also attested by the surviving works that he divinely wrote. It is said that Scipio Africanus always kept in his hand the works of Xenophon, wherein the perfect king is portrayed under the name of Cyrus. I could tell you of Lucullus, Sulla, Pompey, Brutus,'" and many other Romans and Greeks; but I will merely remind you that Hannibal, the illustrious commander, — although fierce by nature and a stranger to all humanity, faithless and a despiser of both men and gods, — yet had knowledge of letters and was conversant with the Greek language; and if I mistake not, I once read that he even left a book composed by him in Greek.
"However it is superfluous to tell you this, for I well know that you all see how wrong the French are in thinking that letters are injurious to arms. You know that glory is the true stimulus to great and hazardous deeds of war, and whoso is moved thereto by gain or other motive, besides doing nothing good, deserves not to be called a gentleman, but a base trafficker. And true glory is that which is preserved in the sacred treasure-house of letters, as everyone may understand except those unfortunates who have never enjoyed them.
"What soul is there so abject, timid and humble, that when he reads of the deeds of Caesar, Alexander, Scipio, Hannibal, and many others, is not inflamed by an ardent desire to be like them, and does not make small account of this frail two days' life, in order to win the almost eternal life of fame, which in spite of death makes him live in far greater glory than before? But he who does not feel the delight of letters, cannot either know how great is the glory they so long preserve, and measures it by the life of one man or two, because his memory runs no further. Hence he cannot esteem this short-lived glory so much as he would that almost eternal glory if knowledge of it were unhappily not denied him, and as he does not esteem it so much, we may reasonably believe that he will not run such danger to pursue it as one who knew it would.
"I should be far from willing to have an antagonist cite instances to the contrary in refutation of my view, and urge upon me that with all their knowledge of letters the Italians have for some time since shown little martial valour, — which is alas only too true." But it very certainly might be said that the fault of a few has brought not only grievous harm but eternal obloquy upon all the rest; and from them was derived the true cause of our ruin and of the decadence if not the death of valour in our souls: yet it would be far more shameful in us to publish it, than for the French to be ignorant of letters. Therefore it is better to pass over in silence that which cannot be recalled without pain: and avoiding this subject (upon which I entered against my will) to return to our Courtier.
"I would have him more than passably accomplished in letters, at least in those studies that are called the humanities, and conversant not only with the Latin language but with the Greek, for the sake of the many different things that have been admirably written therein. Let him be well versed in the poets, and not less in the orators and historians, and also proficient in writing verse and prose, especially in this vulgar tongue of ours; for besides the enjoyment he will find in it, he will by this means never lack agreeable entertainment with ladies, who are usually fond of such things. And if other occupations or want of study prevent his reaching such perfection as to render his writings worthy of great praise, let him be careful to suppress them so that others may not laugh at him, and let him show them only to a friend whom he can trust: because they will at least be of this service to him, that the exercise will enable him to judge the work of others. For it very rarely happens that a man who is not accustomed to write, however learned he may be, can ever quite appreciate the toil and industry of writers, or taste the sweetness and excellence of style, and those latent niceties that are often found in the ancients.
"Moreover these studies will also make him fluent, and as Aristippus said to the tyrant, confident and assured in speaking with everyone.'" Hence I would have our Courtier keep one precept fixed in mind; which is that in this and everything else he should be always on his guard, and diffident rather than forward, and that he should keep from falsely persuading himself that he knows that which he does not know. For by nature we all are fonder of praise than we ought to be, and our ears love the melody of words that praise us more than any other sweet song or sound; and thus, like sirens' voices, they are often the cause of shipwreck to him who does not close his ears to such deceptive harmony. Among the ancient sages this danger was recognized, and books were written showing in what way the true friend may be distinguished from the flatterer.'" But what does this avail, if there be many, nay a host, of those who clearly perceive that they are flattered, yet love him who flatters them, and hold him in hatred who tells them the truth? And often when they find him who praises them too sparing in his words, they even help him and say such things of themselves, that the flatterer is put to shame, most impudent though he be.
From the Third Book
Then my lady Duchess said:
“Do not wander from your subject, my lord Magnifico, but hold to the order given you and describe the Court Lady, to the end that so noble a Lady as this may have someone competent to serve her worthily."
The Magnifico continued:
“Then, my Lady, to show that your commands have power to induce me to essay even that which I know not how to do, I will speak of this excellent Lady as I would have her…”
"And although my lord Gaspar has said that the same rules which are set for the Courtier, serve also for the Lady. I am of another mind for while some qualities are common to both and as necessary to man as to woman, there are nevertheless some others that befit woman more than man, and some are befitting man to which she ought to be wholly a stranger. The same I say of bodily exercises; but above all, methinks that in her ways, manners, words, gestures and bearing, a woman ought to be very unlike a man; for just as it befits him to show a certain stout and sturdy manliness, so it is becoming in a woman to have a soft and dainty tenderness with an air of womanly sweetness in her every movement, which, in her going or staying or saying what you will, shall always make her seem the woman, without any likeness of a man.
"Now, if this precept be added to the rules that these gentlemen have taught the Courtier, I certainly think she ought to be able to profit by many of them, and to adorn herself with admirable accomplishments, as my lord Gaspar says. For I believe that many faculties of the mind are as necessary to woman as to man; likewise gentle birth, to avoid affectation, to be naturally graceful in all her doings, to be mannerly, clever, prudent, not arrogant, not envious, not slanderous, not vain, not quarrelsome, not silly, to know how to win and keep the favor of her mistress and of all others, to practice well and gracefully the exercises that befit women. I am quite of the opinion, too, that beauty is more necessary to her than to the Courtier, for in truth that woman lacks much who lacks beauty. Then, too, she ought to be more circumspect and take greater care not to give occasion for evil being said of her, and so to act that she may not only escape a stain of guilt but even of suspicion, for a woman has not so many ways of defending herself against false imputations as has a man.
“But as Count Ludovico has explained very minutely the chief profession of the Courtier, and has insisted it be that of arms, I think it is also fitting to tell what in my judgment is that of the Court Lady, and when I have done this, I shall think myself quit of the greater part of my duty.
“Laying aside, then, those virtues of the mind that she ought to have in common with the Courtier (such as prudence, magnanimity, continence, and many others), and likewise those qualities that befit all women (such as kindness, discretion, ability to manage her husband's property and her" house and children if she be married, and all those capacities that are requisite in a good housewife), I say that in a lady who lives at court I think above all else a certain pleasant affability is befitting, whereby she may be able to entertain politely every sort of man with agreeable and seemly converse, suited to the time and place, and to the rank of the person with whom she may speak, uniting with calm and modest manners, and with that seemliness which should ever dispose all her actions, a quick vivacity of spirit whereby she may show herself alien to all indelicacy; but with such a kindly manner as shall make us think her no less chaste, prudent and benign, than agreeable, witty and discreet: and so she must preserve a certain mean (difficult and composed almost of contraries), and must barely touch certain limits but not pass them.
"Thus, in her wish to be thought good and pure, the Lady ought not to be so coy and seem so to abhor company and talk that are a little free, as to take her leave as soon as she finds herself therein; for it might easily be thought that she was pretending to be thus austere in order to hide something about herself which she feared others might come to know; and such prudish manners are always odious. Nor ought she, on the other hand, for the sake of showing herself free and agreeable, to utter unseemly words or practice a certain wild and unbridled familiarity and ways likely to make that believed of her which perhaps is not true; but when she is present at such talk, she ought to listen with a little blush and shame.
"Likewise she ought to avoid an error into which I have seen many women fall, which is that of saying and of willingly listening to evil about other women. For those women who, on hearing the unseemly ways of other women described, grow angry thereat and seem to disbelieve it and to regard it almost monstrous that a woman should be immodest, — they, by accounting the offence so heinous, give reason to think that they do not commit it. But those who go about continually prying into other women's intrigues, and narrate them so minutely and with such zest, seem to be envious of them and to wish that everyone may know it, to the end that like matters may not be reckoned as a fault in their own case; and thus they fall into certain laughs and ways that show they then feel greatest pleasure. And hence it comes that men, while seeming to listen gladly, usually hold such women in small respect and have very little regard for them, and think these ways of theirs are an invitation to advance farther, and thus often go such lengths with them as bring them deserved reproach, and finally esteem them so lightly as to despise their company and even find them tedious.
"And on the other hand, there is no man so shameless and insolent as not to have reverence for those women who are esteemed good and virtuous; because this gravity (tempered with wisdom and goodness) is as it were a shield against the insolence and coarseness of the presumptuous. Thus we see that a word or laugh or act of kindness (however small it be) from a virtuous woman is more prized by everyone, than all the endearments and caresses of those who show their lack of shame so openly.”
Document 1.6 - From Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly (1509) Retrieved from Modern History Sourcebook: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1509erasmus-folly.html
TO STUDENTS: This is a work of satire. Take it as such, remembering that a satirist typically uses humor and sarcasm to make serious points. In what ways did Erasmus contrast the Church leaders of his day with the apostles from whom they claimed to derive their authority? It may be helpful to familiarize yourself with the doctrine of apostolic succession before reading.
The Lights of the World Reduced to a mere Wallet
In like manner cardinals, if they thought themselves the successors of the apostles, they would likewise imagine that the same things the [apostles] did are required of them, and that they are not lords but dispensers of spiritual things of which they must shortly give an exact account… they would not be so ambitious… or, if they were, they would willingly leave it and live a laborious, careful life, such as was that of the ancient apostles.
And for popes, that supply the place of Christ, if they should endeavor to imitate His life, to wit His poverty, labor, doctrine, cross, and contempt of life… who would purchase that chair[1] with all his substance? or defend it, so purchased, with swords, poisons, and all force imaginable? …
….
A most inhuman and abominable thing, and more to be execrated, that those great princes of the Church and true lights of the world should be reduced to a staff and a wallet. Whereas now, if there be anything that requires their pains, they leave that to Peter and Paul that have leisure enough; but if there be anything of honor or pleasure, they take that to themselves. By which means it is, yet by my courtesy, that scarce any kind of men live more voluptuously or with less trouble; as believing that Christ will be well enough pleased if in their… ceremonies, titles of holiness and the like, and blessing and cursing, they play the parts of bishops. To work miracles is old and antiquated, and not in fashion now; to instruct the people, troublesome; to interpret the Scripture, pedantic; to pray, a sign one has little else to do; to shed tears, silly and womanish; to be poor, base; to be vanquished, dishonorable and little becoming him that scarce admits even kings to kiss his slipper; and lastly, to die, uncouth; and to be stretched on a cross, infamous.
Theirs are only those weapons[2] and sweet blessings which Paul mentions, and of these truly they are bountiful enough: as interdictions, hangings, heavy burdens, reproofs anathemas, executions in effigy, and that terrible thunderbolt of excommunication, with the very sight of which they sink men's souls beneath the bottom of hell: which yet these most holy fathers in Christ and His vicars hurl with more fierceness against none than against such as, by the instigation of the devil, attempt to lessen or rob them of Peter's patrimony. When, though those words in the Gospel, "We have left all, and followed Thee," were his, yet they call his patrimony lands, cities, tribute, imposts, riches; for which, being enflamed with the love of Christ, they contend with fire and sword, and not without loss of much Christian blood, and believe they have then most apostolically defended the Church, the spouse of Christ, when the enemy, as they call them, are valiantly routed. As if the Church had any deadlier enemies than wicked prelates, who not only suffer Christ to run out of request for want of preaching him, but hinder his spreading by their multitudes of laws merely contrived for their own profit, corrupt him by their forced expositions, and murder him by the evil example of their pestilent life.
Folly Attends a Theological Dispute
I was lately myself at a theological dispute, for I am often there, where when one was demanding what authority there was in Holy Writ that commands heretics to be convinced by fire rather than reclaimed by argument; a crabbed old fellow, and one whose supercilious gravity spoke him at least a doctor, answered in a great fume that Saint Paul had decreed it, who said, "Reject him that is a heretic, after once or twice admonition." And when he had sundry times, one after another, thundered out the same thing, and most men wondered what ailed the man, at last he explained it thus, making two words of one: "A heretic must be put to death.” Some laughed, and yet there wanted not others to whom this exposition seemed plainly theological; which, when some, though those very few, opposed, they cut off the dispute, as we say, with a hatchet, and the credit of so uncontrollable an author. "Pray conceive me," said he, "it is written, 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.' But every heretic bewitches the people; therefore, etc."
Folly Quotes Christ in Her Praise
Folly is so gracious above that her errors are only pardoned, those of wise men never. Whence it is that they ask forgiveness, though they offend never so wittingly, cloak it yet with the excuse of folly… So Saul makes his excuse of David, "For behold," says he, "I did it foolishly." And again, David himself thus sweetens God, "And therefore I beseech thee, O Lord, to take away the trespass of thy servant, for I have done foolishly," as if he knew there was no pardon to be obtained unless he had colored his offense with folly and ignorance.
And stronger is that of Christ upon the cross when he prayed for his enemies, "Father, forgive them," nor does he cover their crime with any other excuse than that of unwittingness- because, says he, "they know not what they do." In like manner Paul, writing to Timothy, "But therefore I obtained mercy, for that I did it ignorantly through unbelief." And what is the meaning of "I did it ignorantly" but that I did it out of folly, not malice? And what of "Therefore I received mercy" but that I had not obtained it had I not been made more allowable through the covert of folly? For us also makes that mystical Psalmist, though I remembered it not in its right place, "Remember not the sins of my youth nor my ignorances."
Answer the following questions in ink on lined paper:
1. Identify at least three ways that Erasmus contrasts the Church leaders of his day with the apostles.
2. According to Erasmus, is it biblical to execute heretics?
3. What is the relationship between Folly and forgiveness?
4. What makes The Praise of Folly a humanistic work?
Document 1.7 - An Obituary of Henry VII, from the Anglica Historia
Retrieved From Tudor England: http://englishhistory.net/tudor/hobit.htmlHe [Henry VII] well knew how to maintain his royal majesty and all which appertains to kingship at every time and in every place. He was most fortunate in war, although he was constitutionally more inclined to peace than to war. He cherished justice above all things; as a result he vigorously punished violence, manslaughter and every other kind of wickedness whatsoever. Consequently he was greatly regretted[3] on that account by all his subjects, who had been able to conduct their lives peaceably, far removed from the assaults and evil doings of scoundrels. He was the most ardent supporter of our faith and daily participated with great piety in religious services....
But all these virtues were obscured latterly by avarice, from which he suffered. This avarice is surely a bad enough vice in a private individual, whom it forever torments; in a monarch indeed it may be considered the worst vice since it is harmful to everyone and distorts those qualities of trustfulness, justice and integrity by which the State must be governed.
Answer the following questions in ink on lined paper:
1. What were Henry VII’s virtues as a ruler?
2. What were Henry’s vices?
3. How did Henry’s actions as described above make him a typical “new monarch?”
Document 1.8 - A Letter from Columbus to the King and Queen of Spain (1494?)
Medieval Sourcebook: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/columbus2.asp
Most High and Mighty Sovereigns,
In obedience to your Highnesses' commands, and with submission to superior judgment, I will say whatever occurs to me in reference to the colonization and commerce of the Island of Espanola, and of the other islands, both those already discovered and those that may be discovered hereafter.
In the first place, as regards the Island of Espanola: Inasmuch as the number of colonists who desire to go thither amounts to two thousand, owing to the land being safer and better for farming and trading, and because it will serve as a place to which they can return and from which they can carry on trade with the neighboring islands:
Document 1.9 - From Thomas More, Utopia (Book I) (1516)
Retrieved from: http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/more/utopia-contents.html
TO STUDENTS: Thomas More’s Utopia is a book written in two parts. The first part features a fictionalized Thomas More and some associates in a dialogue (in the fashion of Plato) with Raphael, a traveler who has explored lands unknown to More and his less-traveled companions. As you read, pay particular attention AND HIGHLIGHT examples of humanism (allusions to classical authors) and note specifically how this work is a work of northern humanism, emphasizing Christian principles and social reform.
HENRY VIII, the unconquered King of England, a prince adorned with all the virtues that become a great monarch, having some differences of no small consequence with Charles, the most serene Prince of Castile, sent me into Flanders, as his ambassador, for treating and composing matters between them...
After we had several times met without coming to an agreement, they went to Brussels for some days to know the Prince's pleasure. And since our business would admit it, I went to Antwerp. While I was there, among many that visited me, there was one that was more acceptable to me than any other, Peter Giles, born at Antwerp, who is a man of great honor, and of a good rank in his town, though less than he deserves... One day as I was returning home from mass at St. Mary's, which is the chief church, and the most frequented of any in Antwerp, I saw him by accident talking with a stranger, who seemed past the flower of his age; his face was tanned, he had a long beard, and his cloak was hanging carelessly about him, so that by his looks and habit I concluded he was a seaman.
As soon as Peter saw me, he came and saluted me; and as I was returning his civility, he took me aside, and pointing to him with whom he had been discoursing, he said: "Do you see that man? I was just thinking to bring him to you."
I answered, "He should have been very welcome on your account."
"And on his own too," replied he, "if you knew the man, for there is none alive that can give so copious an account of unknown nations and countries as he can do; which I know you very much desire."
Then said I, "I did not guess amiss, for at first sight I took him for a seaman."
"But you are much mistaken," said he, "for he has not sailed as a seaman, but as a traveler, or rather a philosopher. This Raphael, who from his family carries the name of Hythloday, is not ignorant of the Latin tongue, but is eminently learned in the Greek, having applied himself more particularly to that than to the former, because he had given himself much to philosophy, in which he knew that the Romans have left us nothing that is valuable, except what is to be found in Seneca and Cicero. He is a Portuguese by birth, and was so desirous of seeing the world that he divided his estate among his brothers, ran the same hazard as Americus Vespucius, and bore a share in three of his four voyages... after he, with five Castilians, had travelled over many countries, at last, by strange good-fortune, he got to Ceylon, and from thence to Calicut, where he very happily found some Portuguese ships, and, beyond all men's expectations, returned to his native country."
When Peter had said this to me, I thanked him for his kindness, in intending to give me the acquaintance of a man whose conversation he knew would be so acceptable; and upon that Raphael and I embraced each other. After those civilities were passed which are usual with strangers upon their first meeting, we all went to my house, and entering into the garden, sat down on a green bank, and entertained one another in discourse….
[Raphael recounts his travels in unknown lands.]
As he told us of many things that were amiss in those new- discovered countries, so he reckoned up not a few things from which patterns might be taken for correcting the errors of these nations among whom we live; of which an account may be given, as I have already promised, at some other time; for at present I intend only to relate those particulars that he told us of the manners and laws of the Utopians: but I will begin with the occasion that led us to speak of that commonwealth. After Raphael had discoursed with great judgment on the many errors that were both among us and these nations; had treated of the wise institutions both here and there, and had spoken as distinctly of the customs and government of every nation through which he had passed, as if he had spent his whole life in it, Peter, being struck with admiration, said: "I wonder, Raphael, how it comes that you enter into no king's service, for I am sure there are none to whom you would not be very acceptable: for your learning and knowledge both of men and things, are such that you would not only entertain them very pleasantly, but be of great use to them, by the examples you could set before them and the advices you could give them; and by this means you would both serve your own interest and be of great use to all your friends."
"As for my friends," answered he, "I need not be much concerned, having already done for them all that was incumbent on me… I think my friends ought to rest contented with this, and not to expect that for their sake I should enslave myself to any king whatsoever…
"Now I live as I will, to which I believe few courtiers can pretend. And there are so many that court the favor of great men, that there will be no great loss if they are not troubled either with me or with others of my temper."
Upon this, said I: "I perceive, Raphael, that you neither desire wealth nor greatness; and indeed I value and admire such a man much more than I do any of the great men in the world. Yet I think you would do what would well become so generous and philosophical a soul as yours is, if you would apply your time and thoughts to public affairs, even though you may happen to find it a little uneasy to yourself: and this you can never do with so much advantage, as by being taken into the counsel of some great prince, and putting him on noble and worthy actions, which I know you would do if you were in such a post; for the springs both of good and evil flow from the prince, over a whole nation, as from a lasting fountain. So much learning as you have… would render you a very fit counselor to any king whatsoever."
"You are doubly mistaken," said he, "Mr. More, both in your opinion of me, and in the judgment you make of things: for as I have not that capacity that you fancy I have, so, if I had it, the public would not be one jot the better, when I had sacrificed my quiet to it. For most princes apply themselves more to affairs of war than to the useful arts of peace; and in these I neither have any knowledge, nor do I much desire it: they are generally more set on acquiring new kingdoms, right or wrong, than on governing well those they possess. And among the ministers of princes, there are none that are not so wise as to need no assistance, or at least that do not think themselves so wise that they imagine they need none; and if they court any, it is only those for whom the prince has much personal favor, whom by their fawnings and flatteries they endeavor to fix to their own interests: and indeed Nature has so made us that we all love to be flattered, and to please ourselves with our own notions… Now if in such a court, made up of persons who envy all others, and only admire themselves, a person should but propose anything that he had either read in history or observed in his travels, the rest would think that the reputation of their wisdom would sink, and that their interest would be much depressed, if they could not run it down… I have met with these proud, morose, and absurd judgments of things in many places, particularly once in England."
"Were you ever there?" said I.
"Yes, I was," answered he, "and stayed some months there not long after the rebellion in the west was suppressed with a great slaughter of the poor people that were engaged in it. I was then much obliged to that reverend prelate, John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal, and Chancellor of England... When I was in England the King depended much on his counsels, and the government seemed to be chiefly supported by him; for from his youth he had been all along practised in affairs; and having passed through many traverses of fortune, he had with great cost acquired a vast stock of wisdom…
"One day when I was dining with him there happened to be at table one of the English lawyers, who took occasion to run out in a high commendation of the severe execution of justice upon thieves, who, as he said, were then hanged so fast that there were sometimes twenty on one gibbet;[4] and upon that he said he could not wonder enough how it came to pass, that since so few escaped, there were yet so many thieves left who were still robbing in all places. Upon this, I who took the boldness to speak freely before the cardinal, said there was no reason to wonder at the matter, since this way of punishing thieves was neither just in itself nor good for the public; for as the severity was too great, so the remedy was not effectual; simple theft not being so great a crime that it ought to cost a man his life. No punishment, however severe, is able to restrain those from robbing who can find out no other way of livelihood. 'In this,' said I, 'not only you in England, but a great part of the world imitate some ill masters that are readier to chastise their scholars than to teach them. There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves, but it were much better to make such good provisions by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and of dying for it.'
"'There has been care enough taken for that,' said he, 'there are many handicrafts, and there is agriculture, by which they may make a shift to live unless they have a greater mind to follow ill courses.'
"'That will not serve your turn,' said I, 'for many lose their limbs in civil or foreign wars, as lately in the Cornish rebellion, and some time ago in your wars with France, who being thus mutilated in the service of their king and country, can no more follow their old trades, and are too old to learn new ones: but since wars are only accidental things, and have intervals, let us consider those things that fall out every day. There is a great number of noblemen among you, that are themselves as idle as drones, that subsist on other men's labor, on the labor of their tenants... besides this, they carry about with them a great number of idle fellows, who never learned any art by which they may gain their living...’
"To this he answered: Noblemen ought to be particularly cherished, for in them consists the force of the armies for which we have occasion; since their birth inspires them with a nobler sense of honor than is to be found among tradesmen or ploughmen.'
"'You may as well say,' replied I, 'that you must cherish thieves on the account of wars, for you will never lack the one as long as you have the other; and as robbers prove sometimes gallant soldiers, so soldiers often prove brave robbers; so near an alliance there is between those two sorts of life. But this bad custom, so common among you, of keeping many servants, is not peculiar to this nation. In France there is yet a more pestiferous sort of people, for the whole country is full of soldiers, still kept up in time of peace, if such a state of a nation can be called a peace: and these are kept in pay upon the same account that you plead for those idle retainers about noblemen; this being a maxim of those pretended statesmen that it is necessary for the public safety to have a good body of veteran soldiers ever in readiness.[5] They think raw men are not to be depended on, and they sometimes seek occasions for making war, that they may train up their soldiers in the art of cutting throats; or as Sallust observed, for keeping their hands in use, that they may not grow dull by too long an intermission. But France has learned to its cost how dangerous it is to feed such beasts.
"'The fate of the Romans, Carthaginians, and Syrians, and many other nations and cities, which were both overturned and quite ruined by those standing armies, should make others wiser: and the folly of this maxim of the French appears plainly even from this, that their trained soldiers often find your raw men prove too hard for them; of which I will not say much, lest you may think I flatter the English. Every day's experience shows that the mechanics in the towns, or the clowns in the country, are not afraid of fighting with those idle gentlemen....
"'Luxury likewise breaks in apace upon you, to set forward your poverty and misery; there is an excessive vanity in apparel, and great cost in diet; and that not only in noblemen's families, but even among tradesmen, among the farmers themselves, and among all ranks of persons. You have also many infamous houses,[6] and, besides those that are known, the taverns and alehouses are no better; add to these, dice, cards, tables, foot-ball, tennis, and quoits, in which money runs fast away; and those that are initiated into them, must in the conclusion betake themselves to robbing for a supply. Banish these plagues, and give orders that those who have dispeopled so much soil, may either rebuild the villages they have pulled down, or let out their grounds to such as will do it: restrain those engrossings of the rich, that are as bad almost as monopolies; leave fewer occasions to idleness; let agriculture be set up again, and the manufacture of the wool be regulated, that so there may be work found for those companies of idle people whom want forces to be thieves, or who, now being idle vagabonds or useless servants, will certainly grow [into] thieves at last. If you do not find a remedy to these evils, it is a vain thing to boast of your severity in punishing theft, which though it may have the appearance of justice, yet in itself is neither just nor convenient. For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them?’”
....
"’But, Raphael,' said [the Cardinal] to me, 'I would gladly know upon what reason it is that you think theft ought not to be punished by death? Would you give way to it? Or do you propose any other punishment that will be more useful to the public? For since death does not restrain theft, if men thought their lives would be safe, what fear or force could restrain ill men? On the contrary, they would look on the mitigation of the punishment as an invitation to commit more crimes.'
"I answered: 'It seems to me a very unjust thing to take away a man's life for a little money; for nothing in the world can be of equal value with a man's life: and if it is said that it is not for the money that one suffers, but for his breaking the law, I must say extreme justice is an extreme injury; for we ought not to approve of these terrible laws that make the smallest offences capital, nor of that opinion of the Stoics that makes all crimes equal, as if there were no difference to be made between the killing a man and the taking his purse, between which, if we examine things impartially, there is no likeness nor proportion. God has commanded us not to kill, and shall we kill so easily for a little money? …
"’If by the Mosaical law, though it was rough and severe, as being a yoke laid on an obstinate and servile nation, men were only fined and not put to death for theft, we cannot imagine that in this new law of mercy,[7] in which God treats us with the tenderness of a father, he has given us a greater license to cruelty than he did to the Jews. Upon these reasons it is that I think putting thieves to death is not lawful; and it is plain and obvious that it is absurd, and of ill-consequence to the commonwealth, that a thief and a murderer should be equally punished; for if a robber sees that his danger is the same, if he is convicted of theft as if he were guilty of murder, this will naturally incite him to kill the person whom otherwise he would only have robbed, since if the punishment is the same, there is more security, and less danger of discovery, when he that can best make it is put out of the way; so that terrifying thieves too much, provokes them to cruelty….
"Thus, Mr. More, I have run out into a tedious story… And from hence you may gather, how little courtiers would value either me or my counsels."
To this I answered: "You have done me a great kindness in this relation… but after all this I cannot change my opinion, for I still think that if you could overcome that aversion which you have to the courts of princes, you might, by the advice which it is in your power to give, do a great deal of good to mankind; and this is the chief design that every good man ought to propose to himself in living; for your friend Plato thinks that nations will be happy, when either philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers, it is no wonder if we are so far from that happiness, while philosophers will not think it their duty to assist kings with their councils.”
"But Plato judged right,” he replied, “that except kings themselves became philosophers, they who from their childhood are corrupted with false notions would never fall in entirely with the councils of philosophers...
"Do not you think that if I were about any king, proposing good laws to him, and endeavoring to root out all the cursed seeds of evil that I found in him, I should either be turned out of his court or at least be laughed at for my pains? For instance, what could it signify if I were about the King of France, and were called into his Cabinet Council, where several wise men, in his hearing, were proposing many expedients, as by what arts and practices Milan may be kept, and Naples,[8] that had so oft slipped out of their hands, recovered; how the Venetians, and after them the rest of Italy, may be subdued; and then how Flanders, Brabant, and all Burgundy, and some other kingdoms which he has swallowed already in his designs, may be added to his empire. One proposes a league with the Venetians… Another proposes the hiring the Germans, and the securing the Switzers by pensions....
"Now when things are in so great a fermentation, and so many gallant men are joining councils, how to carry on the war, if so mean a man as I should stand up, and wish them to change all their councils, to let Italy alone, and stay at home, since the Kingdom of France was indeed greater than could be well governed by one man; that therefore he ought not to think of adding others to it: and if after this, I should propose to them the resolutions of the Achorians, a people that lie on the southeast of Utopia, who long ago engaged in war, in order to add to the dominions of their prince another kingdom… This they conquered, but found that the trouble of keeping it was equal to that by which it was gained; that the conquered people were always either in rebellion or exposed to foreign invasions, while they were obliged to be incessantly at war, either for or against them, and consequently could never disband their army; that in the meantime they were oppressed with taxes, their money went out of the kingdom, their blood was spilt for the glory of their King, without procuring the least advantage to the people, who received not the smallest benefit from it even in time of peace; and that their manners being corrupted by a long war, robbery and murders everywhere abounded, and their laws fell into contempt; while their King, distracted with the care of two kingdoms, was the less able to apply his mind to the interests of either...
Therefore it seemed much more eligible that the King should improve his ancient kingdom all he could, and make it flourish as much as possible; that he should love his people, and be beloved of them; that he should live among them, govern them gently, and let other kingdoms alone, since that which had fallen to his share was big enough, if not too big for him. Pray how do you think would such a speech as this be heard?"
"I confess," said I, "I think not very well…."
"That is what I was saying," replied he, "that there is no room for philosophy in the courts of princes."
"Yes, there is," said I, "but not for this speculative philosophy that makes everything to be alike fitting at all times: but there is another philosophy that is more pliable, that knows its proper scene, accommodates itself to it, and teaches a man with propriety and decency to act that part which has fallen to his share… It is even so in a commonwealth and in the councils of princes; if ill opinions cannot be quite rooted out, and you cannot cure some received vice according to your wishes, you must not therefore abandon the commonwealth; for the same reasons you should not forsake the ship in a storm because you cannot command the winds. You are not obliged to assault people with discourses that are out of their road, when you see that their received notions must prevent your making an impression upon them. You ought rather to cast about and to manage things with all the dexterity in your power, so that if you are not able to make them go well they may be as little ill as possible; for except all men were good everything cannot be right, and that is a blessing that I do not at present hope to see."
"According to your arguments," answered he, "all that I could be able to do would be to preserve myself from being mad while I endeavored to cure the madness of others….
"Here is an example by which Plato set forth the unreasonableness of a philosopher's meddling with government: If a man, says he, was to see a great company run out every day into the rain, and take delight in being wet; if he knew that it would be to no purpose for him to go and persuade them to return to their houses, in order to avoid the storm, and that all that could be expected by his going to speak to them would be that he himself should be as wet as they, it would be best for him to keep within doors; and since he had not influence enough to correct other people's folly, to take care to preserve himself.
"Though to speak plainly my real sentiments, I must freely own that as long as there is any property, and while money is the standard of all other things, I cannot think that a nation can be governed either justly or happily: not justly, because the best things will fall to the share of the worst men; nor happily, because all things will be divided among a few… the rest being left to be absolutely miserable. Therefore when I reflect on the wise and good constitution of the Utopians--among whom all things are so well governed, and with so few laws; where virtue hath its due reward, and yet there is such an equality, that every man lives in plenty -- when I compare with them so many other nations that are still making new laws, and yet can never bring their constitution to a right regulation, where notwithstanding everyone has his property; yet all the laws that they can invent have not the power either to obtain or preserve it, or even to enable men certainly to distinguish what is their own from what is another's; of which the many lawsuits that every day break out… I grow more favorable to Plato, and do not wonder that he resolved not to make any laws for such as would not submit to a community of all things: for so wise a man could not but foresee that the setting all upon a level was the only way to make a nation happy, which cannot be obtained so long as there is property…
"I am persuaded, that till property is taken away there can be no equitable or just distribution of things, nor can the world be happily governed: for as long as that is maintained, the greatest and the far best part of mankind will be still oppressed with a load of cares and anxieties..."
"On the contrary," answered I, "it seems to me that men cannot live conveniently where all things are common: how can there be any plenty, where every man will excuse himself from labor? For as the hope of gain doth not excite him, so the confidence that he has in other men's industry may make him slothful…"
"I do not wonder," said he, "that it appears so to you, since you have no notion, or at least no right one, of such a constitution: but if you had been in Utopia with me, and had seen their laws and rules, as I did… you would then confess that you had never seen a people so well constituted as they."
"You will not easily persuade me," said Peter, "that any nation in that new world is better governed than those among us. For as our understandings are not worse than theirs, so our government, if I mistake not, being more ancient, a long practice has helped us to find out many conveniences of life: and some happy chances have discovered other things to us, which no man's understanding could ever have invented."
"As for the antiquity, either of their government or of ours," said he, "you cannot pass a true judgment of it unless you had read their histories; for if they are to be believed, they had towns among them before these parts were so much as inhabited. And as for those discoveries, that have been either hit on by chance, or made by ingenious men, these might have happened there as well as here. I do not deny that we are more ingenious than they are, but they exceed us much in industry and application.... this is the true cause of their being better governed, and living happier than we…
Upon this I said to him: "I earnestly beg you would describe that island very particularly to us…
He consented. We went in and dined, and after dinner came back and sat down in the same place. I ordered my servants to take care that none might come and interrupt us. And both Peter and I desired Raphael to be as good as his word. When he saw that we were very intent upon it, he paused a little to recollect himself, and began in this manner:
Document 1.10 - From Thomas More, Utopia (Book II) (1516)
Retrieved from: http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/more/utopia-contents.html
TO STUDENTS: In the second book of More’s Utopia, Raphael recounts his travels to the land of the Utopians. As you read, pay particular attention to how this society represents a society reformed according to the Christian principles of the Northern Renaissance.
THE island of Utopia is in the middle 200 miles broad, and holds almost at the same breadth over a great part of it; but it grows narrower toward both ends. Its figure is not unlike a crescent: between its horns, the sea comes in eleven miles broad, and spreads itself into a great bay, which is environed with land to the compass of about 500 miles, and is well secured from winds. In this bay there is no great current; the whole coast is, as it were, one continued harbor, which gives all that live in the island great convenience for mutual commerce; but the entry into the bay, occasioned by rocks on the one hand, and shallows on the other, is very dangerous. In the middle of it there is one single rock which appears above water, and may therefore be easily avoided, and on the top of it there is a tower in which a garrison is kept; the other rocks lie under water, and are very dangerous. The channel is known only to the natives, so that if any stranger should enter into the bay, without one of their pilots, he would run great danger of shipwreck; for even they themselves could not pass it safe, if some marks that are on the coast did not direct their way....
There are fifty-four cities in the island, all large and well built: the manners, customs, and laws of which are the same, and they are all contrived as near in the same manner as the ground on which they stand will allow. The nearest lie at least twenty-four miles distance from one another, and the most remote are not so far distant but that a man can go on foot in one day from it to that which lies next it. Every city sends three of its wisest Senators once a year to Amaurot, to consult about their common concerns; for that is the chief town of the island, being situated near the center of it, so that it is the most convenient place for their assemblies. The jurisdiction of every city extends at least twenty miles: and where the towns lie wider, they have much more ground: no town desires to enlarge its bounds, for the people consider themselves rather as tenants than landlords. They have built over all the country, farmhouses for husbandmen, which are well contrived, and are furnished with all things necessary for country labor. Inhabitants are sent by turns from the cities to dwell in them; no country family has fewer than forty men and women in it, besides two slaves. There is a master and a mistress set over every family; and over thirty families there is a magistrate.
Every year twenty of this family come back to the town, after they have stayed two years in the country; and in their room there are other twenty sent from the town, that they may learn country work from those that have been already one year in the country, as they must teach those that come to them the next from the town. By this means such as dwell in those country farms are never ignorant of agriculture, and so commit no errors, which might otherwise be fatal, and bring them under a scarcity of corn. But though there is every year such a shifting of the husbandmen, to prevent any man being forced against his will to follow that hard course of life too long, yet many among them take such pleasure in it that they desire leave to continue in it many years. These husbandmen till the ground, breed cattle, hew wood, and convey it to the towns…
When they need anything in the country which it does not produce, they fetch that from the town, without carrying anything in exchange for it. And the magistrates of the town take care to see it given them; for they meet generally in the town once a month, upon a festival day. When the time of harvest comes, the magistrates in the country send to those in the towns, and let them know how many hands they will need for reaping the harvest; and the number they call for being sent to them, they commonly finish all of the work in one day.
OF THEIR TRADES, AND MANNER OF LIFEAGRICULTURE is that which is so universally understood among them that no person, either man or woman, is ignorant of it… Besides agriculture, which is so common to them all, every man has some peculiar trade to which he applies himself, such as the manufacture of wool, or flax, masonry, smith's work, or carpenter's work; for there is no sort of trade that is not in great esteem among them. Throughout the island they wear the same sort of clothes without any other distinction, except what is necessary to distinguish the two sexes, and the married and unmarried. The fashion never alters; and as it is neither disagreeable nor uneasy, so it is suited to the climate, and calculated both for their summers and winters. Every family makes their own clothes; but all among them, women as well as men, learn one or other of the trades formerly mentioned. Women, for the most part, deal in wool and flax, which suit best with their weakness, leaving the ruder trades to the men. The same trade generally passes down from father to son, inclinations often following descent; but if any man's genius lies another way, he is by adoption translated into a family that deals in the trade to which he is inclined… And if after a person has learned one trade, he desires to acquire another, that is also allowed, and is managed in the same manner as the former. When he has learned both, he follows that which he likes best, unless the public has more occasion for the other.
The chief, and almost the only business of the magistrates, is to take care that no man may live idle, but that every one may follow his trade diligently: yet they do not wear themselves out with perpetual toil, from morning to night, as if they were beasts of burden, which, as it is indeed a heavy slavery, so it is everywhere the common course of life among all mechanics except the Utopians; but they dividing the day and night into twenty-four hours, appoint six of these for work; three of which are before dinner,[9] and three after. They then sup, and at eight o'clock, counting from noon, go to bed and sleep eight hours. The rest of their time besides that taken up in work, eating and sleeping, is left to every man's discretion; yet they are not to abuse that interval to luxury and idleness, but must employ it in some proper exercise according to their various inclinations, which is for the most part reading. It is ordinary to have public lectures every morning before daybreak; at which none are obliged to appear but those who are marked out for literature; yet a great many, both men and women of all ranks, go to hear lectures of one sort of other, according to their inclinations. But if others, that are not made for contemplation, choose rather to employ themselves at that time in their trades, as many of them do, they are not hindered, but are rather commended, as men that take care to serve their country. After supper, they spend an hour in some diversion, in summer in their gardens, and in winter in the halls where they eat; where they entertain each other, either with music or discourse. They do not so much as know dice, or any such foolish and mischievous games: they have, however, two sorts of games not unlike our chess; the one is between several numbers, in which one number, as it were, consumes another: the other resembles a battle between the virtues and the vices, in which the enmity in the vices among themselves, and their agreement against virtue, is not unpleasantly represented; together with the special oppositions between the particular virtues and vices; as also the methods by which vice either openly assaults or secretly undermines virtue, and virtue on the other hand resists it… You may imagine, that since there are only six hours appointed for work, they may fall under a scarcity of necessary provisions. But it is so far from being true, that this time is not sufficient for supplying them with plenty of all things, either necessary or convenient, that it is rather too much; and this you will easily apprehend, if you consider how great a part of all other nations is quite idle.
First, women generally do little, who are the half of mankind; and if some few women are diligent, their husbands are idle: then consider the great company of idle priests, and of those that are called religious men; add to these all rich men, chiefly those that have estates in land, who are called noblemen and gentlemen, together with their families, made up of idle persons, that are kept more for show than use; add to these, all those strong and lusty beggars, that go about pretending some disease, in excuse for their begging; and upon the whole account you will find that the number of those by whose labors mankind is supplied, is much less than you perhaps imagined.
OF THEIR TRAFFICBUT it is now time to explain to you the mutual intercourse of this people, their commerce, and the rules by which all things are distributed among them.
As their cities are composed of families, so their families are made up of those that are nearly related to one another. Their women, when they grow up, are married out; but all the males, both children and grandchildren, live still in the same house, in great obedience to their common parent, unless age has weakened his understanding… No family may have less than ten and more than sixteen persons in it… This rule is easily observed, by removing some of the children of a more fruitful couple to any other family that does not abound so much in them....
But to return to their manner of living in society, the oldest man of every family, as has been already said, is its governor. Wives serve their husbands, and children their parents, and always the younger serves the elder. Every city is divided into four equal parts, and in the middle of each there is a marketplace: what is brought thither, and manufactured by the several families, is carried from thence to houses appointed for that purpose, in which all things of a sort are laid by themselves; and thither every father goes and takes whatsoever he or his family needs, without either paying for it or leaving anything in exchange. There is no reason for giving a denial to any person, since there is such plenty of everything among them; and there is no danger of a man's asking for more than he needs; they have no inducements to do this, since they are sure that they shall always be supplied. It is the fear of want that makes any of the whole race of animals either greedy or ravenous; but besides fear, there is in man a pride that makes him fancy it a particular glory to excel others in pomp and excess. But by the laws of the Utopians, there is no room for this…
They take more care of their sick than of any others: these are lodged and provided for in public hospitals they have belonging to every town four hospitals, that are built without their walls, and are so large that they may pass for little towns: by this means, if they had ever such a number of sick persons, they could lodge them conveniently, and at such a distance, that such of them as are sick of infectious diseases may be kept so far from the rest that there can be no danger of contagion. The hospitals are furnished and stored with all things that are convenient for the ease and recovery of the sick; and those that are put in them are looked after with such tender and watchful care, and are so constantly attended by their skillful physicians, that as none is sent to them against their will, so there is scarce one in a whole town that, if he should fall ill, would not choose rather to go thither than lie sick at home….
Every child is nursed by its own mother, if death or sickness does not intervene; and in that case a nurse is found quickly, which is no hard matter; for anyone that can do it offers herself cheerfully… All the children under five years old sit among the nurses, the rest of the younger sort of both sexes, till they are fit for marriage, either serve those that sit at table or, if they are not strong enough for that, stand by them in great silence, and eat what is given them… Dishes are not served up to the whole table at first, but the best are first set before the old, whose seats are distinguished from the young, and after them all the rest are served alike. The old men distribute to the younger any curious meats that happen to be set before them, if there is not such an abundance of them that the whole company may be served alike.
Thus old men are honored with a particular respect; yet all the rest fare as well as they. Both dinner and supper are begun with some lecture of morality that is read to them; but it is so short, that it is not tedious nor uneasy to them to hear it: from hence the old men take occasion to entertain those about them with some useful and pleasant enlargements; but they do not engross the whole discourse so to themselves, during their meals, that the younger may not put in for a share: on the contrary, they engage them to talk, that so they may in that free way of conversation find out the force of everyone's spirit and observe his temper. They despatch their dinners quickly, but sit long at supper; because they go to work after the one, and are to sleep after the other, during which they think the stomach carries on the concoction more vigorously. They never sup without music; and there is always fruit served up after meat; while they are at table, some burn perfumes and sprinkle about fragrant ointments and sweet waters: in short, they want nothing that may cheer up their spirits: they give themselves a large allowance that way, and indulge themselves in all such pleasures as are attended with no inconvenience.
OF THE RELIGIONS OF THE UTOPIANSTHERE are several sorts of religions, not only in different parts of the island, but even in every town; some worshipping the sun, others the moon or one of the planets: some worship such men as have been eminent in former times for virtue or glory, not only as ordinary deities, but as the supreme God: yet the greater and wiser sort of them worship none of these, but adore one eternal, invisible, infinite, and incomprehensible Deity; as a being that is far above all our apprehensions, that is spread over the whole universe, not by His bulk, but by His power and virtue; Him they call the Father of All, and acknowledge that the beginnings, the increase, the progress, the vicissitudes, and the end of all things come only from Him; nor do they offer divine honors to any but to Him alone. And indeed, though they differ concerning other things, yet all agree in this, that they think there is one Supreme Being that made and governs the world, whom they call in the language of their country Mithras. They differ in this, that one thinks the god whom he worships is this Supreme Being, and another thinks that his idol is that God; but they all agree in one principle, that whoever is this Supreme Being, He is also that great Essence to whose glory and majesty all honors are ascribed by the consent of all nations.
By degrees, they fall off from the various superstitions that are among them, and grow up to that one religion that is the best and most in request; and there is no doubt to be made but that all the others had vanished long ago, if some of those who advised them to lay aside their superstitions had not met with some unhappy accident, which being considered as inflicted by heaven, made them afraid that the God whose worship had like to have been abandoned, had interposed, and revenged themselves on those who despised their authority. After they had heard from us an account of the doctrine, the course of life, and the miracles of Christ… many of them came over to our religion, and were initiated into it by baptism. But as two of our number were dead, so none of the four that survived were in priest's orders; we therefore could only baptize them; so that to our great regret they could not partake of the other sacraments, that can only be administered by priests; but they are instructed concerning them, and long most vehemently for them. They have had great disputes among themselves, whether one chosen by them to be a priest would not be thereby qualified to do all the things that belong to that character, even though he had no authority derived from the Pope; and they seemed to be resolved to choose some for that employment, but they had not done it when I left them.
Those among them that have not received our religion, do not fright any from it, and use none ill that goes over to it; so that all the while I was there, one man was only punished on this occasion. He being newly baptized, did, notwithstanding all that we could say to the contrary, dispute publicly concerning the Christian religion with more zeal than discretion; and with so much heat, that he not only preferred our worship to theirs, but condemned all their rites as profane; and cried out against all that adhered to them, as impious and sacrilegious persons, that were to be damned to everlasting burnings. Upon his having frequently preached in this manner, he was seized, and after trial he was condemned to banishment, not for having disparaged their religion, but for his inflaming the people to sedition: for this is one of their most ancient laws, that no man ought to be punished for his religion.
[1] The Chair of St. Peter (the Pope’s throne)
[2] “For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God…” -- 2 Corinthians 10:4
[3] To feel sorry for the loss or absence of; basically, he was missed
[4] An structure built for the public display of the bodies of executed criminals
[5] While the French kept up an army at all times, the English were against maintaining standing armies in peacetime.
[6] Brothels?
[7] The Christian Gospel
[8] Naples and Milan were Italian cities that were under French rule at the time.
[9] Here meaning lunch
(adapted from www.tomrichey.net)
Document 1.1 - The Ascent of Mount Ventoux, A Letter from Petrarch to Dionisio da Borgo San Sepolcro
Francesco Petrarch: Father of Humanism: http://petrarch.petersadlon.com/read_letters.html?s=pet17.html
Today I made the ascent of the highest mountain in this region, which is not improperly called Ventosum. My only motive was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer. I have had the expedition in mind for many years; for, as you know, I have lived in this region from infancy, having been cast here by that fate which determines the affairs of men. Consequently the mountain, which is visible from a great distance, was ever before my eyes, and I conceived the plan of some time doing what I have at last accomplished to-day. The idea took hold upon me with especial force when, in re-reading Livy's History of Rome, yesterday, I happened upon the place where Philip of Macedon, the same who waged war against the Romans, ascended Mount Haemus in Thessaly, from whose summit he was able, it is said, to see two seas, the Adriatic and the Euxine. Whether this be true or false I have not been able to determine, for the mountain is too far away, and writers disagree. Pomponius Mela, the cosmographer - not to mention others who have spoken of this occurrence - admits its truth without hesitation; Titus Livius [Roman historian], on the other hand, considers it false. I, assuredly, should not have left the question long in doubt, had that mountain been as easy to explore as this one. Let us leave this matter one side, however, and return to my mountain here, - it seems to me that a young man in private life may well be excused for attempting what an aged king could undertake without arousing criticism.
When I came to look about for a companion I found, strangely enough, that hardly one among my friends seemed suitable, so rarely do we meet with just the right combination of personal tastes and characteristics, even among those who are dearest to us. This one was too apathetic, that one over-anxious; this one too slow, that one too hasty; one was too sad, another over-cheerful; one more simple, another more sagacious, than I desired. I feared this one's taciturnity and that one's loquacity. The heavy deliberation of some repelled me as much as the lean incapacity of others. I rejected those who were likely to irritate me by a cold want of interest, as well as those who might weary me by their excessive enthusiasm. Such defects, however grave, could be borne with at home, for charity endures all things, and friendship accepts any burden; but it is quite otherwise on a journey, where every weakness becomes much more serious. So, as I was bent upon pleasure and anxious that my enjoyment should be unalloyed, I looked about me with unusual care, balanced against one another the various characteristics of my friends, and without committing any breach of friendship I silently condemned every trait which might prove disagreeable on the way. And - would you believe it? - I finally turned homeward for aid, and proposed the ascent to my only brother, who is younger than I, and with whom you are well acquainted. He was delighted and gratified beyond measure by the thought of holding the place of a friend as well as of a brother.
Answer the following questions in ink on lined paper:
- Why did Petrarch decide to climb Mount Ventoux? What inspired him to make his decision?
- How does this letter showcase Petrarch’s humanism?
- What does Petrarch’s careful search for a companion tell us about his personality?
Document 1.2 - A Letter from Petrarch to Marcus Tullius Cicero
Francesco Petrarch: Father of Humanism: http://petrarch.petersadlon.com/read_letters.html?s=pet17.html
Your letters I sought for long and diligently; and finally, where I least expected it, I found them. At once I read them, over and over, with the utmost eagerness. And as I read I seemed to hear your bodily voice, O Marcus Tullius, saying many things, uttering many lamentations, ranging through many phases of thought and feeling. I long had known how excellent a guide you have proved for others; at last I was to learn what sort of guidance you gave yourself.
Now it is your turn to be the listener. Hearken, wherever you are, to the words of advice, or rather of sorrow and regret, that fall, not unaccompanied by tears, from the lips of one of your successors, who loves you faithfully and cherishes your name. O spirit ever restless and perturbed! in old age---I am but using your own words---self-involved in calamities and ruin! what good could you think would come from your incessant wrangling, from all this wasteful strife and enmity? Where were the peace and quiet that befitted your years, your profession, your station in life? What will-o'-the-wisp tempted you away, with a delusive hope of glory; involved you, in your declining years, in the wars of younger men; and, after exposing you to every form of misfortune, hurled you down to a death that it was unseemly for a philosopher to die? Alas! the wise counsel that you gave your brother, and the salutary advice of your great masters, you forgot. You were like a traveler in the night, whose torch lights up for others the path where he himself has miserably fallen….
What insanity led you to hurl yourself upon Antony? Love of the republic, you would probably say. But the republic had fallen before this into irretrievable ruin, as you had yourself admitted. Still, it is possible that a lofty sense of duty, and love of liberty, constrained you to do as you did, hopeless though the effort was. That we can easily believe of so great a man. But why, then, were you so friendly with Augustus? What answer can you give to Brutus? If you accept Octavius, said he, we must conclude that you are not so anxious to be rid of all tyrants as to find a tyrant who will be well-disposed toward yourself. Now, unhappy man, you were to take the last false step, the last and most deplorable. You began to speak ill of the very friend whom you had so lauded, although he was not doing any ill to you, but merely refusing to prevent others who were. I grieve, dear friend at such fickleness. These shortcomings fill me with pity and shame. Like Brutus, I feel no confidence in the arts in which you are so proficient. What, pray, does it profit a man to teach others, and to be prating always about virtue, in high-sounding words, if he fails to give heed to his own instructions? Ah! how much better it would have been, how much more fitting for a philosopher, to have grown old peacefully in the country, meditating, as you yourself have somewhere said, upon the life that endures forever, and not upon this poor fragment of life; to have known no fasces, yearned for no triumphs, found no Catilines to fill the soul with ambitious longings!---All this, however, is vain. Farewell, forever, my Cicero.
Written in the land of the living; on the right bank of the Adige, in Verona, a city of Transpadane Italy; on the 16th of June, and in the year of that God whom you never knew the 1345th.
Answer the following questions in ink on lined paper:
- How does one account for the familiar tone of this letter, when the recipient has been dead for over 1,000 years?
- What are Petrarch’s chief criticisms of Cicero?
Document 1.3 - From Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486)
Retrieved from: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Mirandola/
TO STUDENTS: Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man has been called the “Manifesto of the Renaissance” due to its articulation of the core values held by many humanists. In this preface to his 900 theses on religion and philosophy, Pico employs syncretism (the fusion of the Christian and classical traditions) in his praise of man and of man’s free will.
Most esteemed Fathers, I have read in the ancient writings of the Arabians that Abdala the Saracen on being asked what, on this stage, so to say, of the world, seemed to him most evocative of wonder, replied that there was nothing to be seen more marvelous than man. And that celebrated exclamation of Hermes Trismegistus, ``What a great miracle is man, Asclepius'' confirms this opinion.
… Why, I asked, should we not admire the angels themselves and the beatific choirs more? At long last, however, I feel that I have come to some understanding of why man is the most fortunate of living things and, consequently, deserving of all admiration; of what may be the condition in the hierarchy of beings assigned to him, which draws upon him the envy, not of the brutes alone, but of the astral beings and of the very intelligences which dwell beyond the confines of the world….
God the Father, the Mightiest Architect, had already raised, according to the precepts of His hidden wisdom, this world we see, the cosmic dwelling of divinity, a temple most august. He had already adorned the supercelestial region with Intelligences, infused the heavenly globes with the life of immortal souls and set the fermenting dung-heap of the inferior world teeming with every form of animal life. But when this work was done, the Divine Artificer still longed for some creature which might comprehend the meaning of so vast an achievement, which might be moved with love at its beauty and smitten with awe at its grandeur. When, consequently, all else had been completed (as both Moses and Timaeus testify), in the very last place, He bethought Himself of bringing forth man. Truth was, however, that there remained no archetype according to which He might fashion a new offspring, nor in His treasure-houses the wherewithal to endow a new son with a fitting inheritance, nor any place, among the seats of the universe, where this new creature might dispose himself to contemplate the world. All space was already filled; all things had been distributed in the highest, the middle and the lowest orders. Still, it was not in the nature of the power of the Father to fail in this last creative élan; nor was it in the nature of that supreme Wisdom to hesitate through lack of counsel in so crucial a matter; nor, finally, in the nature of His beneficent love to compel the creature destined to praise the divine generosity in all other things to find it wanting in himself.
At last, the Supreme Maker decreed that this creature, to whom He could give nothing wholly his own, should have a share in the particular endowment of every other creature. Taking man, therefore, this creature of indeterminate image, He set him in the middle of the world and thus spoke to him:
``We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgment and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature. I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.''
Oh unsurpassed generosity of God the Father, Oh wondrous and unsurpassable felicity of man, to whom it is granted to have what he chooses, to be what he wills to be!
Document 1.4 - From Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (1513)
Retrieved from Medieval Sourcebook: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/prince-excerp.html
TO STUDENTS: Niccolo Machiavelli, a diplomat in the pay of the Republic of Florence, wrote The Prince in 1513 after the overthrow of the Republic forced him into exile. It is widely regarded as one of the basic texts of Western political science, and represents a basic change in the attitude and image of government. The Prince is one of the best examples of a Renaissance text focusing on civic humanism – the use of classical studies to produce effective political leaders.
That Which Concerns a Prince on the Subject of the Art of War
The Prince ought to have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else for his study, than war and its rules and discipline; for this is the sole art that belongs to him who rules, and it is of such force that it not only upholds those who are born princes, but it often enables men to rise from a private station to that rank. And, on the contrary, it is seen that when princes have thought more of ease than of arms they have lost their states….
Concerning Things for Which Men, and Especially Princes, are Blamed
It remains now to see what ought to be the rules of conduct for a prince toward subjects and friends. And as I know that many have written on this point, I expect I shall be considered presumptuous in mentioning it again, especially as in discussing it I shall depart from the methods of other people. But it being my intention to write a thing which shall be useful to him to apprehends it, it appears to me more appropriate to follow up the real truth of a matter than the imagination of it; for many have pictured republics and principalities which in fact have never been known or seen, because how one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation; for a man who wishes to act entirely up to his professions of virtue soon meets with what destroys him among so much that is evil.
Hence, it is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity….
Concerning Cruelty and Clemency, and Whether it is Better to be Loved than Feared
Upon this a question arises: whether it is better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you successed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life, and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. And that prince who, relying entirely on their promises, has neglected other precautions, is ruined; because friendships that are obtained by payments, and not by nobility or greatness of mind, may indeed be earned, but they are not secured, and in time of need cannot be relied upon; and men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserved you by a dread of punishment which never fails.
Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated, which will always be as long as he abstains from the property of his citizens and subjects and from their women.
Document 1.5 - From Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1513)
Retrieved from Archive: http://archive.org/stream/bookofcourtier00castuoft/bookofcourtier00castuoft_djvu.txt
TO STUDENTS: In The Book of the Courtier, Baldassare Castiglione aims to instruct young men on how to be an effective presence in the court of a ruler. Essentially, this is a handbook on gentlemanly behavior. As one of the assumptions of humanistic studies is that while the world changes, people stay the same, consider as you read whether you think that Castiglione’s advice is helpful for someone seeking to advance in today’s world.
From the First Book
TO MESSER ALFONSO ARIOSTO:
You ask me then to write what is to my thinking the form of courtiership most befitting a gentleman who lives at the court of princes, by which he may have the ability and knowledge perfectly to serve them in every reasonable thing, winning from them favor, and praise from other men; in short, what manner of man he ought to be who may deserve to be called a perfect Courtier without flaw....
In these books we shall follow no fixed order or rule of distinct precepts, such as are usually employed in teaching anything whatever; but after the fashion of many ancient writers, we shall revive a pleasant memory and rehearse certain discussions that were held between men singularly competent in such matters....
Count Ludovico:
"But to come to some details, I am of opinion that the principal and true profession of the Courtier ought to be that of arms; which I would have him follow actively above all else, and be known among others as bold and strong, and loyal to whomsoever he serves. And he will win a reputation for these good qualities by exercising them at all times and in all places, since one may never fail in this without severest censure. And just as among women, their fair fame once sullied never recovers its first lustre, so the reputation of a gentleman who bears arms, if once it be in the least tarnished with cowardice or other dis- grace, remains forever infamous before the world and full of ignominy. Therefore the more our Courtier excels in this art, the more he will be worthy of praise; and yet I do not deem essential in him that perfect knowledge of things and those other qualities that befit a commander; since this would be too wide a sea, let us be content, as we have said, with perfect loyalty and unconquered courage, and that he be always seen to possess them. For the courageous are often recognized even more in small things than in great; and frequently in perils of importance and where there are many spectators, some men are to be found, who, although their hearts be dead within them, yet, moved by shame or by the presence of others, press forward almost with their eyes shut, and do their duty God knows how. While on occasions of little moment, when they think they can avoid putting themselves in danger without being detected, they are glad to keep safe. But those who, even when they do not expect to be observed or seen or recognized by anyone, show their ardor and neglect nothing, however paltry, that may be laid to their charge, they have that strength of mind which we seek in our Courtier.
"Not that we would have him look so fierce, or go about blustering, or say that he has taken his cuirass to wife, or threaten with those grim scowls that we have often seen in Berto;" because to such men as this, one might justly say that which a brave lady jestingly said in gentle company to one whom I will not name at present ;" who, being invited by her out of compliment to dance, refused not only that, but to listen to the music, and many other entertainments proposed to him, saying always that such silly trifles were not his business; so that at last the lady said, 'What is your business, then?' He replied with a sour look, ' To fight.' Then the lady at once said, ‘Now that you are in no war and out of fighting trim, I should think it were a good thing to have yourself well oiled, and to stow yourself with all your battle harness in a closet until you be needed, lest you grow more rusty than you are;' and so, amid much laughter from the bystanders, she left the discomfited fellow to his silly presumption.
"Therefore let the man we are seeking, be very bold, stern, and always among the first, where the enemy are to be seen; and in every other place, gentle, modest, reserved, above all things avoiding ostentation and that impudent self-praise by which men ever excite hatred and disgust in all who hear them."
Then my lord Caspar replied:
"As for me, I have known few men excellent in anything whatever, who do not praise themselves; and it seems to me that this may well be permitted them; for when anyone who feels himself to be of worth, sees that he is not known to the ignorant by his works, he is offended that his worth should lie buried, and needs must in some way hold it up to view, in order that he may not be cheated of the fame that is the true reward... Thus among the ancient authors, whoever carries weight seldom fails to praise himself. They indeed are insufferable who do this without desert, but such we do not presume our Courtier to be."
The Count then said:
"If you heard what I said, it was impudent and indiscriminate self-praise that I censured: and as you say, we surely ought not to form a bad opinion of a brave man who praises himself modestly, nay we ought rather to regard such praise as better evidence than if it came from the mouth of others. I say, however, that he, who in praising himself runs into no error and incurs no annoyance or envy at the hands of those that hear him, is a very discreet man indeed and merits praise from others in addition to that which he bestows upon himself; because it is a very difficult matter."
* * *
Then the Count said:
"It is a great marvel that in such tender youth, solely by natural instinct and against the usage of his country, he has of himself chosen so worthy a path. And as subjects always copy the customs of their superiors, it may be that, as you say, the French will yet come to esteem letters at their true worth: whereto they may easily be persuaded, if they will but listen to reason; since nothing is by nature more desirable for men, or more proper to them, than knowledge, which it is great folly to say or believe is not always a good thing.
"And if I were speaking with them, or with others who had an opinion contrary to mine, I should strive to show them how useful and necessary letters are to our life and dignity, having indeed been granted by God to men as a crowning gift. Nor should I lack instances of many excellent commanders of antiquity, who all added the ornament of letters to the valor of their arms.
"Thus you know Alexander held Homer in such veneration that he always kept the Iliad by his bedside; and he devoted the greatest attention not only to these studies but to philosophical speculation under Aristotle's guidance. Alcibiades enlarged his natural aptitudes and made them greater by means of letters and the teachings of Socrates. The care that Caesar gave to study is also attested by the surviving works that he divinely wrote. It is said that Scipio Africanus always kept in his hand the works of Xenophon, wherein the perfect king is portrayed under the name of Cyrus. I could tell you of Lucullus, Sulla, Pompey, Brutus,'" and many other Romans and Greeks; but I will merely remind you that Hannibal, the illustrious commander, — although fierce by nature and a stranger to all humanity, faithless and a despiser of both men and gods, — yet had knowledge of letters and was conversant with the Greek language; and if I mistake not, I once read that he even left a book composed by him in Greek.
"However it is superfluous to tell you this, for I well know that you all see how wrong the French are in thinking that letters are injurious to arms. You know that glory is the true stimulus to great and hazardous deeds of war, and whoso is moved thereto by gain or other motive, besides doing nothing good, deserves not to be called a gentleman, but a base trafficker. And true glory is that which is preserved in the sacred treasure-house of letters, as everyone may understand except those unfortunates who have never enjoyed them.
"What soul is there so abject, timid and humble, that when he reads of the deeds of Caesar, Alexander, Scipio, Hannibal, and many others, is not inflamed by an ardent desire to be like them, and does not make small account of this frail two days' life, in order to win the almost eternal life of fame, which in spite of death makes him live in far greater glory than before? But he who does not feel the delight of letters, cannot either know how great is the glory they so long preserve, and measures it by the life of one man or two, because his memory runs no further. Hence he cannot esteem this short-lived glory so much as he would that almost eternal glory if knowledge of it were unhappily not denied him, and as he does not esteem it so much, we may reasonably believe that he will not run such danger to pursue it as one who knew it would.
"I should be far from willing to have an antagonist cite instances to the contrary in refutation of my view, and urge upon me that with all their knowledge of letters the Italians have for some time since shown little martial valour, — which is alas only too true." But it very certainly might be said that the fault of a few has brought not only grievous harm but eternal obloquy upon all the rest; and from them was derived the true cause of our ruin and of the decadence if not the death of valour in our souls: yet it would be far more shameful in us to publish it, than for the French to be ignorant of letters. Therefore it is better to pass over in silence that which cannot be recalled without pain: and avoiding this subject (upon which I entered against my will) to return to our Courtier.
"I would have him more than passably accomplished in letters, at least in those studies that are called the humanities, and conversant not only with the Latin language but with the Greek, for the sake of the many different things that have been admirably written therein. Let him be well versed in the poets, and not less in the orators and historians, and also proficient in writing verse and prose, especially in this vulgar tongue of ours; for besides the enjoyment he will find in it, he will by this means never lack agreeable entertainment with ladies, who are usually fond of such things. And if other occupations or want of study prevent his reaching such perfection as to render his writings worthy of great praise, let him be careful to suppress them so that others may not laugh at him, and let him show them only to a friend whom he can trust: because they will at least be of this service to him, that the exercise will enable him to judge the work of others. For it very rarely happens that a man who is not accustomed to write, however learned he may be, can ever quite appreciate the toil and industry of writers, or taste the sweetness and excellence of style, and those latent niceties that are often found in the ancients.
"Moreover these studies will also make him fluent, and as Aristippus said to the tyrant, confident and assured in speaking with everyone.'" Hence I would have our Courtier keep one precept fixed in mind; which is that in this and everything else he should be always on his guard, and diffident rather than forward, and that he should keep from falsely persuading himself that he knows that which he does not know. For by nature we all are fonder of praise than we ought to be, and our ears love the melody of words that praise us more than any other sweet song or sound; and thus, like sirens' voices, they are often the cause of shipwreck to him who does not close his ears to such deceptive harmony. Among the ancient sages this danger was recognized, and books were written showing in what way the true friend may be distinguished from the flatterer.'" But what does this avail, if there be many, nay a host, of those who clearly perceive that they are flattered, yet love him who flatters them, and hold him in hatred who tells them the truth? And often when they find him who praises them too sparing in his words, they even help him and say such things of themselves, that the flatterer is put to shame, most impudent though he be.
From the Third Book
Then my lady Duchess said:
“Do not wander from your subject, my lord Magnifico, but hold to the order given you and describe the Court Lady, to the end that so noble a Lady as this may have someone competent to serve her worthily."
The Magnifico continued:
“Then, my Lady, to show that your commands have power to induce me to essay even that which I know not how to do, I will speak of this excellent Lady as I would have her…”
"And although my lord Gaspar has said that the same rules which are set for the Courtier, serve also for the Lady. I am of another mind for while some qualities are common to both and as necessary to man as to woman, there are nevertheless some others that befit woman more than man, and some are befitting man to which she ought to be wholly a stranger. The same I say of bodily exercises; but above all, methinks that in her ways, manners, words, gestures and bearing, a woman ought to be very unlike a man; for just as it befits him to show a certain stout and sturdy manliness, so it is becoming in a woman to have a soft and dainty tenderness with an air of womanly sweetness in her every movement, which, in her going or staying or saying what you will, shall always make her seem the woman, without any likeness of a man.
"Now, if this precept be added to the rules that these gentlemen have taught the Courtier, I certainly think she ought to be able to profit by many of them, and to adorn herself with admirable accomplishments, as my lord Gaspar says. For I believe that many faculties of the mind are as necessary to woman as to man; likewise gentle birth, to avoid affectation, to be naturally graceful in all her doings, to be mannerly, clever, prudent, not arrogant, not envious, not slanderous, not vain, not quarrelsome, not silly, to know how to win and keep the favor of her mistress and of all others, to practice well and gracefully the exercises that befit women. I am quite of the opinion, too, that beauty is more necessary to her than to the Courtier, for in truth that woman lacks much who lacks beauty. Then, too, she ought to be more circumspect and take greater care not to give occasion for evil being said of her, and so to act that she may not only escape a stain of guilt but even of suspicion, for a woman has not so many ways of defending herself against false imputations as has a man.
“But as Count Ludovico has explained very minutely the chief profession of the Courtier, and has insisted it be that of arms, I think it is also fitting to tell what in my judgment is that of the Court Lady, and when I have done this, I shall think myself quit of the greater part of my duty.
“Laying aside, then, those virtues of the mind that she ought to have in common with the Courtier (such as prudence, magnanimity, continence, and many others), and likewise those qualities that befit all women (such as kindness, discretion, ability to manage her husband's property and her" house and children if she be married, and all those capacities that are requisite in a good housewife), I say that in a lady who lives at court I think above all else a certain pleasant affability is befitting, whereby she may be able to entertain politely every sort of man with agreeable and seemly converse, suited to the time and place, and to the rank of the person with whom she may speak, uniting with calm and modest manners, and with that seemliness which should ever dispose all her actions, a quick vivacity of spirit whereby she may show herself alien to all indelicacy; but with such a kindly manner as shall make us think her no less chaste, prudent and benign, than agreeable, witty and discreet: and so she must preserve a certain mean (difficult and composed almost of contraries), and must barely touch certain limits but not pass them.
"Thus, in her wish to be thought good and pure, the Lady ought not to be so coy and seem so to abhor company and talk that are a little free, as to take her leave as soon as she finds herself therein; for it might easily be thought that she was pretending to be thus austere in order to hide something about herself which she feared others might come to know; and such prudish manners are always odious. Nor ought she, on the other hand, for the sake of showing herself free and agreeable, to utter unseemly words or practice a certain wild and unbridled familiarity and ways likely to make that believed of her which perhaps is not true; but when she is present at such talk, she ought to listen with a little blush and shame.
"Likewise she ought to avoid an error into which I have seen many women fall, which is that of saying and of willingly listening to evil about other women. For those women who, on hearing the unseemly ways of other women described, grow angry thereat and seem to disbelieve it and to regard it almost monstrous that a woman should be immodest, — they, by accounting the offence so heinous, give reason to think that they do not commit it. But those who go about continually prying into other women's intrigues, and narrate them so minutely and with such zest, seem to be envious of them and to wish that everyone may know it, to the end that like matters may not be reckoned as a fault in their own case; and thus they fall into certain laughs and ways that show they then feel greatest pleasure. And hence it comes that men, while seeming to listen gladly, usually hold such women in small respect and have very little regard for them, and think these ways of theirs are an invitation to advance farther, and thus often go such lengths with them as bring them deserved reproach, and finally esteem them so lightly as to despise their company and even find them tedious.
"And on the other hand, there is no man so shameless and insolent as not to have reverence for those women who are esteemed good and virtuous; because this gravity (tempered with wisdom and goodness) is as it were a shield against the insolence and coarseness of the presumptuous. Thus we see that a word or laugh or act of kindness (however small it be) from a virtuous woman is more prized by everyone, than all the endearments and caresses of those who show their lack of shame so openly.”
Document 1.6 - From Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly (1509) Retrieved from Modern History Sourcebook: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1509erasmus-folly.html
TO STUDENTS: This is a work of satire. Take it as such, remembering that a satirist typically uses humor and sarcasm to make serious points. In what ways did Erasmus contrast the Church leaders of his day with the apostles from whom they claimed to derive their authority? It may be helpful to familiarize yourself with the doctrine of apostolic succession before reading.
The Lights of the World Reduced to a mere Wallet
In like manner cardinals, if they thought themselves the successors of the apostles, they would likewise imagine that the same things the [apostles] did are required of them, and that they are not lords but dispensers of spiritual things of which they must shortly give an exact account… they would not be so ambitious… or, if they were, they would willingly leave it and live a laborious, careful life, such as was that of the ancient apostles.
And for popes, that supply the place of Christ, if they should endeavor to imitate His life, to wit His poverty, labor, doctrine, cross, and contempt of life… who would purchase that chair[1] with all his substance? or defend it, so purchased, with swords, poisons, and all force imaginable? …
….
A most inhuman and abominable thing, and more to be execrated, that those great princes of the Church and true lights of the world should be reduced to a staff and a wallet. Whereas now, if there be anything that requires their pains, they leave that to Peter and Paul that have leisure enough; but if there be anything of honor or pleasure, they take that to themselves. By which means it is, yet by my courtesy, that scarce any kind of men live more voluptuously or with less trouble; as believing that Christ will be well enough pleased if in their… ceremonies, titles of holiness and the like, and blessing and cursing, they play the parts of bishops. To work miracles is old and antiquated, and not in fashion now; to instruct the people, troublesome; to interpret the Scripture, pedantic; to pray, a sign one has little else to do; to shed tears, silly and womanish; to be poor, base; to be vanquished, dishonorable and little becoming him that scarce admits even kings to kiss his slipper; and lastly, to die, uncouth; and to be stretched on a cross, infamous.
Theirs are only those weapons[2] and sweet blessings which Paul mentions, and of these truly they are bountiful enough: as interdictions, hangings, heavy burdens, reproofs anathemas, executions in effigy, and that terrible thunderbolt of excommunication, with the very sight of which they sink men's souls beneath the bottom of hell: which yet these most holy fathers in Christ and His vicars hurl with more fierceness against none than against such as, by the instigation of the devil, attempt to lessen or rob them of Peter's patrimony. When, though those words in the Gospel, "We have left all, and followed Thee," were his, yet they call his patrimony lands, cities, tribute, imposts, riches; for which, being enflamed with the love of Christ, they contend with fire and sword, and not without loss of much Christian blood, and believe they have then most apostolically defended the Church, the spouse of Christ, when the enemy, as they call them, are valiantly routed. As if the Church had any deadlier enemies than wicked prelates, who not only suffer Christ to run out of request for want of preaching him, but hinder his spreading by their multitudes of laws merely contrived for their own profit, corrupt him by their forced expositions, and murder him by the evil example of their pestilent life.
Folly Attends a Theological Dispute
I was lately myself at a theological dispute, for I am often there, where when one was demanding what authority there was in Holy Writ that commands heretics to be convinced by fire rather than reclaimed by argument; a crabbed old fellow, and one whose supercilious gravity spoke him at least a doctor, answered in a great fume that Saint Paul had decreed it, who said, "Reject him that is a heretic, after once or twice admonition." And when he had sundry times, one after another, thundered out the same thing, and most men wondered what ailed the man, at last he explained it thus, making two words of one: "A heretic must be put to death.” Some laughed, and yet there wanted not others to whom this exposition seemed plainly theological; which, when some, though those very few, opposed, they cut off the dispute, as we say, with a hatchet, and the credit of so uncontrollable an author. "Pray conceive me," said he, "it is written, 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.' But every heretic bewitches the people; therefore, etc."
Folly Quotes Christ in Her Praise
Folly is so gracious above that her errors are only pardoned, those of wise men never. Whence it is that they ask forgiveness, though they offend never so wittingly, cloak it yet with the excuse of folly… So Saul makes his excuse of David, "For behold," says he, "I did it foolishly." And again, David himself thus sweetens God, "And therefore I beseech thee, O Lord, to take away the trespass of thy servant, for I have done foolishly," as if he knew there was no pardon to be obtained unless he had colored his offense with folly and ignorance.
And stronger is that of Christ upon the cross when he prayed for his enemies, "Father, forgive them," nor does he cover their crime with any other excuse than that of unwittingness- because, says he, "they know not what they do." In like manner Paul, writing to Timothy, "But therefore I obtained mercy, for that I did it ignorantly through unbelief." And what is the meaning of "I did it ignorantly" but that I did it out of folly, not malice? And what of "Therefore I received mercy" but that I had not obtained it had I not been made more allowable through the covert of folly? For us also makes that mystical Psalmist, though I remembered it not in its right place, "Remember not the sins of my youth nor my ignorances."
Answer the following questions in ink on lined paper:
1. Identify at least three ways that Erasmus contrasts the Church leaders of his day with the apostles.
2. According to Erasmus, is it biblical to execute heretics?
3. What is the relationship between Folly and forgiveness?
4. What makes The Praise of Folly a humanistic work?
Document 1.7 - An Obituary of Henry VII, from the Anglica Historia
Retrieved From Tudor England: http://englishhistory.net/tudor/hobit.htmlHe [Henry VII] well knew how to maintain his royal majesty and all which appertains to kingship at every time and in every place. He was most fortunate in war, although he was constitutionally more inclined to peace than to war. He cherished justice above all things; as a result he vigorously punished violence, manslaughter and every other kind of wickedness whatsoever. Consequently he was greatly regretted[3] on that account by all his subjects, who had been able to conduct their lives peaceably, far removed from the assaults and evil doings of scoundrels. He was the most ardent supporter of our faith and daily participated with great piety in religious services....
But all these virtues were obscured latterly by avarice, from which he suffered. This avarice is surely a bad enough vice in a private individual, whom it forever torments; in a monarch indeed it may be considered the worst vice since it is harmful to everyone and distorts those qualities of trustfulness, justice and integrity by which the State must be governed.
Answer the following questions in ink on lined paper:
1. What were Henry VII’s virtues as a ruler?
2. What were Henry’s vices?
3. How did Henry’s actions as described above make him a typical “new monarch?”
Document 1.8 - A Letter from Columbus to the King and Queen of Spain (1494?)
Medieval Sourcebook: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/columbus2.asp
Most High and Mighty Sovereigns,
In obedience to your Highnesses' commands, and with submission to superior judgment, I will say whatever occurs to me in reference to the colonization and commerce of the Island of Espanola, and of the other islands, both those already discovered and those that may be discovered hereafter.
In the first place, as regards the Island of Espanola: Inasmuch as the number of colonists who desire to go thither amounts to two thousand, owing to the land being safer and better for farming and trading, and because it will serve as a place to which they can return and from which they can carry on trade with the neighboring islands:
- That in the said island there shall be founded three or four towns, situated in the most convenient places, and that the settlers who are there be assigned to the aforesaid places and towns.
- That for the better and more speedy colonization of the said island, no one shall have liberty to collect gold in it except those who have taken out colonists' papers, and have built houses for their abode, in the town in which they are, that they may live united and in greater safety...
- That there shall be a church, and parish priests or friars to administer the sacraments, to perform divine worship, and for the conversion of the Indians.
- That none of the colonists shall go to seek gold without a license from the governor... of the town where he lives; and that he must first take oath to return to the place whence he sets out, for the purpose of registering faithfully all the gold he may have found, and to return once a month, or once a week... to render account and show the quantity of said gold; and that this shall be written down by the notary... or, if it seems better, that a friar or priest, deputed for the purpose, shall be also present.
- That all the gold thus brought in shall be smelted immediately, and stamped with some mark that shall distinguish each town; and that the portion which belongs to your Highnesses shall be weighed... and registered by the above-mentioned priest or friar, so that it shall not pass through the hands of only one person, and there shall he no opportunity to conceal the truth.
- That all gold that may be found without the mark of one of the said towns in the possession of anyone who has once registered in accordance with the above order shall be taken as forfeited, and that the accuser shall have one portion of it and your Highnesses the other.
- That one per centum of all the gold that may be found shall be set aside for building churches and adorning the same, and for the support of the priests or friars belonging to them...
- As regards the division of the gold, and the share that ought to be reserved for your Highnesses... your Highnesses might, for the space of one year, take one half, and the collector the other, and a better arrangement for the division be made afterward.
- That if the... notaries shall commit or be privy to any fraud, punishment shall be provided, and the same for the colonists who shall not have declared all the gold they have.
- That in the said island there shall be a treasurer, with a clerk to assist him, who shall receive all the gold belonging to your Highnesses, and the... notaries of the towns shall each keep a record of what they deliver to the said treasurer.
- As, in the eagerness to get gold, everyone will wish, naturally, to engage in its search in preference to any other employment, it seems to me that the privilege of going to look for gold ought to be withheld during some portion of each year, that there may be opportunity to have the other business necessary for the island performed....
Document 1.9 - From Thomas More, Utopia (Book I) (1516)
Retrieved from: http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/more/utopia-contents.html
TO STUDENTS: Thomas More’s Utopia is a book written in two parts. The first part features a fictionalized Thomas More and some associates in a dialogue (in the fashion of Plato) with Raphael, a traveler who has explored lands unknown to More and his less-traveled companions. As you read, pay particular attention AND HIGHLIGHT examples of humanism (allusions to classical authors) and note specifically how this work is a work of northern humanism, emphasizing Christian principles and social reform.
HENRY VIII, the unconquered King of England, a prince adorned with all the virtues that become a great monarch, having some differences of no small consequence with Charles, the most serene Prince of Castile, sent me into Flanders, as his ambassador, for treating and composing matters between them...
After we had several times met without coming to an agreement, they went to Brussels for some days to know the Prince's pleasure. And since our business would admit it, I went to Antwerp. While I was there, among many that visited me, there was one that was more acceptable to me than any other, Peter Giles, born at Antwerp, who is a man of great honor, and of a good rank in his town, though less than he deserves... One day as I was returning home from mass at St. Mary's, which is the chief church, and the most frequented of any in Antwerp, I saw him by accident talking with a stranger, who seemed past the flower of his age; his face was tanned, he had a long beard, and his cloak was hanging carelessly about him, so that by his looks and habit I concluded he was a seaman.
As soon as Peter saw me, he came and saluted me; and as I was returning his civility, he took me aside, and pointing to him with whom he had been discoursing, he said: "Do you see that man? I was just thinking to bring him to you."
I answered, "He should have been very welcome on your account."
"And on his own too," replied he, "if you knew the man, for there is none alive that can give so copious an account of unknown nations and countries as he can do; which I know you very much desire."
Then said I, "I did not guess amiss, for at first sight I took him for a seaman."
"But you are much mistaken," said he, "for he has not sailed as a seaman, but as a traveler, or rather a philosopher. This Raphael, who from his family carries the name of Hythloday, is not ignorant of the Latin tongue, but is eminently learned in the Greek, having applied himself more particularly to that than to the former, because he had given himself much to philosophy, in which he knew that the Romans have left us nothing that is valuable, except what is to be found in Seneca and Cicero. He is a Portuguese by birth, and was so desirous of seeing the world that he divided his estate among his brothers, ran the same hazard as Americus Vespucius, and bore a share in three of his four voyages... after he, with five Castilians, had travelled over many countries, at last, by strange good-fortune, he got to Ceylon, and from thence to Calicut, where he very happily found some Portuguese ships, and, beyond all men's expectations, returned to his native country."
When Peter had said this to me, I thanked him for his kindness, in intending to give me the acquaintance of a man whose conversation he knew would be so acceptable; and upon that Raphael and I embraced each other. After those civilities were passed which are usual with strangers upon their first meeting, we all went to my house, and entering into the garden, sat down on a green bank, and entertained one another in discourse….
[Raphael recounts his travels in unknown lands.]
As he told us of many things that were amiss in those new- discovered countries, so he reckoned up not a few things from which patterns might be taken for correcting the errors of these nations among whom we live; of which an account may be given, as I have already promised, at some other time; for at present I intend only to relate those particulars that he told us of the manners and laws of the Utopians: but I will begin with the occasion that led us to speak of that commonwealth. After Raphael had discoursed with great judgment on the many errors that were both among us and these nations; had treated of the wise institutions both here and there, and had spoken as distinctly of the customs and government of every nation through which he had passed, as if he had spent his whole life in it, Peter, being struck with admiration, said: "I wonder, Raphael, how it comes that you enter into no king's service, for I am sure there are none to whom you would not be very acceptable: for your learning and knowledge both of men and things, are such that you would not only entertain them very pleasantly, but be of great use to them, by the examples you could set before them and the advices you could give them; and by this means you would both serve your own interest and be of great use to all your friends."
"As for my friends," answered he, "I need not be much concerned, having already done for them all that was incumbent on me… I think my friends ought to rest contented with this, and not to expect that for their sake I should enslave myself to any king whatsoever…
"Now I live as I will, to which I believe few courtiers can pretend. And there are so many that court the favor of great men, that there will be no great loss if they are not troubled either with me or with others of my temper."
Upon this, said I: "I perceive, Raphael, that you neither desire wealth nor greatness; and indeed I value and admire such a man much more than I do any of the great men in the world. Yet I think you would do what would well become so generous and philosophical a soul as yours is, if you would apply your time and thoughts to public affairs, even though you may happen to find it a little uneasy to yourself: and this you can never do with so much advantage, as by being taken into the counsel of some great prince, and putting him on noble and worthy actions, which I know you would do if you were in such a post; for the springs both of good and evil flow from the prince, over a whole nation, as from a lasting fountain. So much learning as you have… would render you a very fit counselor to any king whatsoever."
"You are doubly mistaken," said he, "Mr. More, both in your opinion of me, and in the judgment you make of things: for as I have not that capacity that you fancy I have, so, if I had it, the public would not be one jot the better, when I had sacrificed my quiet to it. For most princes apply themselves more to affairs of war than to the useful arts of peace; and in these I neither have any knowledge, nor do I much desire it: they are generally more set on acquiring new kingdoms, right or wrong, than on governing well those they possess. And among the ministers of princes, there are none that are not so wise as to need no assistance, or at least that do not think themselves so wise that they imagine they need none; and if they court any, it is only those for whom the prince has much personal favor, whom by their fawnings and flatteries they endeavor to fix to their own interests: and indeed Nature has so made us that we all love to be flattered, and to please ourselves with our own notions… Now if in such a court, made up of persons who envy all others, and only admire themselves, a person should but propose anything that he had either read in history or observed in his travels, the rest would think that the reputation of their wisdom would sink, and that their interest would be much depressed, if they could not run it down… I have met with these proud, morose, and absurd judgments of things in many places, particularly once in England."
"Were you ever there?" said I.
"Yes, I was," answered he, "and stayed some months there not long after the rebellion in the west was suppressed with a great slaughter of the poor people that were engaged in it. I was then much obliged to that reverend prelate, John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal, and Chancellor of England... When I was in England the King depended much on his counsels, and the government seemed to be chiefly supported by him; for from his youth he had been all along practised in affairs; and having passed through many traverses of fortune, he had with great cost acquired a vast stock of wisdom…
"One day when I was dining with him there happened to be at table one of the English lawyers, who took occasion to run out in a high commendation of the severe execution of justice upon thieves, who, as he said, were then hanged so fast that there were sometimes twenty on one gibbet;[4] and upon that he said he could not wonder enough how it came to pass, that since so few escaped, there were yet so many thieves left who were still robbing in all places. Upon this, I who took the boldness to speak freely before the cardinal, said there was no reason to wonder at the matter, since this way of punishing thieves was neither just in itself nor good for the public; for as the severity was too great, so the remedy was not effectual; simple theft not being so great a crime that it ought to cost a man his life. No punishment, however severe, is able to restrain those from robbing who can find out no other way of livelihood. 'In this,' said I, 'not only you in England, but a great part of the world imitate some ill masters that are readier to chastise their scholars than to teach them. There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves, but it were much better to make such good provisions by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and of dying for it.'
"'There has been care enough taken for that,' said he, 'there are many handicrafts, and there is agriculture, by which they may make a shift to live unless they have a greater mind to follow ill courses.'
"'That will not serve your turn,' said I, 'for many lose their limbs in civil or foreign wars, as lately in the Cornish rebellion, and some time ago in your wars with France, who being thus mutilated in the service of their king and country, can no more follow their old trades, and are too old to learn new ones: but since wars are only accidental things, and have intervals, let us consider those things that fall out every day. There is a great number of noblemen among you, that are themselves as idle as drones, that subsist on other men's labor, on the labor of their tenants... besides this, they carry about with them a great number of idle fellows, who never learned any art by which they may gain their living...’
"To this he answered: Noblemen ought to be particularly cherished, for in them consists the force of the armies for which we have occasion; since their birth inspires them with a nobler sense of honor than is to be found among tradesmen or ploughmen.'
"'You may as well say,' replied I, 'that you must cherish thieves on the account of wars, for you will never lack the one as long as you have the other; and as robbers prove sometimes gallant soldiers, so soldiers often prove brave robbers; so near an alliance there is between those two sorts of life. But this bad custom, so common among you, of keeping many servants, is not peculiar to this nation. In France there is yet a more pestiferous sort of people, for the whole country is full of soldiers, still kept up in time of peace, if such a state of a nation can be called a peace: and these are kept in pay upon the same account that you plead for those idle retainers about noblemen; this being a maxim of those pretended statesmen that it is necessary for the public safety to have a good body of veteran soldiers ever in readiness.[5] They think raw men are not to be depended on, and they sometimes seek occasions for making war, that they may train up their soldiers in the art of cutting throats; or as Sallust observed, for keeping their hands in use, that they may not grow dull by too long an intermission. But France has learned to its cost how dangerous it is to feed such beasts.
"'The fate of the Romans, Carthaginians, and Syrians, and many other nations and cities, which were both overturned and quite ruined by those standing armies, should make others wiser: and the folly of this maxim of the French appears plainly even from this, that their trained soldiers often find your raw men prove too hard for them; of which I will not say much, lest you may think I flatter the English. Every day's experience shows that the mechanics in the towns, or the clowns in the country, are not afraid of fighting with those idle gentlemen....
"'Luxury likewise breaks in apace upon you, to set forward your poverty and misery; there is an excessive vanity in apparel, and great cost in diet; and that not only in noblemen's families, but even among tradesmen, among the farmers themselves, and among all ranks of persons. You have also many infamous houses,[6] and, besides those that are known, the taverns and alehouses are no better; add to these, dice, cards, tables, foot-ball, tennis, and quoits, in which money runs fast away; and those that are initiated into them, must in the conclusion betake themselves to robbing for a supply. Banish these plagues, and give orders that those who have dispeopled so much soil, may either rebuild the villages they have pulled down, or let out their grounds to such as will do it: restrain those engrossings of the rich, that are as bad almost as monopolies; leave fewer occasions to idleness; let agriculture be set up again, and the manufacture of the wool be regulated, that so there may be work found for those companies of idle people whom want forces to be thieves, or who, now being idle vagabonds or useless servants, will certainly grow [into] thieves at last. If you do not find a remedy to these evils, it is a vain thing to boast of your severity in punishing theft, which though it may have the appearance of justice, yet in itself is neither just nor convenient. For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them?’”
....
"’But, Raphael,' said [the Cardinal] to me, 'I would gladly know upon what reason it is that you think theft ought not to be punished by death? Would you give way to it? Or do you propose any other punishment that will be more useful to the public? For since death does not restrain theft, if men thought their lives would be safe, what fear or force could restrain ill men? On the contrary, they would look on the mitigation of the punishment as an invitation to commit more crimes.'
"I answered: 'It seems to me a very unjust thing to take away a man's life for a little money; for nothing in the world can be of equal value with a man's life: and if it is said that it is not for the money that one suffers, but for his breaking the law, I must say extreme justice is an extreme injury; for we ought not to approve of these terrible laws that make the smallest offences capital, nor of that opinion of the Stoics that makes all crimes equal, as if there were no difference to be made between the killing a man and the taking his purse, between which, if we examine things impartially, there is no likeness nor proportion. God has commanded us not to kill, and shall we kill so easily for a little money? …
"’If by the Mosaical law, though it was rough and severe, as being a yoke laid on an obstinate and servile nation, men were only fined and not put to death for theft, we cannot imagine that in this new law of mercy,[7] in which God treats us with the tenderness of a father, he has given us a greater license to cruelty than he did to the Jews. Upon these reasons it is that I think putting thieves to death is not lawful; and it is plain and obvious that it is absurd, and of ill-consequence to the commonwealth, that a thief and a murderer should be equally punished; for if a robber sees that his danger is the same, if he is convicted of theft as if he were guilty of murder, this will naturally incite him to kill the person whom otherwise he would only have robbed, since if the punishment is the same, there is more security, and less danger of discovery, when he that can best make it is put out of the way; so that terrifying thieves too much, provokes them to cruelty….
"Thus, Mr. More, I have run out into a tedious story… And from hence you may gather, how little courtiers would value either me or my counsels."
To this I answered: "You have done me a great kindness in this relation… but after all this I cannot change my opinion, for I still think that if you could overcome that aversion which you have to the courts of princes, you might, by the advice which it is in your power to give, do a great deal of good to mankind; and this is the chief design that every good man ought to propose to himself in living; for your friend Plato thinks that nations will be happy, when either philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers, it is no wonder if we are so far from that happiness, while philosophers will not think it their duty to assist kings with their councils.”
"But Plato judged right,” he replied, “that except kings themselves became philosophers, they who from their childhood are corrupted with false notions would never fall in entirely with the councils of philosophers...
"Do not you think that if I were about any king, proposing good laws to him, and endeavoring to root out all the cursed seeds of evil that I found in him, I should either be turned out of his court or at least be laughed at for my pains? For instance, what could it signify if I were about the King of France, and were called into his Cabinet Council, where several wise men, in his hearing, were proposing many expedients, as by what arts and practices Milan may be kept, and Naples,[8] that had so oft slipped out of their hands, recovered; how the Venetians, and after them the rest of Italy, may be subdued; and then how Flanders, Brabant, and all Burgundy, and some other kingdoms which he has swallowed already in his designs, may be added to his empire. One proposes a league with the Venetians… Another proposes the hiring the Germans, and the securing the Switzers by pensions....
"Now when things are in so great a fermentation, and so many gallant men are joining councils, how to carry on the war, if so mean a man as I should stand up, and wish them to change all their councils, to let Italy alone, and stay at home, since the Kingdom of France was indeed greater than could be well governed by one man; that therefore he ought not to think of adding others to it: and if after this, I should propose to them the resolutions of the Achorians, a people that lie on the southeast of Utopia, who long ago engaged in war, in order to add to the dominions of their prince another kingdom… This they conquered, but found that the trouble of keeping it was equal to that by which it was gained; that the conquered people were always either in rebellion or exposed to foreign invasions, while they were obliged to be incessantly at war, either for or against them, and consequently could never disband their army; that in the meantime they were oppressed with taxes, their money went out of the kingdom, their blood was spilt for the glory of their King, without procuring the least advantage to the people, who received not the smallest benefit from it even in time of peace; and that their manners being corrupted by a long war, robbery and murders everywhere abounded, and their laws fell into contempt; while their King, distracted with the care of two kingdoms, was the less able to apply his mind to the interests of either...
Therefore it seemed much more eligible that the King should improve his ancient kingdom all he could, and make it flourish as much as possible; that he should love his people, and be beloved of them; that he should live among them, govern them gently, and let other kingdoms alone, since that which had fallen to his share was big enough, if not too big for him. Pray how do you think would such a speech as this be heard?"
"I confess," said I, "I think not very well…."
"That is what I was saying," replied he, "that there is no room for philosophy in the courts of princes."
"Yes, there is," said I, "but not for this speculative philosophy that makes everything to be alike fitting at all times: but there is another philosophy that is more pliable, that knows its proper scene, accommodates itself to it, and teaches a man with propriety and decency to act that part which has fallen to his share… It is even so in a commonwealth and in the councils of princes; if ill opinions cannot be quite rooted out, and you cannot cure some received vice according to your wishes, you must not therefore abandon the commonwealth; for the same reasons you should not forsake the ship in a storm because you cannot command the winds. You are not obliged to assault people with discourses that are out of their road, when you see that their received notions must prevent your making an impression upon them. You ought rather to cast about and to manage things with all the dexterity in your power, so that if you are not able to make them go well they may be as little ill as possible; for except all men were good everything cannot be right, and that is a blessing that I do not at present hope to see."
"According to your arguments," answered he, "all that I could be able to do would be to preserve myself from being mad while I endeavored to cure the madness of others….
"Here is an example by which Plato set forth the unreasonableness of a philosopher's meddling with government: If a man, says he, was to see a great company run out every day into the rain, and take delight in being wet; if he knew that it would be to no purpose for him to go and persuade them to return to their houses, in order to avoid the storm, and that all that could be expected by his going to speak to them would be that he himself should be as wet as they, it would be best for him to keep within doors; and since he had not influence enough to correct other people's folly, to take care to preserve himself.
"Though to speak plainly my real sentiments, I must freely own that as long as there is any property, and while money is the standard of all other things, I cannot think that a nation can be governed either justly or happily: not justly, because the best things will fall to the share of the worst men; nor happily, because all things will be divided among a few… the rest being left to be absolutely miserable. Therefore when I reflect on the wise and good constitution of the Utopians--among whom all things are so well governed, and with so few laws; where virtue hath its due reward, and yet there is such an equality, that every man lives in plenty -- when I compare with them so many other nations that are still making new laws, and yet can never bring their constitution to a right regulation, where notwithstanding everyone has his property; yet all the laws that they can invent have not the power either to obtain or preserve it, or even to enable men certainly to distinguish what is their own from what is another's; of which the many lawsuits that every day break out… I grow more favorable to Plato, and do not wonder that he resolved not to make any laws for such as would not submit to a community of all things: for so wise a man could not but foresee that the setting all upon a level was the only way to make a nation happy, which cannot be obtained so long as there is property…
"I am persuaded, that till property is taken away there can be no equitable or just distribution of things, nor can the world be happily governed: for as long as that is maintained, the greatest and the far best part of mankind will be still oppressed with a load of cares and anxieties..."
"On the contrary," answered I, "it seems to me that men cannot live conveniently where all things are common: how can there be any plenty, where every man will excuse himself from labor? For as the hope of gain doth not excite him, so the confidence that he has in other men's industry may make him slothful…"
"I do not wonder," said he, "that it appears so to you, since you have no notion, or at least no right one, of such a constitution: but if you had been in Utopia with me, and had seen their laws and rules, as I did… you would then confess that you had never seen a people so well constituted as they."
"You will not easily persuade me," said Peter, "that any nation in that new world is better governed than those among us. For as our understandings are not worse than theirs, so our government, if I mistake not, being more ancient, a long practice has helped us to find out many conveniences of life: and some happy chances have discovered other things to us, which no man's understanding could ever have invented."
"As for the antiquity, either of their government or of ours," said he, "you cannot pass a true judgment of it unless you had read their histories; for if they are to be believed, they had towns among them before these parts were so much as inhabited. And as for those discoveries, that have been either hit on by chance, or made by ingenious men, these might have happened there as well as here. I do not deny that we are more ingenious than they are, but they exceed us much in industry and application.... this is the true cause of their being better governed, and living happier than we…
Upon this I said to him: "I earnestly beg you would describe that island very particularly to us…
He consented. We went in and dined, and after dinner came back and sat down in the same place. I ordered my servants to take care that none might come and interrupt us. And both Peter and I desired Raphael to be as good as his word. When he saw that we were very intent upon it, he paused a little to recollect himself, and began in this manner:
Document 1.10 - From Thomas More, Utopia (Book II) (1516)
Retrieved from: http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/more/utopia-contents.html
TO STUDENTS: In the second book of More’s Utopia, Raphael recounts his travels to the land of the Utopians. As you read, pay particular attention to how this society represents a society reformed according to the Christian principles of the Northern Renaissance.
THE island of Utopia is in the middle 200 miles broad, and holds almost at the same breadth over a great part of it; but it grows narrower toward both ends. Its figure is not unlike a crescent: between its horns, the sea comes in eleven miles broad, and spreads itself into a great bay, which is environed with land to the compass of about 500 miles, and is well secured from winds. In this bay there is no great current; the whole coast is, as it were, one continued harbor, which gives all that live in the island great convenience for mutual commerce; but the entry into the bay, occasioned by rocks on the one hand, and shallows on the other, is very dangerous. In the middle of it there is one single rock which appears above water, and may therefore be easily avoided, and on the top of it there is a tower in which a garrison is kept; the other rocks lie under water, and are very dangerous. The channel is known only to the natives, so that if any stranger should enter into the bay, without one of their pilots, he would run great danger of shipwreck; for even they themselves could not pass it safe, if some marks that are on the coast did not direct their way....
There are fifty-four cities in the island, all large and well built: the manners, customs, and laws of which are the same, and they are all contrived as near in the same manner as the ground on which they stand will allow. The nearest lie at least twenty-four miles distance from one another, and the most remote are not so far distant but that a man can go on foot in one day from it to that which lies next it. Every city sends three of its wisest Senators once a year to Amaurot, to consult about their common concerns; for that is the chief town of the island, being situated near the center of it, so that it is the most convenient place for their assemblies. The jurisdiction of every city extends at least twenty miles: and where the towns lie wider, they have much more ground: no town desires to enlarge its bounds, for the people consider themselves rather as tenants than landlords. They have built over all the country, farmhouses for husbandmen, which are well contrived, and are furnished with all things necessary for country labor. Inhabitants are sent by turns from the cities to dwell in them; no country family has fewer than forty men and women in it, besides two slaves. There is a master and a mistress set over every family; and over thirty families there is a magistrate.
Every year twenty of this family come back to the town, after they have stayed two years in the country; and in their room there are other twenty sent from the town, that they may learn country work from those that have been already one year in the country, as they must teach those that come to them the next from the town. By this means such as dwell in those country farms are never ignorant of agriculture, and so commit no errors, which might otherwise be fatal, and bring them under a scarcity of corn. But though there is every year such a shifting of the husbandmen, to prevent any man being forced against his will to follow that hard course of life too long, yet many among them take such pleasure in it that they desire leave to continue in it many years. These husbandmen till the ground, breed cattle, hew wood, and convey it to the towns…
When they need anything in the country which it does not produce, they fetch that from the town, without carrying anything in exchange for it. And the magistrates of the town take care to see it given them; for they meet generally in the town once a month, upon a festival day. When the time of harvest comes, the magistrates in the country send to those in the towns, and let them know how many hands they will need for reaping the harvest; and the number they call for being sent to them, they commonly finish all of the work in one day.
OF THEIR TRADES, AND MANNER OF LIFEAGRICULTURE is that which is so universally understood among them that no person, either man or woman, is ignorant of it… Besides agriculture, which is so common to them all, every man has some peculiar trade to which he applies himself, such as the manufacture of wool, or flax, masonry, smith's work, or carpenter's work; for there is no sort of trade that is not in great esteem among them. Throughout the island they wear the same sort of clothes without any other distinction, except what is necessary to distinguish the two sexes, and the married and unmarried. The fashion never alters; and as it is neither disagreeable nor uneasy, so it is suited to the climate, and calculated both for their summers and winters. Every family makes their own clothes; but all among them, women as well as men, learn one or other of the trades formerly mentioned. Women, for the most part, deal in wool and flax, which suit best with their weakness, leaving the ruder trades to the men. The same trade generally passes down from father to son, inclinations often following descent; but if any man's genius lies another way, he is by adoption translated into a family that deals in the trade to which he is inclined… And if after a person has learned one trade, he desires to acquire another, that is also allowed, and is managed in the same manner as the former. When he has learned both, he follows that which he likes best, unless the public has more occasion for the other.
The chief, and almost the only business of the magistrates, is to take care that no man may live idle, but that every one may follow his trade diligently: yet they do not wear themselves out with perpetual toil, from morning to night, as if they were beasts of burden, which, as it is indeed a heavy slavery, so it is everywhere the common course of life among all mechanics except the Utopians; but they dividing the day and night into twenty-four hours, appoint six of these for work; three of which are before dinner,[9] and three after. They then sup, and at eight o'clock, counting from noon, go to bed and sleep eight hours. The rest of their time besides that taken up in work, eating and sleeping, is left to every man's discretion; yet they are not to abuse that interval to luxury and idleness, but must employ it in some proper exercise according to their various inclinations, which is for the most part reading. It is ordinary to have public lectures every morning before daybreak; at which none are obliged to appear but those who are marked out for literature; yet a great many, both men and women of all ranks, go to hear lectures of one sort of other, according to their inclinations. But if others, that are not made for contemplation, choose rather to employ themselves at that time in their trades, as many of them do, they are not hindered, but are rather commended, as men that take care to serve their country. After supper, they spend an hour in some diversion, in summer in their gardens, and in winter in the halls where they eat; where they entertain each other, either with music or discourse. They do not so much as know dice, or any such foolish and mischievous games: they have, however, two sorts of games not unlike our chess; the one is between several numbers, in which one number, as it were, consumes another: the other resembles a battle between the virtues and the vices, in which the enmity in the vices among themselves, and their agreement against virtue, is not unpleasantly represented; together with the special oppositions between the particular virtues and vices; as also the methods by which vice either openly assaults or secretly undermines virtue, and virtue on the other hand resists it… You may imagine, that since there are only six hours appointed for work, they may fall under a scarcity of necessary provisions. But it is so far from being true, that this time is not sufficient for supplying them with plenty of all things, either necessary or convenient, that it is rather too much; and this you will easily apprehend, if you consider how great a part of all other nations is quite idle.
First, women generally do little, who are the half of mankind; and if some few women are diligent, their husbands are idle: then consider the great company of idle priests, and of those that are called religious men; add to these all rich men, chiefly those that have estates in land, who are called noblemen and gentlemen, together with their families, made up of idle persons, that are kept more for show than use; add to these, all those strong and lusty beggars, that go about pretending some disease, in excuse for their begging; and upon the whole account you will find that the number of those by whose labors mankind is supplied, is much less than you perhaps imagined.
OF THEIR TRAFFICBUT it is now time to explain to you the mutual intercourse of this people, their commerce, and the rules by which all things are distributed among them.
As their cities are composed of families, so their families are made up of those that are nearly related to one another. Their women, when they grow up, are married out; but all the males, both children and grandchildren, live still in the same house, in great obedience to their common parent, unless age has weakened his understanding… No family may have less than ten and more than sixteen persons in it… This rule is easily observed, by removing some of the children of a more fruitful couple to any other family that does not abound so much in them....
But to return to their manner of living in society, the oldest man of every family, as has been already said, is its governor. Wives serve their husbands, and children their parents, and always the younger serves the elder. Every city is divided into four equal parts, and in the middle of each there is a marketplace: what is brought thither, and manufactured by the several families, is carried from thence to houses appointed for that purpose, in which all things of a sort are laid by themselves; and thither every father goes and takes whatsoever he or his family needs, without either paying for it or leaving anything in exchange. There is no reason for giving a denial to any person, since there is such plenty of everything among them; and there is no danger of a man's asking for more than he needs; they have no inducements to do this, since they are sure that they shall always be supplied. It is the fear of want that makes any of the whole race of animals either greedy or ravenous; but besides fear, there is in man a pride that makes him fancy it a particular glory to excel others in pomp and excess. But by the laws of the Utopians, there is no room for this…
They take more care of their sick than of any others: these are lodged and provided for in public hospitals they have belonging to every town four hospitals, that are built without their walls, and are so large that they may pass for little towns: by this means, if they had ever such a number of sick persons, they could lodge them conveniently, and at such a distance, that such of them as are sick of infectious diseases may be kept so far from the rest that there can be no danger of contagion. The hospitals are furnished and stored with all things that are convenient for the ease and recovery of the sick; and those that are put in them are looked after with such tender and watchful care, and are so constantly attended by their skillful physicians, that as none is sent to them against their will, so there is scarce one in a whole town that, if he should fall ill, would not choose rather to go thither than lie sick at home….
Every child is nursed by its own mother, if death or sickness does not intervene; and in that case a nurse is found quickly, which is no hard matter; for anyone that can do it offers herself cheerfully… All the children under five years old sit among the nurses, the rest of the younger sort of both sexes, till they are fit for marriage, either serve those that sit at table or, if they are not strong enough for that, stand by them in great silence, and eat what is given them… Dishes are not served up to the whole table at first, but the best are first set before the old, whose seats are distinguished from the young, and after them all the rest are served alike. The old men distribute to the younger any curious meats that happen to be set before them, if there is not such an abundance of them that the whole company may be served alike.
Thus old men are honored with a particular respect; yet all the rest fare as well as they. Both dinner and supper are begun with some lecture of morality that is read to them; but it is so short, that it is not tedious nor uneasy to them to hear it: from hence the old men take occasion to entertain those about them with some useful and pleasant enlargements; but they do not engross the whole discourse so to themselves, during their meals, that the younger may not put in for a share: on the contrary, they engage them to talk, that so they may in that free way of conversation find out the force of everyone's spirit and observe his temper. They despatch their dinners quickly, but sit long at supper; because they go to work after the one, and are to sleep after the other, during which they think the stomach carries on the concoction more vigorously. They never sup without music; and there is always fruit served up after meat; while they are at table, some burn perfumes and sprinkle about fragrant ointments and sweet waters: in short, they want nothing that may cheer up their spirits: they give themselves a large allowance that way, and indulge themselves in all such pleasures as are attended with no inconvenience.
OF THE RELIGIONS OF THE UTOPIANSTHERE are several sorts of religions, not only in different parts of the island, but even in every town; some worshipping the sun, others the moon or one of the planets: some worship such men as have been eminent in former times for virtue or glory, not only as ordinary deities, but as the supreme God: yet the greater and wiser sort of them worship none of these, but adore one eternal, invisible, infinite, and incomprehensible Deity; as a being that is far above all our apprehensions, that is spread over the whole universe, not by His bulk, but by His power and virtue; Him they call the Father of All, and acknowledge that the beginnings, the increase, the progress, the vicissitudes, and the end of all things come only from Him; nor do they offer divine honors to any but to Him alone. And indeed, though they differ concerning other things, yet all agree in this, that they think there is one Supreme Being that made and governs the world, whom they call in the language of their country Mithras. They differ in this, that one thinks the god whom he worships is this Supreme Being, and another thinks that his idol is that God; but they all agree in one principle, that whoever is this Supreme Being, He is also that great Essence to whose glory and majesty all honors are ascribed by the consent of all nations.
By degrees, they fall off from the various superstitions that are among them, and grow up to that one religion that is the best and most in request; and there is no doubt to be made but that all the others had vanished long ago, if some of those who advised them to lay aside their superstitions had not met with some unhappy accident, which being considered as inflicted by heaven, made them afraid that the God whose worship had like to have been abandoned, had interposed, and revenged themselves on those who despised their authority. After they had heard from us an account of the doctrine, the course of life, and the miracles of Christ… many of them came over to our religion, and were initiated into it by baptism. But as two of our number were dead, so none of the four that survived were in priest's orders; we therefore could only baptize them; so that to our great regret they could not partake of the other sacraments, that can only be administered by priests; but they are instructed concerning them, and long most vehemently for them. They have had great disputes among themselves, whether one chosen by them to be a priest would not be thereby qualified to do all the things that belong to that character, even though he had no authority derived from the Pope; and they seemed to be resolved to choose some for that employment, but they had not done it when I left them.
Those among them that have not received our religion, do not fright any from it, and use none ill that goes over to it; so that all the while I was there, one man was only punished on this occasion. He being newly baptized, did, notwithstanding all that we could say to the contrary, dispute publicly concerning the Christian religion with more zeal than discretion; and with so much heat, that he not only preferred our worship to theirs, but condemned all their rites as profane; and cried out against all that adhered to them, as impious and sacrilegious persons, that were to be damned to everlasting burnings. Upon his having frequently preached in this manner, he was seized, and after trial he was condemned to banishment, not for having disparaged their religion, but for his inflaming the people to sedition: for this is one of their most ancient laws, that no man ought to be punished for his religion.
[1] The Chair of St. Peter (the Pope’s throne)
[2] “For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God…” -- 2 Corinthians 10:4
[3] To feel sorry for the loss or absence of; basically, he was missed
[4] An structure built for the public display of the bodies of executed criminals
[5] While the French kept up an army at all times, the English were against maintaining standing armies in peacetime.
[6] Brothels?
[7] The Christian Gospel
[8] Naples and Milan were Italian cities that were under French rule at the time.
[9] Here meaning lunch
Original Documents: Middle Ages
Unam Sanctam: One Power on Earth
Boniface VIII
(1302)
That there is one holy Catholic and apostolic Church we are impelled by our faith to believe and to hold–this we do firmly believe and openly confess–and outside of this there is neither salvation nor remission of sins, as the bridegroom proclaims in Canticles, “My dove, my undefiled is but one; she is the only one of her mother, she is the choice one of her that bare her.” The Church represents one mystic body, and of this body Christ is the head; of Christ, indeed, God is the head. In it is one Lord, and one faith, and one baptism. In the time of the flood there was one ark of Noah, prefiguring the one Church, finished in one cubit, having one Noah as steersman and commander. Outside of this all things upon the face of the earth were, as we read, destroyed. This Church we venerate and this alone. … It is that seamless coat of the Lord, which was not rent but fell by lot. Therefore, in this one and only Church there is one body and one head,–not two heads as if it were a monster,–namely, Christ and Christ’s vicar, Peter and Peter’s successor; for the Lord said to Peter himself, “Feed my sheep.” “My sheep,” he said, using a general term and not designating these or those sheep, so that we must believe that all the sheep were committed to him. If, then, the Greeks, or others, shall say that they were not intrusted to Peter and his successors, they must perforce admit that they are not of Christ’s sheep, as the Lord says in John, “there is one fold, and one shepherd.”
In this Church and in its power are two swords, to wit, a spiritual and a temporal, and this we are taught by the words of the Gospel; for when the apostles said, “Behold, here are two swords” (in the Church, namely, since the apostles were speaking), the Lord did not reply that it was too many, but enough. And surely he who claims that the temporal sword is not in the power of Peter has but ill understood the word of our Lord when he said, “Put up again thy sword into his place.” Both the spiritual and the material swords, therefore, are in the power of the Church, the latter indeed to be used for the Church, the former by the Church, the one by the priest, the other by the hand of kings and soldiers, but by the will and sufferance of the priest.
It is fitting, moreover, that one sword should be under the other, and the temporal authority subject to the spiritual power. For when the apostle said, “there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God,” they would not be ordained unless one sword were under the other, and one, as inferior, was brought back by the other to the highest place. For, according to St. Dionysius, the law of divinity is to lead the lowest through the intermediate to the highest. Therefore, according to the law of the universe, things are not reduced to order directly and upon the same footing, but the lowest through the intermediate, and the inferior through the superior. It behooves us, therefore, the more freely to confess that the spiritual power excels in dignity and nobility any form whatsoever of earthly power, as spiritual interests exceed the temporal in importance. All this we see fairly from the giving of tithes, from the benediction and sanctification, from the recognition of this power and the control of these same things.
Hence, the truth bearing witness, it is for the spiritual power to establish the earthly power and judge it, if it be not good. Thus, in the case of the Church and the power of the Church, the prophecy of Jeremiah is fulfilled: “See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms,” etc. Therefore, if the earthly power shall err, it shall be judged by the spiritual power; if the lesser spiritual power err, it shall be judged by the higher. But if the supreme power err, it can be judged by God alone and not by man, the apostles bearing witness, saying, The spiritual man judges all things, but he himself is judged by no one. Hence this power, although given to man and exercised by man, is not human, but rather a divine power, given by the divine lips to Peter, and founded on a rock for him and his successors in him (Christ) whom he confessed, the Lord saying to Peter himself, “Whatsoever thou shalt bind,” etc.
Whoever, therefore, shall resist this power, ordained by God, resists the ordination of God, unless there should be two beginnings [i.e. principles], as the Manichaean imagines. But this we judge to be false and heretical, since, by the testimony of Moses, not in the beginnings but in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. We, moreover, proclaim, declare, and pronounce that it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human being to be subject to the Roman pontiff.
Boniface VIII in Hell
Dante Alighieri
(c. 1314)
I saw the gulley, both its banks and ground,
Thickset with holes, all of the selfsame size,
Pierced through the livid stone; and each was round,
Seeming nor more nor less wide to mine eyes
Than those in my own beautiful St John,
Made for the priests to stand in, to baptize; …
From each hole’s mouth stuck out a sinner’s feet
And legs up to the calf; but all the main
Part of the body was hid within the pit.
The soles of them were all on fire, whence pain
Made their joints quiver and thrash with such strong throes,
They’d have snapped withies and hempen ropes in twain.
And as on oily matter the flame flows
On the outer surface only, in lambent flashes,
So did it here, flickering from heels to toes. …
“Oh thou, whoever thou art, unhappy shade,
Heels over head thus planted like a stake,
Speak if thou canst.” This opening I essayed
And stood there like the friar who leans to take
Confession from the treacherous murderer
Quick-buried, who calls him back for respite’s sake.
He cried aloud: “Already standing there?
Art standing there already, Boniface?
Why then, the writ has lied by many a year.
“What! so soon sated with the gilded brass
That nerved thee to betray and then to rape
The Fairest among Women that ever was?”
Then I became like those who stand agape,
Hearing remarks which seem to make no sense,
Blank of retort for what seems jeer and jape.
But Virgil now broke in: “Tell him at once:
‘I am not who thou think’st, I am not he’ “;
So I made answer in obedience.
Attack on Marsilius of Padua: The Avignon Papacy Fights Back
Pope John XXII
(1327)
(1) When Christ ordered the coin which was taken from the fish’s mouth to be paid to the tax collector, he paid tribute to Caesar; and he did this not out of condescension or kindness, but because he had to pay it. From this it is clear that all temporal powers and possessions of the church are subject to the emperor, and he may take them as his own.
(2) That St. Peter had no more authority than the other apostles, and was not the head over the other apostles; and that Christ left behind no head of the church, and did not appoint anyone as his vicar.
(3) That the emperor has the right to make and depose popes and to punish them.
(4) That all priests, whether pope or archbishop or simple priest, are, in accordance with the appointment of Christ, of equal authority and jurisdiction.
(6) That the whole church together can not punish any man with coactive punishment, without the permission of the emperor.
The above articles are contrary to the holy scriptures and hostile to the catholic faith and we declare them to be heretical and erroneous, and the aforesaid Marsilius and John [of Jandun] to be open and notorious heretics, or rather heresiarchs.
The Downfall of the Church: Condemnation of the Papacy During the Great Schism
Nicholas of Clamanges
(c. 1410)
After the great increase of worldly goods, the virtues of our ancestors being quite neglected, boundless avarice and blind ambition invaded the hearts of the churchmen. As a result they were carried away by the glory of their position and the extent of their power, and soon gave way to the degrading effects of luxury. Three most exacting and troublesome masters had now to be satisfied. Luxury demands sundry gratifications,–wine, sleep, banquets, music, debasing sports, courtesans, and the like. Display requires fine houses, castles, towers, palaces, rich and varied furniture, expensive clothes, horses, servants, and the pomp of luxury. Lastly is Avarice, which carefully brings together vast treasures to supply the demands of the above-mentioned vices or, if these are otherwise provided for, to gratify the eye by the vain contemplation of the coins themselves.
So insatiable are these lords, and so imperious are their demands, that the Golden Age of Saturn, which we hear of in stories, should it now return, would hardly suffice to meet the requirements. Since it is impossible, however rich the bishop and ample his revenue, to satisfy these rapacious harpies with that alone, he must cast about for other sources of income.
For carrying on these exactions and gathering the gains into the camera, or Charybdis, as we may better call it, the popes appoint their collectors in every province,–those, namely, whom they know to be most skillful in extracting money, owing to peculiar energy, diligence, or harshness of temper, those, in short, who will neither spare nor except but would squeeze gold from a stone. To these the popes grant, moreover, the power of anathematizing any one, even prelates, and of expelling from the communion of the faithful every one who does not, within a fixed period, satisfy their demands for money. What ills these collectors have caused, and the extent to which poor churches and people have been oppressed, are questions best omitted, as we could never hope to do the matter justice. From this source come the laments of the unhappy ministers of the Church, which reach our ears, as they faint under the insupportable yoke,–yea, perish of hunger. Hence come suspensions from divine service, interdicts from entering a church, and anathemas, a thousandfold intensified in severity.
Such things were resorted to in the rarest instances by the fathers [i.e., by the early church], and then only for the most horrible of crimes; for by these penalties a man is separated from the companionship of the faithful and turned over to Satan. But nowadays these inflictions are so fallen in esteem that they are used for the lightest offense, often for no offense at all, so that they no longer bring terror but are objects of contempt.
To the same cause is to be ascribed the ruin of numerous churches and monasteries and the leveling to the ground, in so many places, of sacred edifices, while the money which was formerly used for their restoration is exhausted in paying these taxes. But it even happens, as some well know, that holy relics in not a few churches–crosses, chalices, feretories, and other precious articles–go to make up this tribute.
Who does not know how many abbots and other prelates, when they come to die, are, if they prove obnoxious to the papal camera on account of their poverty, refused a dignified funeral, and even denied burial, except perchance in some field or garden, or other profane spot, where they are secretly disposed of. Priests, as we all can see, are forced, by reason of their scanty means of support, to desert their parishes and their benefices and, in their hunger, seek bread where they may, performing profane services for laymen. Some rich and hitherto prosperous churches have, indeed, been able to support this burden, but all are now exhausted and can no longer bear to be cheated of their revenue.
The Triumph of Conciliarism: End of the Great Schism
The Council of Constance
(1415 and 1417)
This holy synod of Constance, constituting a general council for the extirpation of the present schism and the union and reformation of the Church of God in head and members, legitimately assembled in the Holy Ghost, to the praise of omnipotent God, in order that it may the more easily, safely, effectively, and freely bring about the union and reformation of the Church of God, hereby determines, decrees, ordains, and declares what follows:
It first declares that this same council, legitimately assembled in the Holy Ghost, forming a general council and representing the Catholic Church militant, has its power immediately from Christ, and every one, whatever his position or rank, even if it be the papal dignity itself, is bound to obey it in all those things which pertain to the faith, to the healing of the schism, and to the general reformation of the Church of God in head and members.
It further declares that any one, whatever his position, station, or rank, even if it be the papal, who shall contumaciously refuse to obey the mandates, decrees, ordinances, or instructions which have been, or shall be, issued by this holy council, or by any other general council legitimately summoned, which concern, or in any way relate to, the above-mentioned objects, shall, unless he repudiate his conduct, be subjected to condign penance and be suitably punished, having recourse, if necessary, to the resources of the law. … [1415]
A frequent celebration of general councils is an especial means for cultivating the field of the Lord and effecting the destruction of briers, thorns, and thistles, to wit, heresies, errors, and schism, and of bringing forth a most abundant harvest. The neglect to summon these fosters and develops all these evils, as may be plainly seen from a recollection of the past and a consideration of existing conditions. Therefore, by a perpetual edict, we sanction, decree, establish, and ordain that general councils shall be celebrated in the following manner, so that the next one shall follow the close of this present council at the end of five years. The second shall follow the close of that, at the end of seven years, and councils shall thereafter be celebrated every ten years in such places as the pope shall be required to designate and assign, with the consent and approbation of the council, one month before the close of the council in question, or which, in his absence, the council itself shall designate. Thus, with a certain continuity, a council will always be either in session, or be expected at the expiration of a definite time.
This term may, however, be shortened on account of emergencies, by the supreme pontiff, with the counsel of his brethren, the cardinals of the holy Roman Church, but it may not be hereafter lengthened. The place, moreover, designated for the future council may not be altered without evident necessity. If, however, some complication shall arise, in view of which such a change shall seem necessary, as, for example, a state of siege, a war, a pest, or other obstacles, it shall be permissible for the supreme pontiff, with the consent and subscription of his said brethren, or two thirds of them, to select another appropriate place near the first, which must be within the same country, unless such obstacles, or similar ones, shall exist throughout the whole nation. In that case, the council may be summoned to some appropriate neighboring place, within the bounds of another nation. To this the prelates, and others, who are wont to be summoned to a council, must betake themselves as if that place had been designated from the first. Such change of place, or shortening of the period, the supreme pontiff is required legitimately and solemnly to publish and announce one year before the expiration of the term fixed, that the said persons may be able to come together, for the celebration of the council, within the term specified. … [1417]
The holy council of Constance decrees and ordains that the supreme pontiff who shall next, by the grace of God, assume office, shall, in conjunction with this holy council, or with the deputies of the several “nations,” reform the Church, before the council dissolves, in head and members, as well as the Roman curia, in accordance with justice and the proper organization of the Church, in all the respects enumerated below, and which are submitted by the “nations” as requiring reform:
The number, character, and nationality of the lords cardinals.
The reservations [of benefices] made by the apostolic see.
The annates, both the servitia communia and the servitia minuta.
The collation to benefices and expectative favors.
What cases are to be brought before the Roman curia and what not.
Appeals to the Roman curia.
The functions of the [papal] chancery and penitentiary.
Exemptions and incorporations made during the schism.
Benefices in commendam.
Confirmation of elections.
Income during vacancies.
The non-alienation of the possessions of the Roman church or other churches.
For what reasons and in what manner a pope shall be corrected or deposed.
The extirpation of heresy.
Dispensations.
The means of support of pope and cardinals.
Indulgences.
Tenths.
When the above-mentioned deputies shall have been appointed by the “nations,” it shall be free to the others, with the permission of the pope, to return home. [1417]
The Great Revolt of 1381: Provocation from Both Sides
Parliament of King Richard II / John Ball
(1377 & 1381)
King Richard II:
At the grievous complaint of the lords and commons of the realm, as well men of holy church as other, made in this Parliament, of that in many lordships and parts of the realm of England, the villains and land tenants in villainage, who owe services and customs to their said lords, have now late withdrawn and do daily withdraw their services and customs due to their said lords; by comfort and procurement of other their counsellors, maintainers and abettors in the country, which have taken hire and profit of the said villains and land tenants by color of certain exemplifications made out of the book of Domesday of the manors and towns where they have been dwelling, and by virtue of the same exemplifications and their evil interpretations of the same, they affirm them to be quit and utterly discharged of all manner of serfdom, due as well of their body as of their said tenures, and will not suffer any distress or other justice to be made upon them; but do menace the servants of their lords of life and member, and, which is more, gather themselves together in great routs, and agree by such confederacy, that every one shall aid other to resist their lords with strong hand; and much other harm they do in sundry ways, to the great damage of their said lords and evil example to others to begin such riots; so that if due remedy be not the rather provided upon the same rebels, greater mischief, which God prohibit, may thereof spring through the realm. It is ordained and established that the lords which feel themselves grieved, shall have special commission under the great seal to the justices of the peace, or to other sufficient persons, to inquire of all such rebels, and of their offences, and their counsellors, procurers, maintainers and abettors, and to imprison all those that shall be thereof indicted before them, as well for the time past as for the time to come, without delivering them out of prison by mainprise, bail or otherwise, without assent of their lords, till they be attainted or acquitted thereof; and that the same justices have power to hear and determine as well at the king’s suit as at the suit of the party.
And as to the said exemplifications, made and purchased as afore is said, which were caused to come in the Parliament, it is declared in the said Parliament that the same may not nor ought to avail, or hold place to the said villains or land tenants, as to the franchise of their bodies; nor to change the condition of their tenure and customs of old time due; nor to do prejudice to the said lords, to have their services and customs as they were wont of old time; and it is ordained that upon this declaration the said lords shall have letters patent under the great seal, as many and such as they shall need, if they the same require.
John Ball:
John Schep, som tyme Seynt Marie prest of York, and now of Colchester, greteth welle Johan Nameles,[1] and Johan the Mullere, and Johan Cartere, and biddeth hem that thei ware of gyle in borugh [i.e., who had entered the town by guile], and stondeth togiddir in Goddis name, and biddeth Peres Ploughman go to his werke, and chastise welle Hobbe the robber, and taketh with you Johan Trewman, and alle his felaws, and no mo, and loke scharpe you to on heved, and no mo.
Johan the Muller hath ygrownde [grown] smal, smal, smal;
The Kyngis sone of hevene [i.e., Jesus] shalle pay for alle.
Be ware or ye be wo.
Knoweth your frende fro youre foo,
Haveth ynowe [enough], and seythe “Hoo;”
And do welle and bettre, and fleth synne,
And seketh pees [peace], and holde therynne
[there in].
And so biddeth Johan Trewman and alle his felawes.
The Trial of Joan of Arc
Anonymous
(1431)
Joan [to her inquisitors]: When I was thirteen years old, I had a voice from God to help me govern my conduct. And the first time I was very fearful. And came this voice, about the hour of noon, in the summertime, in my father’s garden. … I heard the voice on the right-hand side … and rarely do I hear it without a brightness. … It has taught me to conduct myself well, to go habitually to church. … The voice told me that I should raise the siege laid to the city of Orleans … and me, I answered it that I was a poor girl who knew not how to ride nor lead in war.
Jean Pasquerel [priest, Joan's confessor]: “On the morrow, Saturday, I rose early and celebrated mass. And Joan went out against the fortress of the bridge where was the Englishman Classidas. And the assault lasted there from morning until sunset. In this assault … Joan … was struck by an arrow above the breast, and when she felt herself wounded she was afraid and wept. … And some soldiers, seeing her so wounded, wanted to apply a charm to her wound, but she would not have it, saying: “I would rather die than do a thing which I know to be a sin or against the will of God.” … But if to her could be applied a remedy without sin, she was very willing to be cured. And they put on to her wound olive oil and lard. And after that had been applied, Joan made her confession to me, weeping and lamenting.”
Count Dunois: “The assault lasted from the morning until eight … so that there was hardly hope of victory that day. So that I was going to break off and … withdraw. … Then the Maid came to me and required me to wait yet a while. She … mounted her horse and retired alone into a vineyard. … And in this vineyard she remained at prayer. … Then she came back … at once seized her standard in hand and placed herself on the parapet of the trench, and the moment she was there the English trembled and were terrified. The king’s soldiers regained courage and began to go up, charging against the boulevard without meeting the least resistance.”
Jean Pasquerel: “Joan returned to the charge, crying and saying: ‘Classidas, Classidas, yield thee, yield thee to the King of Heaven; thou hast called me ‘whore’; I take great pity on thy soul and thy people’s! Then Classidas, armed from head to foot, fell into the river of Loire and was drowned. And Joan, moved by pity, began to weep much for the soul of Classidas and the others who were drowned in great numbers.” …
Secondary Sources - The REnaissance
http://ww2.d155.org/clc/tdirectory/MSmalley/Shared%20Documents/AP%20Euro%20History/Unit%202%20-%20Renaissance%20Chapter%2013/burckhardt_burke%20REN%20period.pdf
Primary Sources – Renaissance
Letter to Posterity: Petrarch Writes His Autobiography. Francesco Petrarch (c. 1367-1372)
Greeting.–It is possible that some word of me may have come to you, though even this is doubtful, since an insignificant and obscure name will scarcely penetrate far in either time or space. If, however, you should have heard of me, you may desire to know what manner of man I was, or what was the outcome of my labors, especially those of which some description or, at any rate, the bare titles may have reached you.
To begin with myself, then: the utterances of men concerning me will differ widely, since in passing judgment almost every one is influenced not so much by truth as by preference, and good and evil report alike know no bounds. I was, in truth, a poor mortal like yourself, neither very exalted in my origin, nor, on the other hand, of the most humble birth, but belonging, as Augustus Caesar says of himself, to an ancient family. As to my disposition, I was not naturally perverse or wanting in modesty, however the contagion of evil associations may have corrupted me.
My youth was gone before I realized it; I was carried away by the strength of manhood; but a riper age brought me to my senses and taught me by experience the truth I had long before read in books, that youth and pleasure are vanity,–nay, that the Author of all ages and times permits us miserable mortals, puffed up with emptiness, thus to wander about, until finally, coming to a tardy consciousness of our sins, we shall learn to know ourselves.
In my prime I was blessed with a quick and active body, although not exceptionally strong; and while I do not lay claim to remarkable personal beauty, I was comely enough in my best days. I was possessed of a clear complexion, between light and dark, lively eyes, and for long years a keen vision, which however deserted me, contrary to my hopes, after I reached my sixtieth birthday, and forced me, to my great annoyance, to resort to glasses. Although I had previously enjoyed perfect health, old age brought with it the usual array of discomforts.
My parents were honorable folk, Florentine in their origin, of medium fortune, or, I may as well admit it, in a condition verging upon poverty. They had been expelled from their native city, and consequently I was born in exile, at Arezzo, in the year 1304 of this latter age, which begins with Christ’s birth, July the 20th, on a Monday, at dawn. … In my familiar associations with kings and princes, and in my friendship with noble personages, my good fortune has been such as to excite envy. But it is the cruel fate of those who are growing old that they can commonly only weep for friends who have passed away. The greatest kings of this age have loved and courted me. They may know why; I certainly do not. With some of them I was on such terms that they seemed in a certain sense my guests rather than I theirs; their lofty position in no way embarrassing me, but, on the contrary, bringing with it many advantages. I fled, however, from many of those to whom I was greatly attached; and such was my innate longing for liberty, that I studiously avoided those whose very name seemed incompatible with the freedom that I loved.
I possessed a well-balanced rather than a keen intellect,–one prone to all kinds of good and wholesome study, but especially inclined to moral philosophy and the art of poetry. The latter, indeed, I neglected as time went on, and took delight in sacred literature. Finding in that a hidden sweetness which I had once esteemed but lightly, I came to regard the works of the poets as only amenities.
Among the many subjects which interested me, I dwelt especially upon antiquity, for our own age has always repelled me, so that, had it not been for the love of those dear to me, I should have preferred to have been born in any other period than our own. In order to forget my own time, I have constantly striven to place myself in spirit in other ages, and consequently I delighted in history. The conflicting statements troubled me, but when in doubt I accepted what appeared most probable, or yielded to the authority of the writer.
Nicolo Nicoli: A Humanist’s Passion for the Classics
(c. 1450)
Vespasiano da Bisticci
Nicolo may justly be called the father and the benefactor of all students of letters, for he gave them protection and encouragement to work, and pointed out to them the rewards which would follow. If he knew of any Greek or Latin book which was not in Florence he spared neither trouble nor cost until he should procure it; indeed, there are numberless Latin books which the city possesses through his care. He gained such high reputation amongst men of letters that Messer Leonardo sent him his Life of Cicero and pronounced him to be the censor [i.e., foremost critic] of the Latin tongue.
He was a man of upright life who favored virtue and censured vice. He collected a fine library, not regarding the cost, and was always searching for rare books. He bought all these with the wealth which his father had left, putting aside only what was necessary for his maintenance. He sold several of his farms and spent the proceeds on his library. He was a devoted Christian, who specially favored monks and friars, and was the foe of evildoers. He held his books rather for the use of others than of himself, and all lettered students of Greek or Latin would come to him to borrow books, which he would always lend. … If he heard of students going to Greece or to France or elsewhere he would give them the names of books which they lacked in Florence, and procure for them the help of Cosimo de’ Medici who would do anything for him. When it happened that he could only get the copy of a book he would copy it himself, either in current or shaped characters, all in the finest script, as may be seen in San Marco, where there are many books from his hand in one lettering or the other. He procured at his own expense the works of Tertullian and other [ancient] writers which were not in Italy. He also found an imperfect copy of Ammianus Marcellinus and wrote it out with his own hand. The De Oratore and the Brutus [by Cicero] were sent to Nicolo from Lombardy, having been brought by the envoys of Duke Filippo when they went to ask for peace in the time of Pope Martin. The book was found in a chest in a very old church; this chest had not been opened for a long time, and they found the book, a very ancient example, while searching for evidence concerning certain ancient rights. De Oratore was found broken up, and it is through the care of Nicolo that we find it perfect today. He also rediscovered many sacred works and several of Tully’s [Cicero's] orations.
Through Nicolo Florence acquired many fine works of sculpture, of which he had great knowledge as well as of painting. A complete copy of Pliny did not exist in Florence, but when Nicolo heard that there was one in Lubeck, in Germany, he secured it by Cosimo’s aid, and thus Pliny came to Florence. All the young men he knew in Florence used to come to him for instruction in letters, and he cared for the needs of all those who wanted books or teachers. He did not seek any office in Florence [although] he was made an official in the University; many times he was selected for some governorship, but he refused them all, saying that they were food for the vultures, and he would let these feed on them. He called vultures those who went into the alehouses and devoured the poor. …
A Renaissance Oration on Human Dignity
Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola
(1486)
At last it seems to me I have come to understand why man is the most fortunate of creatures and consequently worthy of all admiration and what precisely is that rank which is his lot in the universal chain of Being–a rank to be envied not only by brutes but even by the stars and by minds beyond this world. It is a matter past faith and a wondrous one. Why should it not be? For it is on this very account that man is rightly called and judged a great miracle and a wonderful creature indeed. …
O supreme generosity of God the Father, O highest and most marvelous felicity of man! To him it is granted to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he wills. Beasts as soon as they are born (so says Lucilius) bring with them from their mother’s womb all they will ever possess. Spiritual beings, either from the beginning or soon thereafter, become what they are to be for ever and ever. On man when he came into life the Father conferred the seeds of all kinds and the germs of every way of life. Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow to maturity and bear in him their own fruit. If they be vegetative, he will be like a plant. If sensitive, he will become brutish. If rational, he will grow into a heavenly being. If intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God. And if, happy in the lot of no created thing, he withdraws into the center of his own unity, his spirit, made one with God, in the solitary darkness of God, who is set above all things, shall surpass them all. Who would not admire this our chameleon? Or who could more greatly admire aught else whatever? It is man who Asclepius of Athens, arguing from his mutability of character and from his self-transforming nature, on just grounds says was symbolized by Proteus in the mysteries. Hence those metamorphoses renowned among the Hebrews and the Pythagoreans. …
Selecting a Bride in Renaissance Florence
Alessandra Macinghi Delghi Strozzi
(1464-1465)
[April 20, 1464] … Concerning the matter of a wife [for Filippo], it appears to me that if Francesco di Messer Guglielmino Tanagli wishes to give his daughter, that it would be a fine marriage. … Now I will speak with Marco [Parenti, Alessandra's son-in-law], to see if there are other prospects that would be better. … Francesco Tanagli has a good reputation, and he has held office, not the highest, but still he has been in office. You may ask: “Why should he give her to someone in exile?” There are three reasons. First, there aren’t many young men of good family who have both virtue and property. Secondly, she has only a small dowry, 1,000 florins, which is the dowry of an artisan. … Third, I believe that he will give her away, because he has a large family and he will need help to settle them. …
[August 17, 1465] … Sunday morning I went to the first mass at S. Reparata … to see the Adimari girl, who customarily goes to that mass, and I found the Tanagli girl there. Not knowing who she was, I stood beside her. … She is very attractive, well proportioned, as large or larger than Caterina [Alessandra's daughter]. … She has a long face, and her features are not very delicate, but they aren’t like a peasant’s. From her demeanor, she does not appear to me to be indolent. … I walked behind her as we left the church, and thus I realized that she was one of the Tanagli. …
[September 13, 1465] … Marco came to me and said that he had met with Francesco Tanagli, who had spoken very coldly, so that I understand that he had changed his mind. … I believe that this is the result of the long delay in our replying to him, both yours and Marco’s. Now that this delay has angered him, and he has at hand some prospect that is more attractive. … I am very annoyed by this business. …
[Filippo Strozzi eventually married Fiametta di Donato Adimari, in 1466.]
Scandal in Renaissance Florence: The Maid is Pregnant
Bernado Machiavelli
(1475)
My wife told me that from certain signs which she had observed, our servant girl Lorenza, also called Nencia di Lazerino, had missed her period and that she appeared to be pregnant. … I told her to confront the girl alone and to use threats and persuasions to find out the truth from her. I had to go away, and upon my return in the evening, she told me that she had the girl alone in a room and that, after cajoling and threatening her, she had learned that the girl was pregnant by Niccolo di Alessandro Machiavelli. When asked how this had happened, she said that after we had returned from the country last year, on November 8, she had often gone at night through the window over the roof, and then through the little window next to the kitchen hearth to Niccolo’s house to stay with him. …
The truth was that he, Niccolo, had never had anything to do with her. Francesco had done this, and his only fault had been his failure to tell me.
In reply, I complained bitterly of his [Niccolo's] injury to me, which would have been grave in any event, but which was even worse, since he was my neighbor … and a close blood relation. [I said] that I had never done anything similar to him or his father, and that I did not understand how he could have held me in such low esteem. For both here [in Florence] and at the villa, he was often in my company and had never said anything to me so that I might prevent my house from becoming a bordello. He should also consider the nature of this affair, for this girl was not a slut but came from a good but impoverished family of Pistoia, and her father and brothers were men of some worth. I did not want the girl in my house any longer, and I had no choice but to inform Giovanni Nelli, who had given her to me, or to arrange for her father and mother to come for her. Niccolo replied that he was aware that he had injured me, but that it was Francesco who had harmed the girl, and that his error had been in not telling me. …
Classroom Rebellion: Students Berate a Renaissance Teacher
Students of Conrad Celtis
(c. 1500)
By your long and incessant scoldings, with which you frequently consume half the hour, you force us to make some reply in the name of truth. You accuse us of madness and charge that we are stupid barbarians, and you call wild beasts those whose fees support you. … This we might have borne with better grace, but for the fact that you yourself abound in the faults of which you accuse us. For what of the fact that, while you carp about us, you yourself are so torpid from dissipation that in private conversation your drowsy head droops to your elbow like a figure eight. You touch on many points in questions, but you speak neither plain argument nor cultured speech nor elegant Latin expositions; nor do you observe true coherence and order of speaking. Yet you have at hand the motto, “He teaches clearly who understands clearly.” Either you lack understanding–a shameful thing in a doctor–or you think us unworthy of your learning, which is incredible. For you certainly experience daily studious auditors, sometimes learned men, calculated to adorn you with great praise. Or you dislike the labor of lecturing, as we clearly comprehend, understand and see. In this one point you both derogate from your own reputation and seem to us all deficient. But now we have clearly expressed ourselves on that point. Wherefore, if you are ready and willing to vindicate the name and dignity of a preceptor and doctor, to fulfill your professional duties, we will be more attentive. If first, as befits you, you clear yourself of the fault you impute to us, you will make us more diligent by your diligence, which has now long been lacking, if you can conquer and overcome your dislike of study and tardiness in work. If you do less, we shall have to take more stringent measures.
A Model for Judas: Leonardo Paints The Last Supper
Giorgio Vasari
(1568)
Leonardo also executed in Milan, for the Dominicans of Santa Maria delle Grazie, a marvelous and beautiful painting of the Last Supper. Having depicted the heads of the apostles full of splendor and majesty, he deliberately left the head of Christ unfinished, convinced he would fail to give it the divine spirituality it demands. … It is said that the prior used to keep pressing Leonardo, in the most importunate way, to hurry up and finish the work, because he was puzzled by Leonardo’s habit of sometimes spending half a day at a time contemplating what he had done so far; if the prior had had his way, Leonardo would have toiled like one of the laborers hoeing in the garden and never put his brush down for a moment. Not satisfied with this, the prior then complained to the duke [Ludovico Sforza], making such a fuss that the duke was constrained to send for Leonardo. … Leonardo, knowing he was dealing with a prince of acute and discerning intelligence, was willing (as he never had been with the prior) to explain his mind at length. … He explained that men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least. … Leonardo then said that he still had two heads to paint: the head of Christ was one, and for this he was unwilling to look for any human model. … Then, he said, he had yet to do the head of Judas, and this troubled him since he did not think he could imagine the features that would form the countenance of a man who, despite all the blessings he had been given, could so cruelly steel his will to betray his own master and the creator of the world. However, added Leonardo, he would try to find a model for Judas, and if he did not succeed in doing so, why then he was not without the head of that tactless and importunate prior. The duke roared with laughter at this and said that Leonardo had every reason in the world for saying so.
Praise of Folly: Erasmus on Popular Religious Practice
Desiderius Erasmus
(1509)
To this same class of fools belong those who beguile themselves with the silly but pleasing notion that if they look upon a picture or image of St. Christopher,–that huge Polyphemus,–they will not die that day; or that he who salutes an image of St. Barbara with the proper form of address will come back from battle safe; or that one who approaches St. Erasmus on certain days with wax candles and prayers will soon be rich. They have found a new Hercules in St. George,–a sort of second Hippolytus. They seem to adore even his horse, which is scrupulously decked out with gorgeous trappings, and additional offerings are constantly being made in the hope of gaining new favors. His bronze helmet one would think half divine, the way people swear by it.
And what shall I say of those who comfortably delude themselves with imaginary pardons for their sins, and who measure the time in purgatory with an hourglass into years, months, days, and hours, with all the precision of a mathematical table? There are plenty, too, who, relying upon certain magical little certificates and prayers,–which some pious impostor devised either in fun or for the benefit of his pocket,–believe that they may procure riches, honor, future happiness, health, perpetual prosperity, long life, a lusty old age,–nay, in the end, a seat at the right hand of Christ in heaven; but as for this last, it matters not how long it be deferred: they will content themselves with the joys of heaven only when they must finally surrender the pleasures of this world, to which they lovingly cling.
The trader, the soldier, and the judge think that they can clean up the Augean stable of a lifetime, once for all, by sacrificing a single coin from their ill-gotten gains. They flatter themselves that all sorts of perjury, debauchery, drunkenness, quarrels, bloodshed, imposture, perfidy, and treason can be compounded for by contract and so adjusted that, having paid off their arrears, they can begin a new score.
How foolish, or rather how happy, are those who promise themselves more than supernal happiness if they repeat the verses of the seven holy psalms! Those magical lines are supposed to have been taught to St. Bernard by a demon, who seems to have been a wag; but he was not very clever, and, poor fellow, was frustrated in his attempt to deceive the saint. These silly things which even I, Folly, am almost ashamed of, are approved not only by the common herd but even by the teachers of religion.
How foolish, too, for religious bodies each to give preference to its particular guardian saint! Nay, each saint has his particular office allotted to him, and is addressed each in his special way: this one is called upon to alleviate toothache; that, to aid in childbirth; others, to restore a stolen article, bring rescue to the shipwrecked, or protect cattle,–and so on with the rest, who are much too numerous to mention. A few indeed among the saints are good in more than one emergency, especially the Holy Virgin, to whom the common man now attributes almost more than to her Son.
And for what, after all, do men petition the saints except for foolish things? Look at the votive offerings which cover the walls of certain churches and with which you see even the ceiling filled; do you find any one who expresses his gratitude that he has escaped Folly or because he has become a whit wiser? One perhaps was saved from drowning, another recovered when he had been run through by his enemy; another, while his fellows were fighting, ran away with expedition and success; another, on the point of being hanged, escaped, through the aid of some saintly friend of thieves, and lived to relieve a few more of those whom he believed to be overburdened with their wealth. …
These various forms of foolishness so pervade the whole life of Christians that even the priests themselves find no objection to admitting, not to say fostering, them, since they do not fail to perceive how many tidy little sums accrue to them from such sources. But what if some odious philosopher should chime in and say, as is quite true: “You will not die badly if you live well. You are redeeming your sins when you add to the sum that you contribute a hearty detestation of evil doers: then you may spare yourself tears, vigils, invocations, fasts, and all that kind of life. You may rely upon any saint to aid you when once you begin to imitate his life.”
As for the theologians, perhaps the less said the better on this gloomy and dangerous theme, since they are a style of man who show themselves exceeding supercilious and irritable unless they can heap up six hundred conclusions about you and force you to recant; and if you refuse, they promptly brand you as a heretic,–for it is their custom to terrify by their thunderings those whom they dislike. It must be confessed that no other group of fools are so reluctant to acknowledge Folly’s benefits toward them, although I have many titles to their gratitude, for I make them so in love with themselves that they seem to be happily exalted to the third heaven, whence they look down with something like pity upon all other mortals, wandering about on the earth like mere cattle. …
The Prince: Power Politics During the Italian Renaissance
Niccolo Machiavelli
(1513)
Every one understands how praiseworthy it is in a prince to keep faith, and to live uprightly and not craftily. Nevertheless we see, from what has taken place in our own days, that princes who have set little store by their word, but have known how to overreach men by their cunning, have accomplished great things, and in the end got the better of those who trusted to honest dealing.
Be it known, then, that there are two ways of contending,–one in accordance with the laws, the other by force; the first of which is proper to men, the second to beasts. But since the first method is often ineffectual, it becomes necessary to resort to the second. A prince should, therefore, understand how to use well both the man and the beast. … But inasmuch as a prince should know how to use the beast’s nature wisely, he ought of beasts to choose both the lion and the fox; for the lion cannot guard himself from the toils, nor the fox from wolves. He must therefore be a fox to discern toils, and a lion to drive off wolves.
To rely wholly on the lion is unwise; and for this reason a prudent prince neither can nor ought to keep his word when to keep it is hurtful to him and the causes which led him to pledge it are removed. If all men were good, this would not be good advice, but since they are dishonest and do not keep faith with you, you in return need not keep faith with them; and no prince was ever at a loss for plausible reasons to cloak a breach of faith. Of this numberless recent instances could be given, and it might be shown how many solemn treaties and engagements have been rendered inoperative and idle through want of faith among princes, and that he who has best known how to play the fox has had the best success.
It is necessary, indeed, to put a good color on this nature, and to be skilled in simulating and dissembling. But men are so simple, and governed so absolutely by their present needs, that he who wishes to deceive will never fail in finding willing dupes. One recent example I will not omit. Pope Alexander VI had no care or thought but how to deceive, and always found material to work on. No man ever had a more effective manner or asseverating, or made promises with more solemn protestations, or observed them less. And yet, because he understood this side of human nature, his frauds always succeeded. …
In his efforts to aggrandize his son the duke [Caesar Borgia], Alexander VI had to face many difficulties, both immediate and remote. In the first place, he saw no way to make him ruler of any state which did not belong to the Church. Yet, if he sought to take for him a state of the Church, he knew that the duke of Milan and the Venetians would withhold their consent, Faenza and Rimini [towns in the province of Romagna] being already under the protection of the latter. Further, he saw that the forces of Italy, and those more especially of which he might have availed himself, were in the hands of men who had reason to fear his aggrandizement,– that is, of the Orsini, the Colonnesi [Roman noble families] and their followers. These, therefore, he could not trust. …
And since this part of his [Caesar Borgia's] conduct merits both attention and imitation, I shall not pass it over in silence. After the duke had taken Romagna, finding that it had been ruled by feeble lords, who thought more of plundering than of governing their subjects,–which gave them more cause for division than for union, so that the country was overrun with robbery, tumult, and every kind of outrage,–he judged it necessary, with a view to rendering it peaceful, and obedient to his authority, to provide it with a good government. Accordingly he set over it Messer Remiro d’ Orco, a stern and prompt ruler, who, being intrusted with the fullest powers, in a very short time, and with much credit to himself, restored it to tranquility and order. But afterwards the duke, apprehending that such unlimited authority might become odious, decided that it was no longer needed, and established [at] the center of the province a civil tribunal, with an excellent president, in which every town was represented by its advocate. And knowing that past severities had generated ill feeling against himself, in order to purge the minds of the people and gain their good will, he sought to show them that any cruelty which had been done had not originated with him, but in the harsh disposition of this minister. Availing himself of the pretext which this afforded, he one morning caused Remiro to be beheaded, and exposed in the market place of Cesena with a block and bloody ax by his side. The barbarity of this spectacle at once astounded and satisfied the populace.
Utopia: A Question over Diplomatic Advice
Thomas More
(1516)
“Do not you think that if I were about any king, proposing good laws to him, and endeavoring to root out all the cursed seeds of evil that I found in him, I should either be turned out of his court or at least be laughed at for my pains? For instance, what could it signify if I were about the King of France, and were called into his Cabinet Council, where several wise men, in his hearing, were proposing many expedients, as by what arts and practices Milan may be kept, and Naples, that had so oft slipped out of their hands, recovered; how the Venetians, and after them the rest of Italy, may be subdued; and then how Flanders, Brabant, and all Burgundy, and some other kingdoms which he has swallowed already in his designs, may be added to his empire. One proposes a league with the Venetians, to be kept as long as he finds his account in it, and that he ought to communicate councils with them, and give them some share of the spoil, till his success makes him need or fear them less, and then it will be easily taken out of their hands. Another proposes the hiring the Germans, and the securing the Switzers by pensions. Another proposes the gaining the Emperor by money, which is omnipotent with him. Another proposes a peace with the King of Aragon, and, in order to cement it, the yielding up the King of Navarre’s pretensions. Another thinks the Prince of Castile is to be wrought on, by the hope of an alliance; and that some of his courtiers are to be gained to the French faction by pensions. The hardest point of all is what to do with England: a treaty of peace is to be set on foot, and if their alliance is not to be depended on, yet it is to be made as firm as possible; and they are to be called friends, but suspected as enemies: therefore the Scots are to be kept in readiness, to be let loose upon England on every occasion: and some banished nobleman is to be supported underhand (for by the league it cannot be done avowedly) who had a pretension to the crown, by which means that suspected prince may be kept in awe.
“Now when things are in so great a fermentation, and so many gallant men are joining councils, how to carry on the war, if so mean a man as I should stand up, and wish them to change all their councils, to let Italy alone, and stay at home, since the Kingdom of France was indeed greater than could be well governed by one man; that therefore he ought not to think of adding others to it: and if after this, I should propose to them the resolutions of the Achorians, a people that lie on the southeast of Utopia, who long ago engaged in war, in order to add to the dominions of their prince another kingdom, to which he had some pretensions by an ancient alliance. This they conquered, but found that the trouble of keeping it was equal to that by which it was gained; that the conquered people were always either in rebellion or exposed to foreign invasions, while they were obliged to be incessantly at war, either for or against them, and consequently could never disband their army; that in the meantime they were oppressed with taxes, their money went out of the kingdom, their blood was spilt for the glory of their King, without procuring the least advantage to the people, who received not the smallest benefit from it even in time of peace; and that their manners being corrupted by a long war, robbery and murders everywhere abounded, and their laws fell into contempt; while their King, distracted with the care of two kingdoms, was the less able to apply his mind to the interests of either.
“When they saw this, and that there would be no end to these evils, they by joint councils made an humble address to their King, desiring him to choose which of the two kingdoms he had the greatest mind to keep, since he could not hold both; for they were too great a people to be governed by a divided king, since no man would willingly have a groom that should be in common between him and another. Upon which the good prince was forced to quit his new kingdom to one of his friends (who was not long after dethroned), and to be contented with his old one. To this I would add that after all those warlike attempts, the vast confusions, and the consumption both of treasure and of people that must follow them; perhaps upon some misfortune, they might be forced to throw up all at last; therefore it seemed much more eligible that the King should improve his ancient kingdom all he could, and make it flourish as much as possible; that he should love his people, and be beloved of them; that he should live among them, govern them gently, and let other kingdoms alone, since that which had fallen to his share was big enough, if not too big for him. Pray how do you think would such a speech as this be heard?”
“I confess,” said I, “I think not very well.”
Unam Sanctam: One Power on Earth
Boniface VIII
(1302)
That there is one holy Catholic and apostolic Church we are impelled by our faith to believe and to hold–this we do firmly believe and openly confess–and outside of this there is neither salvation nor remission of sins, as the bridegroom proclaims in Canticles, “My dove, my undefiled is but one; she is the only one of her mother, she is the choice one of her that bare her.” The Church represents one mystic body, and of this body Christ is the head; of Christ, indeed, God is the head. In it is one Lord, and one faith, and one baptism. In the time of the flood there was one ark of Noah, prefiguring the one Church, finished in one cubit, having one Noah as steersman and commander. Outside of this all things upon the face of the earth were, as we read, destroyed. This Church we venerate and this alone. … It is that seamless coat of the Lord, which was not rent but fell by lot. Therefore, in this one and only Church there is one body and one head,–not two heads as if it were a monster,–namely, Christ and Christ’s vicar, Peter and Peter’s successor; for the Lord said to Peter himself, “Feed my sheep.” “My sheep,” he said, using a general term and not designating these or those sheep, so that we must believe that all the sheep were committed to him. If, then, the Greeks, or others, shall say that they were not intrusted to Peter and his successors, they must perforce admit that they are not of Christ’s sheep, as the Lord says in John, “there is one fold, and one shepherd.”
In this Church and in its power are two swords, to wit, a spiritual and a temporal, and this we are taught by the words of the Gospel; for when the apostles said, “Behold, here are two swords” (in the Church, namely, since the apostles were speaking), the Lord did not reply that it was too many, but enough. And surely he who claims that the temporal sword is not in the power of Peter has but ill understood the word of our Lord when he said, “Put up again thy sword into his place.” Both the spiritual and the material swords, therefore, are in the power of the Church, the latter indeed to be used for the Church, the former by the Church, the one by the priest, the other by the hand of kings and soldiers, but by the will and sufferance of the priest.
It is fitting, moreover, that one sword should be under the other, and the temporal authority subject to the spiritual power. For when the apostle said, “there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God,” they would not be ordained unless one sword were under the other, and one, as inferior, was brought back by the other to the highest place. For, according to St. Dionysius, the law of divinity is to lead the lowest through the intermediate to the highest. Therefore, according to the law of the universe, things are not reduced to order directly and upon the same footing, but the lowest through the intermediate, and the inferior through the superior. It behooves us, therefore, the more freely to confess that the spiritual power excels in dignity and nobility any form whatsoever of earthly power, as spiritual interests exceed the temporal in importance. All this we see fairly from the giving of tithes, from the benediction and sanctification, from the recognition of this power and the control of these same things.
Hence, the truth bearing witness, it is for the spiritual power to establish the earthly power and judge it, if it be not good. Thus, in the case of the Church and the power of the Church, the prophecy of Jeremiah is fulfilled: “See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms,” etc. Therefore, if the earthly power shall err, it shall be judged by the spiritual power; if the lesser spiritual power err, it shall be judged by the higher. But if the supreme power err, it can be judged by God alone and not by man, the apostles bearing witness, saying, The spiritual man judges all things, but he himself is judged by no one. Hence this power, although given to man and exercised by man, is not human, but rather a divine power, given by the divine lips to Peter, and founded on a rock for him and his successors in him (Christ) whom he confessed, the Lord saying to Peter himself, “Whatsoever thou shalt bind,” etc.
Whoever, therefore, shall resist this power, ordained by God, resists the ordination of God, unless there should be two beginnings [i.e. principles], as the Manichaean imagines. But this we judge to be false and heretical, since, by the testimony of Moses, not in the beginnings but in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. We, moreover, proclaim, declare, and pronounce that it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human being to be subject to the Roman pontiff.
Boniface VIII in Hell
Dante Alighieri
(c. 1314)
I saw the gulley, both its banks and ground,
Thickset with holes, all of the selfsame size,
Pierced through the livid stone; and each was round,
Seeming nor more nor less wide to mine eyes
Than those in my own beautiful St John,
Made for the priests to stand in, to baptize; …
From each hole’s mouth stuck out a sinner’s feet
And legs up to the calf; but all the main
Part of the body was hid within the pit.
The soles of them were all on fire, whence pain
Made their joints quiver and thrash with such strong throes,
They’d have snapped withies and hempen ropes in twain.
And as on oily matter the flame flows
On the outer surface only, in lambent flashes,
So did it here, flickering from heels to toes. …
“Oh thou, whoever thou art, unhappy shade,
Heels over head thus planted like a stake,
Speak if thou canst.” This opening I essayed
And stood there like the friar who leans to take
Confession from the treacherous murderer
Quick-buried, who calls him back for respite’s sake.
He cried aloud: “Already standing there?
Art standing there already, Boniface?
Why then, the writ has lied by many a year.
“What! so soon sated with the gilded brass
That nerved thee to betray and then to rape
The Fairest among Women that ever was?”
Then I became like those who stand agape,
Hearing remarks which seem to make no sense,
Blank of retort for what seems jeer and jape.
But Virgil now broke in: “Tell him at once:
‘I am not who thou think’st, I am not he’ “;
So I made answer in obedience.
Attack on Marsilius of Padua: The Avignon Papacy Fights Back
Pope John XXII
(1327)
(1) When Christ ordered the coin which was taken from the fish’s mouth to be paid to the tax collector, he paid tribute to Caesar; and he did this not out of condescension or kindness, but because he had to pay it. From this it is clear that all temporal powers and possessions of the church are subject to the emperor, and he may take them as his own.
(2) That St. Peter had no more authority than the other apostles, and was not the head over the other apostles; and that Christ left behind no head of the church, and did not appoint anyone as his vicar.
(3) That the emperor has the right to make and depose popes and to punish them.
(4) That all priests, whether pope or archbishop or simple priest, are, in accordance with the appointment of Christ, of equal authority and jurisdiction.
(6) That the whole church together can not punish any man with coactive punishment, without the permission of the emperor.
The above articles are contrary to the holy scriptures and hostile to the catholic faith and we declare them to be heretical and erroneous, and the aforesaid Marsilius and John [of Jandun] to be open and notorious heretics, or rather heresiarchs.
The Downfall of the Church: Condemnation of the Papacy During the Great Schism
Nicholas of Clamanges
(c. 1410)
After the great increase of worldly goods, the virtues of our ancestors being quite neglected, boundless avarice and blind ambition invaded the hearts of the churchmen. As a result they were carried away by the glory of their position and the extent of their power, and soon gave way to the degrading effects of luxury. Three most exacting and troublesome masters had now to be satisfied. Luxury demands sundry gratifications,–wine, sleep, banquets, music, debasing sports, courtesans, and the like. Display requires fine houses, castles, towers, palaces, rich and varied furniture, expensive clothes, horses, servants, and the pomp of luxury. Lastly is Avarice, which carefully brings together vast treasures to supply the demands of the above-mentioned vices or, if these are otherwise provided for, to gratify the eye by the vain contemplation of the coins themselves.
So insatiable are these lords, and so imperious are their demands, that the Golden Age of Saturn, which we hear of in stories, should it now return, would hardly suffice to meet the requirements. Since it is impossible, however rich the bishop and ample his revenue, to satisfy these rapacious harpies with that alone, he must cast about for other sources of income.
For carrying on these exactions and gathering the gains into the camera, or Charybdis, as we may better call it, the popes appoint their collectors in every province,–those, namely, whom they know to be most skillful in extracting money, owing to peculiar energy, diligence, or harshness of temper, those, in short, who will neither spare nor except but would squeeze gold from a stone. To these the popes grant, moreover, the power of anathematizing any one, even prelates, and of expelling from the communion of the faithful every one who does not, within a fixed period, satisfy their demands for money. What ills these collectors have caused, and the extent to which poor churches and people have been oppressed, are questions best omitted, as we could never hope to do the matter justice. From this source come the laments of the unhappy ministers of the Church, which reach our ears, as they faint under the insupportable yoke,–yea, perish of hunger. Hence come suspensions from divine service, interdicts from entering a church, and anathemas, a thousandfold intensified in severity.
Such things were resorted to in the rarest instances by the fathers [i.e., by the early church], and then only for the most horrible of crimes; for by these penalties a man is separated from the companionship of the faithful and turned over to Satan. But nowadays these inflictions are so fallen in esteem that they are used for the lightest offense, often for no offense at all, so that they no longer bring terror but are objects of contempt.
To the same cause is to be ascribed the ruin of numerous churches and monasteries and the leveling to the ground, in so many places, of sacred edifices, while the money which was formerly used for their restoration is exhausted in paying these taxes. But it even happens, as some well know, that holy relics in not a few churches–crosses, chalices, feretories, and other precious articles–go to make up this tribute.
Who does not know how many abbots and other prelates, when they come to die, are, if they prove obnoxious to the papal camera on account of their poverty, refused a dignified funeral, and even denied burial, except perchance in some field or garden, or other profane spot, where they are secretly disposed of. Priests, as we all can see, are forced, by reason of their scanty means of support, to desert their parishes and their benefices and, in their hunger, seek bread where they may, performing profane services for laymen. Some rich and hitherto prosperous churches have, indeed, been able to support this burden, but all are now exhausted and can no longer bear to be cheated of their revenue.
The Triumph of Conciliarism: End of the Great Schism
The Council of Constance
(1415 and 1417)
This holy synod of Constance, constituting a general council for the extirpation of the present schism and the union and reformation of the Church of God in head and members, legitimately assembled in the Holy Ghost, to the praise of omnipotent God, in order that it may the more easily, safely, effectively, and freely bring about the union and reformation of the Church of God, hereby determines, decrees, ordains, and declares what follows:
It first declares that this same council, legitimately assembled in the Holy Ghost, forming a general council and representing the Catholic Church militant, has its power immediately from Christ, and every one, whatever his position or rank, even if it be the papal dignity itself, is bound to obey it in all those things which pertain to the faith, to the healing of the schism, and to the general reformation of the Church of God in head and members.
It further declares that any one, whatever his position, station, or rank, even if it be the papal, who shall contumaciously refuse to obey the mandates, decrees, ordinances, or instructions which have been, or shall be, issued by this holy council, or by any other general council legitimately summoned, which concern, or in any way relate to, the above-mentioned objects, shall, unless he repudiate his conduct, be subjected to condign penance and be suitably punished, having recourse, if necessary, to the resources of the law. … [1415]
A frequent celebration of general councils is an especial means for cultivating the field of the Lord and effecting the destruction of briers, thorns, and thistles, to wit, heresies, errors, and schism, and of bringing forth a most abundant harvest. The neglect to summon these fosters and develops all these evils, as may be plainly seen from a recollection of the past and a consideration of existing conditions. Therefore, by a perpetual edict, we sanction, decree, establish, and ordain that general councils shall be celebrated in the following manner, so that the next one shall follow the close of this present council at the end of five years. The second shall follow the close of that, at the end of seven years, and councils shall thereafter be celebrated every ten years in such places as the pope shall be required to designate and assign, with the consent and approbation of the council, one month before the close of the council in question, or which, in his absence, the council itself shall designate. Thus, with a certain continuity, a council will always be either in session, or be expected at the expiration of a definite time.
This term may, however, be shortened on account of emergencies, by the supreme pontiff, with the counsel of his brethren, the cardinals of the holy Roman Church, but it may not be hereafter lengthened. The place, moreover, designated for the future council may not be altered without evident necessity. If, however, some complication shall arise, in view of which such a change shall seem necessary, as, for example, a state of siege, a war, a pest, or other obstacles, it shall be permissible for the supreme pontiff, with the consent and subscription of his said brethren, or two thirds of them, to select another appropriate place near the first, which must be within the same country, unless such obstacles, or similar ones, shall exist throughout the whole nation. In that case, the council may be summoned to some appropriate neighboring place, within the bounds of another nation. To this the prelates, and others, who are wont to be summoned to a council, must betake themselves as if that place had been designated from the first. Such change of place, or shortening of the period, the supreme pontiff is required legitimately and solemnly to publish and announce one year before the expiration of the term fixed, that the said persons may be able to come together, for the celebration of the council, within the term specified. … [1417]
The holy council of Constance decrees and ordains that the supreme pontiff who shall next, by the grace of God, assume office, shall, in conjunction with this holy council, or with the deputies of the several “nations,” reform the Church, before the council dissolves, in head and members, as well as the Roman curia, in accordance with justice and the proper organization of the Church, in all the respects enumerated below, and which are submitted by the “nations” as requiring reform:
The number, character, and nationality of the lords cardinals.
The reservations [of benefices] made by the apostolic see.
The annates, both the servitia communia and the servitia minuta.
The collation to benefices and expectative favors.
What cases are to be brought before the Roman curia and what not.
Appeals to the Roman curia.
The functions of the [papal] chancery and penitentiary.
Exemptions and incorporations made during the schism.
Benefices in commendam.
Confirmation of elections.
Income during vacancies.
The non-alienation of the possessions of the Roman church or other churches.
For what reasons and in what manner a pope shall be corrected or deposed.
The extirpation of heresy.
Dispensations.
The means of support of pope and cardinals.
Indulgences.
Tenths.
When the above-mentioned deputies shall have been appointed by the “nations,” it shall be free to the others, with the permission of the pope, to return home. [1417]
The Great Revolt of 1381: Provocation from Both Sides
Parliament of King Richard II / John Ball
(1377 & 1381)
King Richard II:
At the grievous complaint of the lords and commons of the realm, as well men of holy church as other, made in this Parliament, of that in many lordships and parts of the realm of England, the villains and land tenants in villainage, who owe services and customs to their said lords, have now late withdrawn and do daily withdraw their services and customs due to their said lords; by comfort and procurement of other their counsellors, maintainers and abettors in the country, which have taken hire and profit of the said villains and land tenants by color of certain exemplifications made out of the book of Domesday of the manors and towns where they have been dwelling, and by virtue of the same exemplifications and their evil interpretations of the same, they affirm them to be quit and utterly discharged of all manner of serfdom, due as well of their body as of their said tenures, and will not suffer any distress or other justice to be made upon them; but do menace the servants of their lords of life and member, and, which is more, gather themselves together in great routs, and agree by such confederacy, that every one shall aid other to resist their lords with strong hand; and much other harm they do in sundry ways, to the great damage of their said lords and evil example to others to begin such riots; so that if due remedy be not the rather provided upon the same rebels, greater mischief, which God prohibit, may thereof spring through the realm. It is ordained and established that the lords which feel themselves grieved, shall have special commission under the great seal to the justices of the peace, or to other sufficient persons, to inquire of all such rebels, and of their offences, and their counsellors, procurers, maintainers and abettors, and to imprison all those that shall be thereof indicted before them, as well for the time past as for the time to come, without delivering them out of prison by mainprise, bail or otherwise, without assent of their lords, till they be attainted or acquitted thereof; and that the same justices have power to hear and determine as well at the king’s suit as at the suit of the party.
And as to the said exemplifications, made and purchased as afore is said, which were caused to come in the Parliament, it is declared in the said Parliament that the same may not nor ought to avail, or hold place to the said villains or land tenants, as to the franchise of their bodies; nor to change the condition of their tenure and customs of old time due; nor to do prejudice to the said lords, to have their services and customs as they were wont of old time; and it is ordained that upon this declaration the said lords shall have letters patent under the great seal, as many and such as they shall need, if they the same require.
John Ball:
John Schep, som tyme Seynt Marie prest of York, and now of Colchester, greteth welle Johan Nameles,[1] and Johan the Mullere, and Johan Cartere, and biddeth hem that thei ware of gyle in borugh [i.e., who had entered the town by guile], and stondeth togiddir in Goddis name, and biddeth Peres Ploughman go to his werke, and chastise welle Hobbe the robber, and taketh with you Johan Trewman, and alle his felaws, and no mo, and loke scharpe you to on heved, and no mo.
Johan the Muller hath ygrownde [grown] smal, smal, smal;
The Kyngis sone of hevene [i.e., Jesus] shalle pay for alle.
Be ware or ye be wo.
Knoweth your frende fro youre foo,
Haveth ynowe [enough], and seythe “Hoo;”
And do welle and bettre, and fleth synne,
And seketh pees [peace], and holde therynne
[there in].
And so biddeth Johan Trewman and alle his felawes.
The Trial of Joan of Arc
Anonymous
(1431)
Joan [to her inquisitors]: When I was thirteen years old, I had a voice from God to help me govern my conduct. And the first time I was very fearful. And came this voice, about the hour of noon, in the summertime, in my father’s garden. … I heard the voice on the right-hand side … and rarely do I hear it without a brightness. … It has taught me to conduct myself well, to go habitually to church. … The voice told me that I should raise the siege laid to the city of Orleans … and me, I answered it that I was a poor girl who knew not how to ride nor lead in war.
Jean Pasquerel [priest, Joan's confessor]: “On the morrow, Saturday, I rose early and celebrated mass. And Joan went out against the fortress of the bridge where was the Englishman Classidas. And the assault lasted there from morning until sunset. In this assault … Joan … was struck by an arrow above the breast, and when she felt herself wounded she was afraid and wept. … And some soldiers, seeing her so wounded, wanted to apply a charm to her wound, but she would not have it, saying: “I would rather die than do a thing which I know to be a sin or against the will of God.” … But if to her could be applied a remedy without sin, she was very willing to be cured. And they put on to her wound olive oil and lard. And after that had been applied, Joan made her confession to me, weeping and lamenting.”
Count Dunois: “The assault lasted from the morning until eight … so that there was hardly hope of victory that day. So that I was going to break off and … withdraw. … Then the Maid came to me and required me to wait yet a while. She … mounted her horse and retired alone into a vineyard. … And in this vineyard she remained at prayer. … Then she came back … at once seized her standard in hand and placed herself on the parapet of the trench, and the moment she was there the English trembled and were terrified. The king’s soldiers regained courage and began to go up, charging against the boulevard without meeting the least resistance.”
Jean Pasquerel: “Joan returned to the charge, crying and saying: ‘Classidas, Classidas, yield thee, yield thee to the King of Heaven; thou hast called me ‘whore’; I take great pity on thy soul and thy people’s! Then Classidas, armed from head to foot, fell into the river of Loire and was drowned. And Joan, moved by pity, began to weep much for the soul of Classidas and the others who were drowned in great numbers.” …
Secondary Sources - The REnaissance
http://ww2.d155.org/clc/tdirectory/MSmalley/Shared%20Documents/AP%20Euro%20History/Unit%202%20-%20Renaissance%20Chapter%2013/burckhardt_burke%20REN%20period.pdf
Primary Sources – Renaissance
Letter to Posterity: Petrarch Writes His Autobiography. Francesco Petrarch (c. 1367-1372)
Greeting.–It is possible that some word of me may have come to you, though even this is doubtful, since an insignificant and obscure name will scarcely penetrate far in either time or space. If, however, you should have heard of me, you may desire to know what manner of man I was, or what was the outcome of my labors, especially those of which some description or, at any rate, the bare titles may have reached you.
To begin with myself, then: the utterances of men concerning me will differ widely, since in passing judgment almost every one is influenced not so much by truth as by preference, and good and evil report alike know no bounds. I was, in truth, a poor mortal like yourself, neither very exalted in my origin, nor, on the other hand, of the most humble birth, but belonging, as Augustus Caesar says of himself, to an ancient family. As to my disposition, I was not naturally perverse or wanting in modesty, however the contagion of evil associations may have corrupted me.
My youth was gone before I realized it; I was carried away by the strength of manhood; but a riper age brought me to my senses and taught me by experience the truth I had long before read in books, that youth and pleasure are vanity,–nay, that the Author of all ages and times permits us miserable mortals, puffed up with emptiness, thus to wander about, until finally, coming to a tardy consciousness of our sins, we shall learn to know ourselves.
In my prime I was blessed with a quick and active body, although not exceptionally strong; and while I do not lay claim to remarkable personal beauty, I was comely enough in my best days. I was possessed of a clear complexion, between light and dark, lively eyes, and for long years a keen vision, which however deserted me, contrary to my hopes, after I reached my sixtieth birthday, and forced me, to my great annoyance, to resort to glasses. Although I had previously enjoyed perfect health, old age brought with it the usual array of discomforts.
My parents were honorable folk, Florentine in their origin, of medium fortune, or, I may as well admit it, in a condition verging upon poverty. They had been expelled from their native city, and consequently I was born in exile, at Arezzo, in the year 1304 of this latter age, which begins with Christ’s birth, July the 20th, on a Monday, at dawn. … In my familiar associations with kings and princes, and in my friendship with noble personages, my good fortune has been such as to excite envy. But it is the cruel fate of those who are growing old that they can commonly only weep for friends who have passed away. The greatest kings of this age have loved and courted me. They may know why; I certainly do not. With some of them I was on such terms that they seemed in a certain sense my guests rather than I theirs; their lofty position in no way embarrassing me, but, on the contrary, bringing with it many advantages. I fled, however, from many of those to whom I was greatly attached; and such was my innate longing for liberty, that I studiously avoided those whose very name seemed incompatible with the freedom that I loved.
I possessed a well-balanced rather than a keen intellect,–one prone to all kinds of good and wholesome study, but especially inclined to moral philosophy and the art of poetry. The latter, indeed, I neglected as time went on, and took delight in sacred literature. Finding in that a hidden sweetness which I had once esteemed but lightly, I came to regard the works of the poets as only amenities.
Among the many subjects which interested me, I dwelt especially upon antiquity, for our own age has always repelled me, so that, had it not been for the love of those dear to me, I should have preferred to have been born in any other period than our own. In order to forget my own time, I have constantly striven to place myself in spirit in other ages, and consequently I delighted in history. The conflicting statements troubled me, but when in doubt I accepted what appeared most probable, or yielded to the authority of the writer.
Nicolo Nicoli: A Humanist’s Passion for the Classics
(c. 1450)
Vespasiano da Bisticci
Nicolo may justly be called the father and the benefactor of all students of letters, for he gave them protection and encouragement to work, and pointed out to them the rewards which would follow. If he knew of any Greek or Latin book which was not in Florence he spared neither trouble nor cost until he should procure it; indeed, there are numberless Latin books which the city possesses through his care. He gained such high reputation amongst men of letters that Messer Leonardo sent him his Life of Cicero and pronounced him to be the censor [i.e., foremost critic] of the Latin tongue.
He was a man of upright life who favored virtue and censured vice. He collected a fine library, not regarding the cost, and was always searching for rare books. He bought all these with the wealth which his father had left, putting aside only what was necessary for his maintenance. He sold several of his farms and spent the proceeds on his library. He was a devoted Christian, who specially favored monks and friars, and was the foe of evildoers. He held his books rather for the use of others than of himself, and all lettered students of Greek or Latin would come to him to borrow books, which he would always lend. … If he heard of students going to Greece or to France or elsewhere he would give them the names of books which they lacked in Florence, and procure for them the help of Cosimo de’ Medici who would do anything for him. When it happened that he could only get the copy of a book he would copy it himself, either in current or shaped characters, all in the finest script, as may be seen in San Marco, where there are many books from his hand in one lettering or the other. He procured at his own expense the works of Tertullian and other [ancient] writers which were not in Italy. He also found an imperfect copy of Ammianus Marcellinus and wrote it out with his own hand. The De Oratore and the Brutus [by Cicero] were sent to Nicolo from Lombardy, having been brought by the envoys of Duke Filippo when they went to ask for peace in the time of Pope Martin. The book was found in a chest in a very old church; this chest had not been opened for a long time, and they found the book, a very ancient example, while searching for evidence concerning certain ancient rights. De Oratore was found broken up, and it is through the care of Nicolo that we find it perfect today. He also rediscovered many sacred works and several of Tully’s [Cicero's] orations.
Through Nicolo Florence acquired many fine works of sculpture, of which he had great knowledge as well as of painting. A complete copy of Pliny did not exist in Florence, but when Nicolo heard that there was one in Lubeck, in Germany, he secured it by Cosimo’s aid, and thus Pliny came to Florence. All the young men he knew in Florence used to come to him for instruction in letters, and he cared for the needs of all those who wanted books or teachers. He did not seek any office in Florence [although] he was made an official in the University; many times he was selected for some governorship, but he refused them all, saying that they were food for the vultures, and he would let these feed on them. He called vultures those who went into the alehouses and devoured the poor. …
A Renaissance Oration on Human Dignity
Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola
(1486)
At last it seems to me I have come to understand why man is the most fortunate of creatures and consequently worthy of all admiration and what precisely is that rank which is his lot in the universal chain of Being–a rank to be envied not only by brutes but even by the stars and by minds beyond this world. It is a matter past faith and a wondrous one. Why should it not be? For it is on this very account that man is rightly called and judged a great miracle and a wonderful creature indeed. …
O supreme generosity of God the Father, O highest and most marvelous felicity of man! To him it is granted to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he wills. Beasts as soon as they are born (so says Lucilius) bring with them from their mother’s womb all they will ever possess. Spiritual beings, either from the beginning or soon thereafter, become what they are to be for ever and ever. On man when he came into life the Father conferred the seeds of all kinds and the germs of every way of life. Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow to maturity and bear in him their own fruit. If they be vegetative, he will be like a plant. If sensitive, he will become brutish. If rational, he will grow into a heavenly being. If intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God. And if, happy in the lot of no created thing, he withdraws into the center of his own unity, his spirit, made one with God, in the solitary darkness of God, who is set above all things, shall surpass them all. Who would not admire this our chameleon? Or who could more greatly admire aught else whatever? It is man who Asclepius of Athens, arguing from his mutability of character and from his self-transforming nature, on just grounds says was symbolized by Proteus in the mysteries. Hence those metamorphoses renowned among the Hebrews and the Pythagoreans. …
Selecting a Bride in Renaissance Florence
Alessandra Macinghi Delghi Strozzi
(1464-1465)
[April 20, 1464] … Concerning the matter of a wife [for Filippo], it appears to me that if Francesco di Messer Guglielmino Tanagli wishes to give his daughter, that it would be a fine marriage. … Now I will speak with Marco [Parenti, Alessandra's son-in-law], to see if there are other prospects that would be better. … Francesco Tanagli has a good reputation, and he has held office, not the highest, but still he has been in office. You may ask: “Why should he give her to someone in exile?” There are three reasons. First, there aren’t many young men of good family who have both virtue and property. Secondly, she has only a small dowry, 1,000 florins, which is the dowry of an artisan. … Third, I believe that he will give her away, because he has a large family and he will need help to settle them. …
[August 17, 1465] … Sunday morning I went to the first mass at S. Reparata … to see the Adimari girl, who customarily goes to that mass, and I found the Tanagli girl there. Not knowing who she was, I stood beside her. … She is very attractive, well proportioned, as large or larger than Caterina [Alessandra's daughter]. … She has a long face, and her features are not very delicate, but they aren’t like a peasant’s. From her demeanor, she does not appear to me to be indolent. … I walked behind her as we left the church, and thus I realized that she was one of the Tanagli. …
[September 13, 1465] … Marco came to me and said that he had met with Francesco Tanagli, who had spoken very coldly, so that I understand that he had changed his mind. … I believe that this is the result of the long delay in our replying to him, both yours and Marco’s. Now that this delay has angered him, and he has at hand some prospect that is more attractive. … I am very annoyed by this business. …
[Filippo Strozzi eventually married Fiametta di Donato Adimari, in 1466.]
Scandal in Renaissance Florence: The Maid is Pregnant
Bernado Machiavelli
(1475)
My wife told me that from certain signs which she had observed, our servant girl Lorenza, also called Nencia di Lazerino, had missed her period and that she appeared to be pregnant. … I told her to confront the girl alone and to use threats and persuasions to find out the truth from her. I had to go away, and upon my return in the evening, she told me that she had the girl alone in a room and that, after cajoling and threatening her, she had learned that the girl was pregnant by Niccolo di Alessandro Machiavelli. When asked how this had happened, she said that after we had returned from the country last year, on November 8, she had often gone at night through the window over the roof, and then through the little window next to the kitchen hearth to Niccolo’s house to stay with him. …
The truth was that he, Niccolo, had never had anything to do with her. Francesco had done this, and his only fault had been his failure to tell me.
In reply, I complained bitterly of his [Niccolo's] injury to me, which would have been grave in any event, but which was even worse, since he was my neighbor … and a close blood relation. [I said] that I had never done anything similar to him or his father, and that I did not understand how he could have held me in such low esteem. For both here [in Florence] and at the villa, he was often in my company and had never said anything to me so that I might prevent my house from becoming a bordello. He should also consider the nature of this affair, for this girl was not a slut but came from a good but impoverished family of Pistoia, and her father and brothers were men of some worth. I did not want the girl in my house any longer, and I had no choice but to inform Giovanni Nelli, who had given her to me, or to arrange for her father and mother to come for her. Niccolo replied that he was aware that he had injured me, but that it was Francesco who had harmed the girl, and that his error had been in not telling me. …
Classroom Rebellion: Students Berate a Renaissance Teacher
Students of Conrad Celtis
(c. 1500)
By your long and incessant scoldings, with which you frequently consume half the hour, you force us to make some reply in the name of truth. You accuse us of madness and charge that we are stupid barbarians, and you call wild beasts those whose fees support you. … This we might have borne with better grace, but for the fact that you yourself abound in the faults of which you accuse us. For what of the fact that, while you carp about us, you yourself are so torpid from dissipation that in private conversation your drowsy head droops to your elbow like a figure eight. You touch on many points in questions, but you speak neither plain argument nor cultured speech nor elegant Latin expositions; nor do you observe true coherence and order of speaking. Yet you have at hand the motto, “He teaches clearly who understands clearly.” Either you lack understanding–a shameful thing in a doctor–or you think us unworthy of your learning, which is incredible. For you certainly experience daily studious auditors, sometimes learned men, calculated to adorn you with great praise. Or you dislike the labor of lecturing, as we clearly comprehend, understand and see. In this one point you both derogate from your own reputation and seem to us all deficient. But now we have clearly expressed ourselves on that point. Wherefore, if you are ready and willing to vindicate the name and dignity of a preceptor and doctor, to fulfill your professional duties, we will be more attentive. If first, as befits you, you clear yourself of the fault you impute to us, you will make us more diligent by your diligence, which has now long been lacking, if you can conquer and overcome your dislike of study and tardiness in work. If you do less, we shall have to take more stringent measures.
A Model for Judas: Leonardo Paints The Last Supper
Giorgio Vasari
(1568)
Leonardo also executed in Milan, for the Dominicans of Santa Maria delle Grazie, a marvelous and beautiful painting of the Last Supper. Having depicted the heads of the apostles full of splendor and majesty, he deliberately left the head of Christ unfinished, convinced he would fail to give it the divine spirituality it demands. … It is said that the prior used to keep pressing Leonardo, in the most importunate way, to hurry up and finish the work, because he was puzzled by Leonardo’s habit of sometimes spending half a day at a time contemplating what he had done so far; if the prior had had his way, Leonardo would have toiled like one of the laborers hoeing in the garden and never put his brush down for a moment. Not satisfied with this, the prior then complained to the duke [Ludovico Sforza], making such a fuss that the duke was constrained to send for Leonardo. … Leonardo, knowing he was dealing with a prince of acute and discerning intelligence, was willing (as he never had been with the prior) to explain his mind at length. … He explained that men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least. … Leonardo then said that he still had two heads to paint: the head of Christ was one, and for this he was unwilling to look for any human model. … Then, he said, he had yet to do the head of Judas, and this troubled him since he did not think he could imagine the features that would form the countenance of a man who, despite all the blessings he had been given, could so cruelly steel his will to betray his own master and the creator of the world. However, added Leonardo, he would try to find a model for Judas, and if he did not succeed in doing so, why then he was not without the head of that tactless and importunate prior. The duke roared with laughter at this and said that Leonardo had every reason in the world for saying so.
Praise of Folly: Erasmus on Popular Religious Practice
Desiderius Erasmus
(1509)
To this same class of fools belong those who beguile themselves with the silly but pleasing notion that if they look upon a picture or image of St. Christopher,–that huge Polyphemus,–they will not die that day; or that he who salutes an image of St. Barbara with the proper form of address will come back from battle safe; or that one who approaches St. Erasmus on certain days with wax candles and prayers will soon be rich. They have found a new Hercules in St. George,–a sort of second Hippolytus. They seem to adore even his horse, which is scrupulously decked out with gorgeous trappings, and additional offerings are constantly being made in the hope of gaining new favors. His bronze helmet one would think half divine, the way people swear by it.
And what shall I say of those who comfortably delude themselves with imaginary pardons for their sins, and who measure the time in purgatory with an hourglass into years, months, days, and hours, with all the precision of a mathematical table? There are plenty, too, who, relying upon certain magical little certificates and prayers,–which some pious impostor devised either in fun or for the benefit of his pocket,–believe that they may procure riches, honor, future happiness, health, perpetual prosperity, long life, a lusty old age,–nay, in the end, a seat at the right hand of Christ in heaven; but as for this last, it matters not how long it be deferred: they will content themselves with the joys of heaven only when they must finally surrender the pleasures of this world, to which they lovingly cling.
The trader, the soldier, and the judge think that they can clean up the Augean stable of a lifetime, once for all, by sacrificing a single coin from their ill-gotten gains. They flatter themselves that all sorts of perjury, debauchery, drunkenness, quarrels, bloodshed, imposture, perfidy, and treason can be compounded for by contract and so adjusted that, having paid off their arrears, they can begin a new score.
How foolish, or rather how happy, are those who promise themselves more than supernal happiness if they repeat the verses of the seven holy psalms! Those magical lines are supposed to have been taught to St. Bernard by a demon, who seems to have been a wag; but he was not very clever, and, poor fellow, was frustrated in his attempt to deceive the saint. These silly things which even I, Folly, am almost ashamed of, are approved not only by the common herd but even by the teachers of religion.
How foolish, too, for religious bodies each to give preference to its particular guardian saint! Nay, each saint has his particular office allotted to him, and is addressed each in his special way: this one is called upon to alleviate toothache; that, to aid in childbirth; others, to restore a stolen article, bring rescue to the shipwrecked, or protect cattle,–and so on with the rest, who are much too numerous to mention. A few indeed among the saints are good in more than one emergency, especially the Holy Virgin, to whom the common man now attributes almost more than to her Son.
And for what, after all, do men petition the saints except for foolish things? Look at the votive offerings which cover the walls of certain churches and with which you see even the ceiling filled; do you find any one who expresses his gratitude that he has escaped Folly or because he has become a whit wiser? One perhaps was saved from drowning, another recovered when he had been run through by his enemy; another, while his fellows were fighting, ran away with expedition and success; another, on the point of being hanged, escaped, through the aid of some saintly friend of thieves, and lived to relieve a few more of those whom he believed to be overburdened with their wealth. …
These various forms of foolishness so pervade the whole life of Christians that even the priests themselves find no objection to admitting, not to say fostering, them, since they do not fail to perceive how many tidy little sums accrue to them from such sources. But what if some odious philosopher should chime in and say, as is quite true: “You will not die badly if you live well. You are redeeming your sins when you add to the sum that you contribute a hearty detestation of evil doers: then you may spare yourself tears, vigils, invocations, fasts, and all that kind of life. You may rely upon any saint to aid you when once you begin to imitate his life.”
As for the theologians, perhaps the less said the better on this gloomy and dangerous theme, since they are a style of man who show themselves exceeding supercilious and irritable unless they can heap up six hundred conclusions about you and force you to recant; and if you refuse, they promptly brand you as a heretic,–for it is their custom to terrify by their thunderings those whom they dislike. It must be confessed that no other group of fools are so reluctant to acknowledge Folly’s benefits toward them, although I have many titles to their gratitude, for I make them so in love with themselves that they seem to be happily exalted to the third heaven, whence they look down with something like pity upon all other mortals, wandering about on the earth like mere cattle. …
The Prince: Power Politics During the Italian Renaissance
Niccolo Machiavelli
(1513)
Every one understands how praiseworthy it is in a prince to keep faith, and to live uprightly and not craftily. Nevertheless we see, from what has taken place in our own days, that princes who have set little store by their word, but have known how to overreach men by their cunning, have accomplished great things, and in the end got the better of those who trusted to honest dealing.
Be it known, then, that there are two ways of contending,–one in accordance with the laws, the other by force; the first of which is proper to men, the second to beasts. But since the first method is often ineffectual, it becomes necessary to resort to the second. A prince should, therefore, understand how to use well both the man and the beast. … But inasmuch as a prince should know how to use the beast’s nature wisely, he ought of beasts to choose both the lion and the fox; for the lion cannot guard himself from the toils, nor the fox from wolves. He must therefore be a fox to discern toils, and a lion to drive off wolves.
To rely wholly on the lion is unwise; and for this reason a prudent prince neither can nor ought to keep his word when to keep it is hurtful to him and the causes which led him to pledge it are removed. If all men were good, this would not be good advice, but since they are dishonest and do not keep faith with you, you in return need not keep faith with them; and no prince was ever at a loss for plausible reasons to cloak a breach of faith. Of this numberless recent instances could be given, and it might be shown how many solemn treaties and engagements have been rendered inoperative and idle through want of faith among princes, and that he who has best known how to play the fox has had the best success.
It is necessary, indeed, to put a good color on this nature, and to be skilled in simulating and dissembling. But men are so simple, and governed so absolutely by their present needs, that he who wishes to deceive will never fail in finding willing dupes. One recent example I will not omit. Pope Alexander VI had no care or thought but how to deceive, and always found material to work on. No man ever had a more effective manner or asseverating, or made promises with more solemn protestations, or observed them less. And yet, because he understood this side of human nature, his frauds always succeeded. …
In his efforts to aggrandize his son the duke [Caesar Borgia], Alexander VI had to face many difficulties, both immediate and remote. In the first place, he saw no way to make him ruler of any state which did not belong to the Church. Yet, if he sought to take for him a state of the Church, he knew that the duke of Milan and the Venetians would withhold their consent, Faenza and Rimini [towns in the province of Romagna] being already under the protection of the latter. Further, he saw that the forces of Italy, and those more especially of which he might have availed himself, were in the hands of men who had reason to fear his aggrandizement,– that is, of the Orsini, the Colonnesi [Roman noble families] and their followers. These, therefore, he could not trust. …
And since this part of his [Caesar Borgia's] conduct merits both attention and imitation, I shall not pass it over in silence. After the duke had taken Romagna, finding that it had been ruled by feeble lords, who thought more of plundering than of governing their subjects,–which gave them more cause for division than for union, so that the country was overrun with robbery, tumult, and every kind of outrage,–he judged it necessary, with a view to rendering it peaceful, and obedient to his authority, to provide it with a good government. Accordingly he set over it Messer Remiro d’ Orco, a stern and prompt ruler, who, being intrusted with the fullest powers, in a very short time, and with much credit to himself, restored it to tranquility and order. But afterwards the duke, apprehending that such unlimited authority might become odious, decided that it was no longer needed, and established [at] the center of the province a civil tribunal, with an excellent president, in which every town was represented by its advocate. And knowing that past severities had generated ill feeling against himself, in order to purge the minds of the people and gain their good will, he sought to show them that any cruelty which had been done had not originated with him, but in the harsh disposition of this minister. Availing himself of the pretext which this afforded, he one morning caused Remiro to be beheaded, and exposed in the market place of Cesena with a block and bloody ax by his side. The barbarity of this spectacle at once astounded and satisfied the populace.
Utopia: A Question over Diplomatic Advice
Thomas More
(1516)
“Do not you think that if I were about any king, proposing good laws to him, and endeavoring to root out all the cursed seeds of evil that I found in him, I should either be turned out of his court or at least be laughed at for my pains? For instance, what could it signify if I were about the King of France, and were called into his Cabinet Council, where several wise men, in his hearing, were proposing many expedients, as by what arts and practices Milan may be kept, and Naples, that had so oft slipped out of their hands, recovered; how the Venetians, and after them the rest of Italy, may be subdued; and then how Flanders, Brabant, and all Burgundy, and some other kingdoms which he has swallowed already in his designs, may be added to his empire. One proposes a league with the Venetians, to be kept as long as he finds his account in it, and that he ought to communicate councils with them, and give them some share of the spoil, till his success makes him need or fear them less, and then it will be easily taken out of their hands. Another proposes the hiring the Germans, and the securing the Switzers by pensions. Another proposes the gaining the Emperor by money, which is omnipotent with him. Another proposes a peace with the King of Aragon, and, in order to cement it, the yielding up the King of Navarre’s pretensions. Another thinks the Prince of Castile is to be wrought on, by the hope of an alliance; and that some of his courtiers are to be gained to the French faction by pensions. The hardest point of all is what to do with England: a treaty of peace is to be set on foot, and if their alliance is not to be depended on, yet it is to be made as firm as possible; and they are to be called friends, but suspected as enemies: therefore the Scots are to be kept in readiness, to be let loose upon England on every occasion: and some banished nobleman is to be supported underhand (for by the league it cannot be done avowedly) who had a pretension to the crown, by which means that suspected prince may be kept in awe.
“Now when things are in so great a fermentation, and so many gallant men are joining councils, how to carry on the war, if so mean a man as I should stand up, and wish them to change all their councils, to let Italy alone, and stay at home, since the Kingdom of France was indeed greater than could be well governed by one man; that therefore he ought not to think of adding others to it: and if after this, I should propose to them the resolutions of the Achorians, a people that lie on the southeast of Utopia, who long ago engaged in war, in order to add to the dominions of their prince another kingdom, to which he had some pretensions by an ancient alliance. This they conquered, but found that the trouble of keeping it was equal to that by which it was gained; that the conquered people were always either in rebellion or exposed to foreign invasions, while they were obliged to be incessantly at war, either for or against them, and consequently could never disband their army; that in the meantime they were oppressed with taxes, their money went out of the kingdom, their blood was spilt for the glory of their King, without procuring the least advantage to the people, who received not the smallest benefit from it even in time of peace; and that their manners being corrupted by a long war, robbery and murders everywhere abounded, and their laws fell into contempt; while their King, distracted with the care of two kingdoms, was the less able to apply his mind to the interests of either.
“When they saw this, and that there would be no end to these evils, they by joint councils made an humble address to their King, desiring him to choose which of the two kingdoms he had the greatest mind to keep, since he could not hold both; for they were too great a people to be governed by a divided king, since no man would willingly have a groom that should be in common between him and another. Upon which the good prince was forced to quit his new kingdom to one of his friends (who was not long after dethroned), and to be contented with his old one. To this I would add that after all those warlike attempts, the vast confusions, and the consumption both of treasure and of people that must follow them; perhaps upon some misfortune, they might be forced to throw up all at last; therefore it seemed much more eligible that the King should improve his ancient kingdom all he could, and make it flourish as much as possible; that he should love his people, and be beloved of them; that he should live among them, govern them gently, and let other kingdoms alone, since that which had fallen to his share was big enough, if not too big for him. Pray how do you think would such a speech as this be heard?”
“I confess,” said I, “I think not very well.”
Original Documents - The Reformation
Instructions for Selling Indulgences
Albrecht of Brandenburg
(1517)
Here follow the four principal graces and privileges, which are granted by the apostolic bull, of which each may be obtained without the other. In the matter of these four privileges preachers shall take pains to commend each to believers with the greatest care, and, in-so-far as in their power lies, to explain the same.
The first grace is the complete remission of all sins; and nothing greater than this can be named, since man who lives in sin and forfeits the favor of God, obtains complete remission by these means and once more enjoys God’s favor: moreover, through this remission of sins the punishment which one is obliged to undergo in Purgatory on account of the affront to the divine Majesty, is all remitted, and the pains of Purgatory completely blotted out. And although nothing is precious enough to be given in exchange for such a grace,–since it is the free gift of God and a grace beyond price,–yet in order that Christian believers may be the more easily induced to procure the same, we establish the following rules, to wit:
In the first place every one who is contrite in heart, and has made oral confession, or at all events has the intention of confessing at a suitable time, shall visit at least the seven churches indicated for this purpose, that is to say, those in which the papal arms are displayed, and in each church shall say devoutly five Paternosters and five Ave Marias in honor of the five wounds of our Lord Jesus Christ, whereby our salvation is won, or one Miserere [the prayer beginning "Lord have mercy"], which Psalm is particularly well adapted for obtaining forgiveness of sins. …
Respecting, now, the contribution to the chest, for the building of the said church of the chief of the apostles, the penitentiaries and confessors, after they have explained to those making confession the full remission and privileges, shall ask of them, for how much money or other temporal goods they would conscientiously go without the said most complete remission and privileges; and this shall be done in order that hereafter they may be brought the more easily to contribute. And because the conditions and occupations of men are so manifold and diverse that we cannot consider them individually, and impose specific rates accordingly, we have therefore concluded that the rates should be determined according to the recognized classes of persons.
Kings and Queens and their offspring, archbishops and bishops, and other great rulers as well, provided they seek the places where the cross is raised, or otherwise present themselves, shall pay at least five and twenty Rhenish guilders in gold. Abbots and the great prelates of Cathedral churches, counts, barons, and others of the higher nobility, together with their consorts, shall pay for each letter of indulgence ten such guilders. Other lesser prelates and nobles, as also the rectors of celebrated places, and all others, who, either from permanent incomes or merchandise, or otherwise, enjoy a total yearly revenue of five hundred gold guilders, shall pay six such guilders. Other citizens and tradespeople and artisans, who have individual incomes and families of their own, shall pay one such guilder; others of less means only a half. And where it is impossible to adhere rigidly to the schedule above indicated, then we declare that the said kings, bishops, dukes, abbots, prelates, counts, barons, members of the higher nobility and rectors, together with all others above mentioned, shall place or caused to be placed in the chest a sum in accordance with the dictates of sound reason, proportionate to their magnificence or generosity, after they have listened to the advice and council of the subcommissioners and penitentiaries and of their confessors, in order that they may fully obtain the grace and privileges. All other persons are confided to the discretion of the confessors and penitentiaries, who should have ever in view the advancement of this building, and should urge their penitents to a freer contribution, but should let no one go away without some portion of grace, because the happiness of Christian believers is here concerned not less than the interests of the building. And those that have no money, they shall supply their contribution with prayer and fasting; for the Kingdom of Heaven should be open to the poor not less than to the rich.
And although a married woman may not dispose of the husband’s goods against his will, yet she shall be able to contribute in this instance against the will of her husband of her dowry or of her own private property, which has come to her in a regular manner. Where she has no such possessions, or is prevented by her husband, she shall then supply such contribution with prayer; and the same we wish to have understood concerning sons who still remain under parental control. …
The second signal grace is a confessional letter containing the most extraordinarily comforting and hitherto unheard of privileges, and which also retains its virtue even after our bull expires at the end of eight years, since the bull says: “they shall be participators now and for ever.” The meaning of the same preachers and confessors shall explain and bring unto all possible prominence; for there will be granted in the confessional letter, to those who buy: first, the power to choose a qualified confessor, even a monk from the mendicant orders, who shall absolve them first and foremost, with the consent of the persons involved, from all censures by whomsoever imposed; in the second place, from each and every crime, even the greatest, and as well from those reserved to the apostolic see, once in a lifetime and in the hour of death; third, in those cases which are not reserved, as often as necessary; fourth, the chosen confessor may grant him complete forgiveness of all sins once in life, and at the hour of death, as often as it may seem at hand, although death ensue not; and, fifth, transform all kinds of vows, excepting alone those solemnly taken, into other works of piety (as when one has vowed to perform the journey to the Holy Land, or to visit the holy Apostles at Rome, to make a pilgrimage to St. James at Compostella, to become a monk, or to take a vow of chastity); sixth, the confessor may administer to him the sacrament of the altar at all seasons, except on Easter day, and in the hour of death. …
The third most important grace is the participation in all the possessions of the church universal, which consists herein, that contributors toward the said building, together with their deceased relations, who have departed this world in a state of grace, shall from now and for eternity, be partakers in all petitions, intercessions, alms, fastings, prayers, in each and every pilgrimage, even those to the Holy Land; furthermore, in the stations at Rome, in the masses canonical hours, flagellations, and all other spiritual goods which have been brought forth or which shall be brought forth by the universal, most holy church militant or by any of its members. Believers will become participants in all these things who purchase confessional letters. Preachers and confessors must insist with great perseverance upon these advantages, and persuade believers that they should not neglect to acquire these along with their confessional letter.
We also declare that in order to acquire these two most important graces, it is not necessary to make confession, or to visit the churches and altars, but merely to purchase the confessional letter. …
The fourth distinctive grace is for those souls which are in purgatory, and is the complete remission of all sins, which remission the pope brings to pass through his intercession to the advantage of said souls, in this wise; that the same contribution shall be placed in the chest by a living person as one would make for himself. It is our wish, however, that our subcommissioners should modify the regulations regarding contributions of this kind which are given for the dead, and that they should use their judgment in all other cases, where in their opinion modifications are desirable. It is furthermore not necessary that the persons who place their contributions in the chest for the dead should be contrite in heart and have orally confessed, since this grace is based simply on the state of grace in which the dead departed, and on the contribution of the living, as is evident from the text of the bull. Moreover, preachers shall exert themselves to give this grace the widest publicity, since through the same, help will surely come to departed souls, and the construction of the Church of St. Peter will be abundantly promoted at the same time. …
“Ninety-five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences”
Martin Luther
(1517)
1. Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ in saying “Repent ye” (poenitentiam agite) etc., intended that the whole life of believers should be penitence (poenitentia).
2. This word cannot be understood as sacramental penance (poenitentia), that is, of the confession and satisfaction which are performed under the ministry of priests.
3. It does not, however, refer solely to inward penitence (poenitentia); nay such inward penitence is naught, unless it outwardly produces various mortifications of the flesh.
4. The penalty (poena) thus continues as long as the hatred of self (that is, true inward penitence); namely, till our entrance into the kingdom of heaven.
5. The Pope has neither the will nor the power to remit any penalties except those which he has imposed by his own authority, or by that of the canons.
6. The Pope has no power to remit any guilt, except by declaring and warranting it to have been remitted by God; or at most by remitting cases reserved for himself; in which cases, if his power were despised, guilt would certainly remain.
7. Certainly God remits no man’s guilt without at the same time subjecting him, humbled in all things, to the authority of his representative the priest.
8. The penitential canons are imposed only on the living, and no burden ought to be imposed on the dying, according to them.
9. Hence, the Holy Spirit acting in the Pope does well for us in that, in his decrees, he always makes exception of the article of death and of necessity.
10. Those priests act unlearnedly and wrongly who, in the case of the dying, reserve the canonical penances for purgatory. …
20. Therefore the Pope, when he speaks of the plenary remission of all penalties, does not mean really of all, but only of those imposed by himself.
21. Thus those preachers of indulgences are in error who say that by the indulgences of the Pope a man is freed and saved from all punishment.
22. For in fact he remits to souls in purgatory no penalty which they would have had to pay in this life according to the canons.
23. If any entire remission of all penalties can be granted to any one it is certain that it is granted to none but the most perfect, that is to very few.
24. Hence, the greater part of the people must needs be deceived by this indiscriminate and high-sounding promise of release from penalties. …
26. The Pope acts most rightly in granting remission to souls not by the power of the keys (which is of no avail in this case) but by the way of intercession.
27. They preach man who say that the soul flies out of Purgatory as soon as the money thrown into the chest rattles.[1]
28. It is certain that, when the money rattles in the chest, avarice and gain may be increased, but the effect of the intercession of the Church depends on the will of God alone.
29. Who knows whether all the souls in purgatory desire to be redeemed from it–witness the story told of Saints Severinus and Paschal?
30. No man is sure of the reality of his own contrition, much less of the attainment of plenary remission.
31. Rare as is a true penitent, so rare is one who truly buys indulgences–that is to say, most rare.
32. Those who believe that, through letters of pardon, they are made sure of their own salvation will be eternally damned along with their teachers.
33. We must especially beware of those who say that these pardons from the Pope are that inestimable gift of God by which man is reconciled to God.
34. For the grace conveyed by these pardons has respect only to the penalties of sacramental satisfaction, which are of human appointment.
35. They preach no Christian doctrine who teach that contrition is not necessary for those who buy souls [out of purgatory] or buy confessional licenses.
36. Every Christian who feels true compunction has of right plenary remission of punishment and guilt even without letters of pardon.
37. Every true Christian, whether living or dead, has a share in all the benefits of Christ and of the Church, given him by God, even without letters of pardon.
38. The remission, however, imparted by the Pope is by no means to be despised, since it is, as I have said, a declaration of the divine remission.
39. It is a most difficult thing, even for the most learned theologians, to exalt at the same time in the eyes of the people the ample effect of pardons and the necessity of true contrition.
40. True contrition seeks and loves punishment; while the ampleness of pardons relaxes it, and causes men to hate it, or at least gives occasion for them to do so.
41. Apostolic pardons ought to be proclaimed with caution, lest the people should falsely suppose that they are placed before other good works of charity.
42. Christians should be taught that it is not the wish of the Pope that the buying of pardons should be in any way compared to works of mercy.
43. Christians should be taught that he who gives to a poor man, or lends to a needy man, does better than if he bought pardons.
44. Because by works of charity, charity increases, and the man becomes better; while by means of pardons, he does not become better, but only freer from punishment.
45. Christians should be taught that he who sees any one in need, and, passing him by, gives money for pardons, is not purchasing for himself the indulgences of the Pope but the anger of God.
46. Christians should be taught that, unless they have superfluous wealth, they are bound to keep what is necessary for the use of their own households, and by no means to lavish it on pardons.
47. Christians should be taught that while they are free to buy pardons they are not commanded to do so.
48. Christians should be taught that the Pope, in granting pardons, has both more need and more desire that devout prayer should be made for him than that money should be readily paid.
49. Christians should be taught that the Pope’s pardons are useful if they do not put their trust in them, but most hurtful if through them they lose the fear of God.
50. Christians should be taught that, if the Pope were acquainted with the exactions of the Preachers of pardons, he would prefer that the Basilica of St. Peter should be burnt to ashes rather than that it should be built up with the skin, flesh, and bones of his sheep.
51. Christians should be taught that as it would be the duty so it would be the wish of the Pope even to sell, if necessary, the Basilica of St. Peter, and to give of his own money to very many of those from whom the preachers of pardons extract money.
52. Vain is the hope of salvation through letters of pardon, even if a commissary–nay, the Pope himself–were to pledge his own soul for them.
53. They were enemies of Christ and of the Pope who, in order that pardons may be preached, condemn the word of God to utter silence in other churches.
54. Wrong is done to the Word of God when, in the same sermon, an equal or longer time is spent on pardons than on it.
55. The mind of the Pope necessarily is that, if pardons, which are a very small matter, are celebrated with single bells, single processions, and single ceremonies, the Gospel, which is a very great matter, should be preached with a hundred bells, a hundred processions, and a hundred ceremonies.
56. The treasures of the Church, whence the Pope grants indulgences, are neither sufficiently named nor known among the people of Christ.
57. It is clear that they are at least not temporal treasures, for these are not so readily lavished, but only accumulated, by many of the preachers.
58. Nor are they the merits of Christ and of the saints, for these, independently of the Pope, are always working grace to the inner man, and the cross, death, and hell to the outer man….
67. Those indulgences, which the preachers loudly proclaim to be the greatest graces, are seen to be truly such as regards the promotion of gain.
68. Yet they are in reality most insignificant when compared to the grace of God and the piety of the cross. …
75. To think that the Papal pardons have such power that they could absolve a man even if–by an impossibility–he had violated the Mother of God, is madness.
76. We affirm on the contrary that Papal pardons cannot take away even the least of venial sins, as regards its guilt.
77. The saying that, even if St. Peter were now Pope, he could grant no greater graces, is blasphemy against St. Peter and the Pope.
78. We affirm on the contrary that both he and any other Pope has greater graces to grant, namely, the Gospel, powers, gifts of healing, etc. (1 Cor. xii.)
79. To say that the cross set up among the insignia of the Papal arms is of equal power with the cross of Christ, is blasphemy.
80. Those bishops, priests and theologians who allow such discourses to have currency among the people will have to render an account.
81. This license in the preaching of pardons makes it no easy thing, even for learned men, to protect the reverence due to the Pope against the calumnies, or, at all events, the keen questionings of the laity.
82. As for instance: Why does not the Pope empty purgatory for the sake of most holy charity and of the supreme necessity of souls–this being the most just of all reasons–if he redeems an infinite number of souls for the sake of that most fatal thing, money, to be spent on building a basilica–this being a very slight reason?
83. Again; why do funeral masses and anniversary masses for the deceased continue, and why does not the Pope return, or permit the withdrawal of, the funds bequeathed for this purpose, since it is a wrong to pray for those who are already redeemed?
84. Again; what is this new kindness of God and the Pope, in that, for money’s sake, they permit an impious man and an enemy of God to redeem a pious soul which loves God, and yet do not redeem that same pious and beloved soul out of free charity on account of its own need?
85. Again; why is it that the penitential canons, long since abrogated and dead in themselves, in very fact and not only by usage, are yet still redeemed with money, through the granting of indulgences, as if they were full of life?
86. Again; why does not the Pope, whose riches are at this day more ample than those of the wealthiest of the wealthy, build the single Basilica of St. Peter with his own money rather than with that of poor believers?
87. Again; what does the Pope remit or impart to those who through perfect contrition have a right to plenary remission and participation?
88. Again; what greater good could the Church receive than if the Pope, instead of once, as he does now, were to bestow these remissions and participations a hundred times a day on any one of the faithful?
89. Since it is the salvation of souls, rather than money, that the Pope seeks by his pardons, why does he suspend the letters and pardons granted long ago, since they are equally efficacious? …
91. If all these pardons were preached according to the spirit and mind of the Pope, all these questions would be resolved with ease; nay, would not exist. …
Pastor Luther Confronts His Flock
Martin Luther
(1528)
The sermon on the 8th of November, 1528, was on the lord who forgave his servant: This lord, said Luther, is a type of the Kingdom of God. The servant was not forgiven because he had forgiven his fellow servant. On the contrary he received forgiveness before he had done anything whatever about his fellow servant. From this we see that there are two kinds of forgiveness. The first is that which we receive from God; the second is that which we exercise by bearing no ill will to any upon earth. But we must not overlook the two administrations, the civil and the spiritual, because the prince cannot and should not forgive. He has a different administration than Christ, who rules over crushed and broken hearts. The Kaiser rules over scoundrels who do not recognize their sins and mock and carry their heads high. That is why the emperor carries a sword, a sign of blood and not of peace. But Christ’s kingdom is for the troubled conscience. He says, “I do not ask of you a penny, only this, that you do the same for your neighbor.” And the lord in the parable does not tell the servant to found a monastery, but simply that he should have mercy on his fellow servants.
But now what shall I say to you Wittenbergers? It would be better that I preach to you the Sachsenspiegel [the imperial law], because you want to be Christians while still practicing usury, robbing and stealing. How do people who are so sunk in sins expect to receive forgiveness? The sword of the emperor really applies here, but my sermon is for crushed hearts who feel their sins and have no peace. Enough for this gospel.
I understand that this is the week for the church collection, and many of you do not want to give a thing. You ungrateful people should be ashamed of yourselves. You Wittenbergers have been relieved of schools and hospitals, which have been taken over by the common chest, and now you want to know why you are asked to give four pennies. They are for the ministers, schoolteachers, and sacristans. The first labor for your salvation, preach to you the precious treasure of the gospel, administer the sacraments, and visit you at great personal risk in the plague. The second train children to be good magistrates, judges, and ministers. The third care for the poor. So far the common chest has cared for these, and now that you are asked to give four miserable pennies you are up in arms. What does this mean if not that you do not want the gospel preached, the children taught, and the poor helped? I am not saying this for myself. I receive nothing from you. I am the prince’s beggar. But I am sorry I ever freed you from the tyrants and the papists. You ungrateful beasts, you are not worthy of the treasure of the gospel. If you don’t improve, I will stop preaching rather than cast pearls before swine.
And now another point: couples to be blessed by the curate before a wedding should come early. There are stated hours: in summer, mornings at eight and afternoons at three; in winter, mornings at nine and afternoons at two. If you come later, I will bless you myself, and you won’t thank me for it. And the invited guests should prepare themselves in good time for the wedding and let not Miss Goose wait for Mrs. Duck.
Luther Rages “Against the Murdering and Robbing Bands of Peasants”
Martin Luther
(1525)
In my preceding pamphlet [on the "Twelve Articles"] I had no occasion to condemn the peasants, because they promised to yield to law and better instruction, as Christ also demands (Matt. vii. 1). But before I can turn around, they go out and appeal to force, in spite of their promises, and rob and pillage and act like mad dogs. From this it is quite apparent what they had in their false minds, and that what they put forth under the name of the gospel in the “Twelve Articles” was all vain pretense. In short, they practice mere devil’s work, and it is the arch-devil himself who reigns at Muhlhausen,[1] indulging in nothing but robbery, murder, and bloodshed; as Christ says of the devil in John viii. 44, “he was a murderer from the beginning.” Since, therefore, those peasants and miserable wretches allow themselves to be led astray and act differently from what they declared, I likewise must write differently concerning them; and first bring their sins before their eyes, as God commands (Isa. lviii. 1; Ezek. ii. 7), whether perchance some of them may come to their senses; and, further, I would instruct those in authority how to conduct themselves in this matter.
With threefold horrible sins against God and men have these peasants loaded themselves, for which they have deserved a manifold death of body and soul.
First, they have sworn to their true and gracious rulers to be submissive and obedient, in accord with God’s command. … But since they have deliberately and sacrilegiously abandoned their obedience, and in addition have dared to oppose their lords, they have thereby forfeited body and soul, as perfidious, perjured, lying, disobedient wretches and scoundrels are wont to do. …
Second, they cause uproar and sacrilegiously rob and pillage monasteries and castles that do not belong to them, for which, like public highwaymen and murderers, they deserve the twofold death of body and soul. It is right and lawful to slay at the first opportunity a rebellious person, who is known as such, for he is already under God’s and the emperor’s ban. Every man is at once judge and executioner of a public rebel; just as, when a fire starts, he who can extinguish it first is the best fellow. Rebellion is not simply vile murder, but is like a great fire that kindles and devastates a country; it fills the land with murder and bloodshed, makes widows and orphans, and destroys everything, like the greatest calamity. Therefore, whosoever can, should smite, strangle, and stab, secretly or publicly, and should remember that there is nothing more poisonous, pernicious, and devilish than a rebellious man. Just as one must slay a mad dog, so, if you do not fight the rebels, they will fight you, and the whole country with you.
Third, they cloak their frightful and revolting sins with the gospel, call themselves Christian brethren, swear allegiance, and compel people to join them in such abominations. Thereby they become the greatest blasphemers and violators of God’s holy name, and serve and honor the devil under the semblance of the gospel, so that they have ten times deserved death of body and soul, for never have I heard of uglier sins. And I believe also that the devil foresees the judgment day, that he undertakes such an unheard-of measure; as if he said, “It is the last and therefore it shall be the worst; I’ll stir up the dregs and knock the very bottom out.” May the Lord restrain him! Lo, how mighty a prince is the devil, how he holds the world in his hands and can put it to confusion: who else could so soon capture so many thousands of peasants, lead them astray, blind and deceive them, stir them to revolt, and make them the willing executioners of his malice. …
And should the peasants prevail (which God forbid!),–for all things are possible to God, and we know not but that he is preparing for the judgment day, which cannot be far distant, and may purpose to destroy, by means of the devil, all order and authority and throw the world into wild chaos,–yet surely they who are found, sword in hand, shall perish in the wreck with clear consciences, leaving to the devil the kingdom of this world and receiving instead the eternal kingdom. For we are come upon such strange times that a prince may more easily win heaven by the shedding of blood than others by prayers.
Institutes: Calvin on Predestination and the Elect
John Calvin
(1539)
Therefore we say that the Scripture shows that God, by His eternal and immutable counsel once for all determined both those whom He desired one day to admit to salvation and those whom He would give back to destruction. We affirm that this counsel as to the elect is founded upon His gratuitous mercy, without any respect to human merit; but to those whom He had handed over to damnation, by His just and blameless though incomprehensible judgment, the way of life is closed.
In the case of the elect we regard calling as an evidence of election, and justification another token of its manifestation, until they arrive in glory, where its fulness shall be found. Just as God seals His elect by calling and justification, so by shutting out the rejected ones either from the knowledge of His name or the sanctification of His spirit He makes known to them the judgment that awaits them.
Religious Law and Order in Calvin’s Geneva
John Calvin
(1537)
Our Lord established excommunication as a means of correction and discipline, by which those who led a disordered life unworthy of a Christian, and who despised to mend their ways and return to the strait way after they had been admonished, should be expelled from the body of the church and cut off as rotten members until they come to themselves and acknowledge their fault. … We have an example given by St. Paul (1 Tim. i and 1 Cor. v), in a solemn warning that we should not keep company with one who is called a Christian but who is, none the less, a fornicator, covetous, an idolater, a railer, a drunkard, or an extortioner. So if there be in us any fear of God, this ordinance should be enforced in our Church.
To accomplish this we have determined to petition you [i.e. the town council] to establish and choose, according to your good pleasure, certain persons [namely, the elders] of upright life and good repute among all the faithful, likewise constant and not easy to corrupt, who shall be assigned and distributed in all parts of the town and have an eye on the life and conduct of every individual. If one of these see any obvious vice which is to be reprehended, he shall bring this to the attention of some one of the ministers, who shall admonish whoever it may be who is at fault and exhort him in a brotherly way to correct his ways. If it is apparent that such remonstrances do no good, he shall be warned that his obstinacy will be reported to the church. Then if he repents, there is in that alone excellent fruit of this form of discipline. If he will not listen to warnings, it shall be time for the minister, being informed by those who have the matter in charge, to declare publicly to the congregation the efforts which have been made to bring the sinner to amend, and how all has been in vain.
Should it appear that he proposes to persevere in his hardness of heart, it shall be time to excommunicate him; that is to say, that the offender shall be regarded as cast out from the companionship of Christians and left in the power of the devil for his temporal confusion, until he shall give good proofs of penitence and amendment. In sign of his casting out he shall be excluded from the communion, and the faithful shall be forbidden to hold familiar converse with him. Nevertheless he shall not omit to attend the sermons in order to receive instruction, so that it may be seen whether it shall please the Lord to turn his heart to the right way.
The offenses to be corrected in this manner are those named by St. Paul above, and others like them. When others than the said deputies–for example, neighbors or relatives–shall first have knowledge of such offenses, they may make the necessary remonstrances themselves. If they accomplish nothing, then they shall notify the deputies to do their duty.
This then is the manner in which it would seem expedient to us to introduce excommunication into our Church and maintain it in its full force; for beyond this form of correction the Church does not go. But should there be insolent persons, abandoned to all perversity, who only laugh when they are excommunicated and do not mind living and dying in that condition of rejection, it shall be your affair to determine whether you should long suffer such contempt and mocking of God to pass unpunished. …
If those who agree with us in faith should be punished by excommunication for their offenses, how much more should the Church refuse to tolerate those who oppose us in religion? The remedy that we have thought of is to petition you to require all the inhabitants of your city to make a confession and give an account of their faith, so that you may know who agree with the gospel and who, on the contrary, would prefer the kingdom of the pope to the kingdom of Jesus Christ.
The Trial of Michael Servetus in Calvin’s Geneva
Nicholas de la Fontaine
(1553)
Nicholas de la Fontaine asserts that he has instituted proceedings against Michael Servetus, and on this account he has allowed himself to be held prisoner in criminal process.
1. In the first place that about twenty-four years ago the defendant commenced to annoy the churches of Germany with his errors and heresies, and was condemned and took to flight in order to escape the punishment prepared for him.
2. Item, that on or about this time he printed a wretched book, which has infected many people.
3. Item, that since that time he has not ceased by all means in his power to scatter his poison, as much by his construction of biblical text, as by certain annotations which he has made upon Ptolemy.
4. Item, that since that time he has printed in secrecy another book containing endless blasphemies.
5. Item, that while detained in prison in the city of Vienne [in France], when he saw that they were willing to pardon him on condition of his recanting, he found means to escape from prison.
Said Nicholas demands that said Servetus be examined upon all these points.
And since he is able to evade the question by pretending that his blasphemies and heresies are nought else than good doctrine, said Nicholas proposes certain articles upon which he demands said heretic be examined.
6. To wit, whether he has not written and falsely taught and published that to believe that in a single essence of God there are three distinct persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, is to create four phantoms, which cannot and ought not to be imagined.
7. Item, that to put such distinction into the essence of God is to cause God to be divided into three parts, and that this is a threeheaded devil, like to Cerberus, whom the ancient poets have called the dog of hell, a monster, and things equally injurious. …
9. Item, whether he does not say that our Lord Jesus Christ is not the Son of God, except in so much as he was conceived of the Holy Ghost in the womb of the virgin Mary.
10. Item, that those who believe Jesus Christ to have been the word of God the Father, engendered through all eternity, have a scheme of redemption which is fanciful and of the nature of sorcery.
11. Item, that Jesus Christ is God, insomuch as God has caused him to be such. …
27. Item, that the soul of man is mortal, and that the only thing which is immortal is an elementary breath, which is the substance that Jesus Christ now possesses in heaven and which is also the elementary and divine and incorruptible substance of the Holy Ghost. …
32. Item, that the baptism of little children is an invention of the Devil, an infernal falsehood tending to the destruction of all Christianity. …
37. Item, that in the person of M. Calvin, minister of the word of God in the Church of Geneva, he has defamed with printed book the doctrine which he preached, uttering all the injurious and blasphemous things which it is possible to invent. …
The Council of Trent and Catholic Reformation
Acts of the Council of Trent
(1563)
The universal Church has always understood that the complete confession of sins was instituted by the Lord, and is of divine right necessary for all who have fallen into sin after baptism; because our Lord Jesus Christ, when about to ascend from earth to heaven, left priests, his own vicars, as leaders and judges, before whom all the mortal offenses into which the faithful of Christ may have fallen should be carried, in order that, in accordance with the power of the keys, they may pronounce the sentence of forgiveness or of retention of sins. For it is manifest that priests could not have exercised this judgment without knowledge of the case….
This holy Council enjoins on all bishops and others who are charged with teaching, that they instruct the faithful diligently concerning the intercession and invocation of saints, the honor paid to relics, and the legitimate use of images. Let them teach that the saints, who reign together with Christ, offer up their own prayers to God for men; that it is good and useful suppliantly to invoke them, and to have recourse to their prayers and aid in obtaining benefits from God, through his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who is our sole Redeemer and Saviour; and that those persons think impiously who deny that the saints, who enjoy eternal happiness in heaven, are to be invoked; or who assert that the saints do not pray for men, or that the invocation of them to pray for each of us individually is idolatry; or who declare that it is repugnant to the word of God, and opposed to the honor of the “one mediator of God and men, Christ Jesus,” or that it is foolish to supplicate, orally or mentally, those who reign in heaven. …
If any one saith that the New Testament does not provide for a distinct, visible priesthood; or that this priesthood has not any power of consecrating and offering up the true body and blood of the Lord, and of forgiving and retaining sins, but is only an office and bare ministry of preaching the gospel; or that those who do not preach are not priests at all; let him be anathema. …
If any one saith that by sacred ordination the Holy Ghost is not given, and that vainly therefore do the bishops say, “Receive ye the Holy Ghost”; or that a character is not imprinted by that ordination; or that he who has once been a priest can again become a layman; let him be anathema. …
If any one saith that in the Catholic Church there is not a hierarchy instituted by divine ordination, consisting of bishops, priests, and ministers; let him be anathema.
If any one saith that the sacraments of the new law were not all instituted by Jesus Christ, our Lord; or that they are more or less than seven, to wit, baptism, confirmation, the eucharist, penance, extreme unction, orders, and matrimony; or even that any one of these seven is not truly and properly a sacrament; let him be anathema. …
In order that the faithful may approach and receive the sacraments with greater reverence and devotion of mind, this Holy Council enjoins on all bishops that, not only when they are themselves about to administer them to the people they shall first explain, in a manner suited to the capacity of those who receive them, the efficacy and use of those sacraments, but they shall endeavor that the same be done piously and prudently by every parish priest; and this even in the vernacular tongue, if need be, and if it can be conveniently done.
Such instruction shall be given in accordance with the form which will be prescribed for each of the sacraments by this holy Council in a catechism, which the bishops shall take care to have faithfully translated into the vulgar tongue, and to have expounded to the people by all parish priests. They shall also explain in the said vulgar tongue, during the solemnization of mass, or the celebration of the divine offices, on all festivals or solemnities, the sacred oracles and the maxims of salvation; and, setting aside all unprofitable questions, they shall endeavor to impress them on the hearts of all, and to instruct their hearers in the law of the Lord. …
It is to be desired that those who undertake the office of bishop should understand what their portion is, and comprehend that they are called, not to their own convenience, not to riches or luxury, but to labors and cares, for the glory of God. For it is not to be doubted that the rest of the faithful also will be more easily excited to religion and innocence if they shall see those who are set over them not fixing their thoughts on the things of this world, but on the salvation of souls and on their heavenly country. Wherefore this holy Council, being minded that these things are of the greatest importance towards restoring ecclesiastical discipline, admonishes all bishops that, often mediating thereon, they show themselves conformable to their office by their actual deeds and the actions of their lives; which is a kind of perpetual sermon; but, above all, that they so order their whole conversation that others may thence be able to derive examples of frugality, modesty, continency, and of that holy humility which so much commends us to God.
Wherefore, after the example of our fathers in the Council of Carthage, this Council not only orders that bishops be content with modest furniture, and a frugal table and diet, but that they also give heed that in the rest of their manner of living, and in their whole house, there be nothing seen which is alien to this holy institution, and which does not manifest simplicity, zeal toward God, and a contempt of vanities.
It strictly forbids them, moreover, to strive to enrich their own kindred or domestics out of the revenues of the Church; seeing that even the canons of the apostles forbid them to give to their kindred the property of the Church, which belongs to God; but if their kindred be poor, let them distribute to them thereof as poor, but not misapply or waste the Church’s goods for their sakes: yea, this holy Council, with the utmost earnestness, admonishes them completely to lay aside all this human and carnal affection towards brothers, nephews, and kindred, which is the seed plot of many evils in the Church. And what has been said of bishops, the same is to be observed by all who hold ecclesiastical benefices, whether secular or regular, each according to the nature of his rank. …
The Religious Peace of Augsburg
Imperial Diet, Augsburg
(1555)
In order that … peace, which is especially necessary in view of the divided religions, as is seen from the causes before mentioned, and is demanded by the sad necessity of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, may be the better established and made secure and enduring between his Roman Imperial Majesty and us, on the one hand, and the electors, princes, and estates of the Holy Empire of the German nation on the other, therefore his Imperial Majesty, and we, and the electors, princes, and estates of the Holy Empire will not make war upon any estate of the empire on account of the Augsburg Confession and the doctrine, religion, and faith of the same, nor injure nor do violence to those estates that hold it, nor force them, against their conscience, knowledge, and will, to abandon the religion, faith, church usages, ordinances, and ceremonies of the Augsburg Confession, where these have been established, or may hereafter be established, in their principalities, lands, and dominions. Nor shall we, through mandate or in any other way, trouble or disparage them, but shall let them quietly and peacefully enjoy their religion, faith, church usages, ordinances, and ceremonies, as well as their possessions, real and personal property, lands, people, dominions, governments, honors, and rights. …
On the other hand, the estates that have accepted the Augsburg Confession shall suffer his Imperial Majesty, us, and the electors, princes, and other estates of the Holy Empire, adhering to the old religion, to abide in like manner by their religion, faith, church usages, ordinances, and ceremonies. They shall also leave undisturbed their possessions, real and personal property, lands, people, dominions, government, honors, and rights, rents, interest, and tithes. …
But all others who are not adherents of either of the above-mentioned religions are not included in this peace, but shall be altogether excluded. …
No estate shall urge another estate, or the subjects of the same, to embrace its religion.
But when our subjects and those of the electors, princes, and estates, adhering to the old religion or to the Augsburg Confession, wish, for the sake of their religion, to go with wife and children to another place in the lands, principalities, and cities of the electors, princes, and estates of the Holy Empire, and settle there, such going and coming, and the sale of property and goods, in return for reasonable compensation for serfdom and arrears of taxes, … shall be everywhere unhindered, permitted, and granted. …
The Scaffold Speech of a Condemned English Jesuit
Robert Johnson
(1582)
Johnson. I am a Catholic, and am condemn’d for conspiring the queen’s death at Rheims, with the other company who were condemn’d with me. I protest, that as for some of them with whom I was condemn’d to have conspired withal, I did never see them before we met at the barr, neither did I ever write unto them, or receive letters from them: and as for any treasons, I am not guilty in deed nor thought …
Sheriff. Dost thou acknowledge the queen for lawful queen? Repent thee, and notwithstanding thy traitorous practices, we have authority from the queen to carry thee back.
Johnson. I do acknowledge her as lawful as Queen Mary was. I can say no more; but pray to God to give her grace, and that she may now stay her hand from shedding of innocent blood.
Sheriff. Dost thou acknowledge her supreme head of the church in ecclesiastical matters?
Johnson. I acknowledge her to have as full and great authority as ever Queen Mary had; and more with safety and conscience I cannot give her.
Sheriff. Thou art a traitor most obstinate.
Johnson. If I be a traitor for maintaining this faith, then all the kings and queens of this realm heretofore, and all our ancestors, were traitors, for they maintain’d the same.
Sheriff. What! You will preach treason also, if we suffer you!
Johnson. I teach but the Catholic religion.
Hereupon the rope was put about his neck, and he was willed to pray, which he did in Latin. They willed him to pray in English, that they might witness with him; he said, “I pray that prayer which Christ taught, in a tongue I well understand.” Aminister cried out, “Pray as Christ taught”: to whom Mr. Johnson replied, “What! do you think Christ taught in English?” He went on, saying in Latin his Pater, Ave, and Creed, and In manus tuas,[1] etc. And so the cart was drawn away, and he finish’d this life as the rest did …
Instructions for Selling Indulgences
Albrecht of Brandenburg
(1517)
Here follow the four principal graces and privileges, which are granted by the apostolic bull, of which each may be obtained without the other. In the matter of these four privileges preachers shall take pains to commend each to believers with the greatest care, and, in-so-far as in their power lies, to explain the same.
The first grace is the complete remission of all sins; and nothing greater than this can be named, since man who lives in sin and forfeits the favor of God, obtains complete remission by these means and once more enjoys God’s favor: moreover, through this remission of sins the punishment which one is obliged to undergo in Purgatory on account of the affront to the divine Majesty, is all remitted, and the pains of Purgatory completely blotted out. And although nothing is precious enough to be given in exchange for such a grace,–since it is the free gift of God and a grace beyond price,–yet in order that Christian believers may be the more easily induced to procure the same, we establish the following rules, to wit:
In the first place every one who is contrite in heart, and has made oral confession, or at all events has the intention of confessing at a suitable time, shall visit at least the seven churches indicated for this purpose, that is to say, those in which the papal arms are displayed, and in each church shall say devoutly five Paternosters and five Ave Marias in honor of the five wounds of our Lord Jesus Christ, whereby our salvation is won, or one Miserere [the prayer beginning "Lord have mercy"], which Psalm is particularly well adapted for obtaining forgiveness of sins. …
Respecting, now, the contribution to the chest, for the building of the said church of the chief of the apostles, the penitentiaries and confessors, after they have explained to those making confession the full remission and privileges, shall ask of them, for how much money or other temporal goods they would conscientiously go without the said most complete remission and privileges; and this shall be done in order that hereafter they may be brought the more easily to contribute. And because the conditions and occupations of men are so manifold and diverse that we cannot consider them individually, and impose specific rates accordingly, we have therefore concluded that the rates should be determined according to the recognized classes of persons.
Kings and Queens and their offspring, archbishops and bishops, and other great rulers as well, provided they seek the places where the cross is raised, or otherwise present themselves, shall pay at least five and twenty Rhenish guilders in gold. Abbots and the great prelates of Cathedral churches, counts, barons, and others of the higher nobility, together with their consorts, shall pay for each letter of indulgence ten such guilders. Other lesser prelates and nobles, as also the rectors of celebrated places, and all others, who, either from permanent incomes or merchandise, or otherwise, enjoy a total yearly revenue of five hundred gold guilders, shall pay six such guilders. Other citizens and tradespeople and artisans, who have individual incomes and families of their own, shall pay one such guilder; others of less means only a half. And where it is impossible to adhere rigidly to the schedule above indicated, then we declare that the said kings, bishops, dukes, abbots, prelates, counts, barons, members of the higher nobility and rectors, together with all others above mentioned, shall place or caused to be placed in the chest a sum in accordance with the dictates of sound reason, proportionate to their magnificence or generosity, after they have listened to the advice and council of the subcommissioners and penitentiaries and of their confessors, in order that they may fully obtain the grace and privileges. All other persons are confided to the discretion of the confessors and penitentiaries, who should have ever in view the advancement of this building, and should urge their penitents to a freer contribution, but should let no one go away without some portion of grace, because the happiness of Christian believers is here concerned not less than the interests of the building. And those that have no money, they shall supply their contribution with prayer and fasting; for the Kingdom of Heaven should be open to the poor not less than to the rich.
And although a married woman may not dispose of the husband’s goods against his will, yet she shall be able to contribute in this instance against the will of her husband of her dowry or of her own private property, which has come to her in a regular manner. Where she has no such possessions, or is prevented by her husband, she shall then supply such contribution with prayer; and the same we wish to have understood concerning sons who still remain under parental control. …
The second signal grace is a confessional letter containing the most extraordinarily comforting and hitherto unheard of privileges, and which also retains its virtue even after our bull expires at the end of eight years, since the bull says: “they shall be participators now and for ever.” The meaning of the same preachers and confessors shall explain and bring unto all possible prominence; for there will be granted in the confessional letter, to those who buy: first, the power to choose a qualified confessor, even a monk from the mendicant orders, who shall absolve them first and foremost, with the consent of the persons involved, from all censures by whomsoever imposed; in the second place, from each and every crime, even the greatest, and as well from those reserved to the apostolic see, once in a lifetime and in the hour of death; third, in those cases which are not reserved, as often as necessary; fourth, the chosen confessor may grant him complete forgiveness of all sins once in life, and at the hour of death, as often as it may seem at hand, although death ensue not; and, fifth, transform all kinds of vows, excepting alone those solemnly taken, into other works of piety (as when one has vowed to perform the journey to the Holy Land, or to visit the holy Apostles at Rome, to make a pilgrimage to St. James at Compostella, to become a monk, or to take a vow of chastity); sixth, the confessor may administer to him the sacrament of the altar at all seasons, except on Easter day, and in the hour of death. …
The third most important grace is the participation in all the possessions of the church universal, which consists herein, that contributors toward the said building, together with their deceased relations, who have departed this world in a state of grace, shall from now and for eternity, be partakers in all petitions, intercessions, alms, fastings, prayers, in each and every pilgrimage, even those to the Holy Land; furthermore, in the stations at Rome, in the masses canonical hours, flagellations, and all other spiritual goods which have been brought forth or which shall be brought forth by the universal, most holy church militant or by any of its members. Believers will become participants in all these things who purchase confessional letters. Preachers and confessors must insist with great perseverance upon these advantages, and persuade believers that they should not neglect to acquire these along with their confessional letter.
We also declare that in order to acquire these two most important graces, it is not necessary to make confession, or to visit the churches and altars, but merely to purchase the confessional letter. …
The fourth distinctive grace is for those souls which are in purgatory, and is the complete remission of all sins, which remission the pope brings to pass through his intercession to the advantage of said souls, in this wise; that the same contribution shall be placed in the chest by a living person as one would make for himself. It is our wish, however, that our subcommissioners should modify the regulations regarding contributions of this kind which are given for the dead, and that they should use their judgment in all other cases, where in their opinion modifications are desirable. It is furthermore not necessary that the persons who place their contributions in the chest for the dead should be contrite in heart and have orally confessed, since this grace is based simply on the state of grace in which the dead departed, and on the contribution of the living, as is evident from the text of the bull. Moreover, preachers shall exert themselves to give this grace the widest publicity, since through the same, help will surely come to departed souls, and the construction of the Church of St. Peter will be abundantly promoted at the same time. …
“Ninety-five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences”
Martin Luther
(1517)
1. Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ in saying “Repent ye” (poenitentiam agite) etc., intended that the whole life of believers should be penitence (poenitentia).
2. This word cannot be understood as sacramental penance (poenitentia), that is, of the confession and satisfaction which are performed under the ministry of priests.
3. It does not, however, refer solely to inward penitence (poenitentia); nay such inward penitence is naught, unless it outwardly produces various mortifications of the flesh.
4. The penalty (poena) thus continues as long as the hatred of self (that is, true inward penitence); namely, till our entrance into the kingdom of heaven.
5. The Pope has neither the will nor the power to remit any penalties except those which he has imposed by his own authority, or by that of the canons.
6. The Pope has no power to remit any guilt, except by declaring and warranting it to have been remitted by God; or at most by remitting cases reserved for himself; in which cases, if his power were despised, guilt would certainly remain.
7. Certainly God remits no man’s guilt without at the same time subjecting him, humbled in all things, to the authority of his representative the priest.
8. The penitential canons are imposed only on the living, and no burden ought to be imposed on the dying, according to them.
9. Hence, the Holy Spirit acting in the Pope does well for us in that, in his decrees, he always makes exception of the article of death and of necessity.
10. Those priests act unlearnedly and wrongly who, in the case of the dying, reserve the canonical penances for purgatory. …
20. Therefore the Pope, when he speaks of the plenary remission of all penalties, does not mean really of all, but only of those imposed by himself.
21. Thus those preachers of indulgences are in error who say that by the indulgences of the Pope a man is freed and saved from all punishment.
22. For in fact he remits to souls in purgatory no penalty which they would have had to pay in this life according to the canons.
23. If any entire remission of all penalties can be granted to any one it is certain that it is granted to none but the most perfect, that is to very few.
24. Hence, the greater part of the people must needs be deceived by this indiscriminate and high-sounding promise of release from penalties. …
26. The Pope acts most rightly in granting remission to souls not by the power of the keys (which is of no avail in this case) but by the way of intercession.
27. They preach man who say that the soul flies out of Purgatory as soon as the money thrown into the chest rattles.[1]
28. It is certain that, when the money rattles in the chest, avarice and gain may be increased, but the effect of the intercession of the Church depends on the will of God alone.
29. Who knows whether all the souls in purgatory desire to be redeemed from it–witness the story told of Saints Severinus and Paschal?
30. No man is sure of the reality of his own contrition, much less of the attainment of plenary remission.
31. Rare as is a true penitent, so rare is one who truly buys indulgences–that is to say, most rare.
32. Those who believe that, through letters of pardon, they are made sure of their own salvation will be eternally damned along with their teachers.
33. We must especially beware of those who say that these pardons from the Pope are that inestimable gift of God by which man is reconciled to God.
34. For the grace conveyed by these pardons has respect only to the penalties of sacramental satisfaction, which are of human appointment.
35. They preach no Christian doctrine who teach that contrition is not necessary for those who buy souls [out of purgatory] or buy confessional licenses.
36. Every Christian who feels true compunction has of right plenary remission of punishment and guilt even without letters of pardon.
37. Every true Christian, whether living or dead, has a share in all the benefits of Christ and of the Church, given him by God, even without letters of pardon.
38. The remission, however, imparted by the Pope is by no means to be despised, since it is, as I have said, a declaration of the divine remission.
39. It is a most difficult thing, even for the most learned theologians, to exalt at the same time in the eyes of the people the ample effect of pardons and the necessity of true contrition.
40. True contrition seeks and loves punishment; while the ampleness of pardons relaxes it, and causes men to hate it, or at least gives occasion for them to do so.
41. Apostolic pardons ought to be proclaimed with caution, lest the people should falsely suppose that they are placed before other good works of charity.
42. Christians should be taught that it is not the wish of the Pope that the buying of pardons should be in any way compared to works of mercy.
43. Christians should be taught that he who gives to a poor man, or lends to a needy man, does better than if he bought pardons.
44. Because by works of charity, charity increases, and the man becomes better; while by means of pardons, he does not become better, but only freer from punishment.
45. Christians should be taught that he who sees any one in need, and, passing him by, gives money for pardons, is not purchasing for himself the indulgences of the Pope but the anger of God.
46. Christians should be taught that, unless they have superfluous wealth, they are bound to keep what is necessary for the use of their own households, and by no means to lavish it on pardons.
47. Christians should be taught that while they are free to buy pardons they are not commanded to do so.
48. Christians should be taught that the Pope, in granting pardons, has both more need and more desire that devout prayer should be made for him than that money should be readily paid.
49. Christians should be taught that the Pope’s pardons are useful if they do not put their trust in them, but most hurtful if through them they lose the fear of God.
50. Christians should be taught that, if the Pope were acquainted with the exactions of the Preachers of pardons, he would prefer that the Basilica of St. Peter should be burnt to ashes rather than that it should be built up with the skin, flesh, and bones of his sheep.
51. Christians should be taught that as it would be the duty so it would be the wish of the Pope even to sell, if necessary, the Basilica of St. Peter, and to give of his own money to very many of those from whom the preachers of pardons extract money.
52. Vain is the hope of salvation through letters of pardon, even if a commissary–nay, the Pope himself–were to pledge his own soul for them.
53. They were enemies of Christ and of the Pope who, in order that pardons may be preached, condemn the word of God to utter silence in other churches.
54. Wrong is done to the Word of God when, in the same sermon, an equal or longer time is spent on pardons than on it.
55. The mind of the Pope necessarily is that, if pardons, which are a very small matter, are celebrated with single bells, single processions, and single ceremonies, the Gospel, which is a very great matter, should be preached with a hundred bells, a hundred processions, and a hundred ceremonies.
56. The treasures of the Church, whence the Pope grants indulgences, are neither sufficiently named nor known among the people of Christ.
57. It is clear that they are at least not temporal treasures, for these are not so readily lavished, but only accumulated, by many of the preachers.
58. Nor are they the merits of Christ and of the saints, for these, independently of the Pope, are always working grace to the inner man, and the cross, death, and hell to the outer man….
67. Those indulgences, which the preachers loudly proclaim to be the greatest graces, are seen to be truly such as regards the promotion of gain.
68. Yet they are in reality most insignificant when compared to the grace of God and the piety of the cross. …
75. To think that the Papal pardons have such power that they could absolve a man even if–by an impossibility–he had violated the Mother of God, is madness.
76. We affirm on the contrary that Papal pardons cannot take away even the least of venial sins, as regards its guilt.
77. The saying that, even if St. Peter were now Pope, he could grant no greater graces, is blasphemy against St. Peter and the Pope.
78. We affirm on the contrary that both he and any other Pope has greater graces to grant, namely, the Gospel, powers, gifts of healing, etc. (1 Cor. xii.)
79. To say that the cross set up among the insignia of the Papal arms is of equal power with the cross of Christ, is blasphemy.
80. Those bishops, priests and theologians who allow such discourses to have currency among the people will have to render an account.
81. This license in the preaching of pardons makes it no easy thing, even for learned men, to protect the reverence due to the Pope against the calumnies, or, at all events, the keen questionings of the laity.
82. As for instance: Why does not the Pope empty purgatory for the sake of most holy charity and of the supreme necessity of souls–this being the most just of all reasons–if he redeems an infinite number of souls for the sake of that most fatal thing, money, to be spent on building a basilica–this being a very slight reason?
83. Again; why do funeral masses and anniversary masses for the deceased continue, and why does not the Pope return, or permit the withdrawal of, the funds bequeathed for this purpose, since it is a wrong to pray for those who are already redeemed?
84. Again; what is this new kindness of God and the Pope, in that, for money’s sake, they permit an impious man and an enemy of God to redeem a pious soul which loves God, and yet do not redeem that same pious and beloved soul out of free charity on account of its own need?
85. Again; why is it that the penitential canons, long since abrogated and dead in themselves, in very fact and not only by usage, are yet still redeemed with money, through the granting of indulgences, as if they were full of life?
86. Again; why does not the Pope, whose riches are at this day more ample than those of the wealthiest of the wealthy, build the single Basilica of St. Peter with his own money rather than with that of poor believers?
87. Again; what does the Pope remit or impart to those who through perfect contrition have a right to plenary remission and participation?
88. Again; what greater good could the Church receive than if the Pope, instead of once, as he does now, were to bestow these remissions and participations a hundred times a day on any one of the faithful?
89. Since it is the salvation of souls, rather than money, that the Pope seeks by his pardons, why does he suspend the letters and pardons granted long ago, since they are equally efficacious? …
91. If all these pardons were preached according to the spirit and mind of the Pope, all these questions would be resolved with ease; nay, would not exist. …
Pastor Luther Confronts His Flock
Martin Luther
(1528)
The sermon on the 8th of November, 1528, was on the lord who forgave his servant: This lord, said Luther, is a type of the Kingdom of God. The servant was not forgiven because he had forgiven his fellow servant. On the contrary he received forgiveness before he had done anything whatever about his fellow servant. From this we see that there are two kinds of forgiveness. The first is that which we receive from God; the second is that which we exercise by bearing no ill will to any upon earth. But we must not overlook the two administrations, the civil and the spiritual, because the prince cannot and should not forgive. He has a different administration than Christ, who rules over crushed and broken hearts. The Kaiser rules over scoundrels who do not recognize their sins and mock and carry their heads high. That is why the emperor carries a sword, a sign of blood and not of peace. But Christ’s kingdom is for the troubled conscience. He says, “I do not ask of you a penny, only this, that you do the same for your neighbor.” And the lord in the parable does not tell the servant to found a monastery, but simply that he should have mercy on his fellow servants.
But now what shall I say to you Wittenbergers? It would be better that I preach to you the Sachsenspiegel [the imperial law], because you want to be Christians while still practicing usury, robbing and stealing. How do people who are so sunk in sins expect to receive forgiveness? The sword of the emperor really applies here, but my sermon is for crushed hearts who feel their sins and have no peace. Enough for this gospel.
I understand that this is the week for the church collection, and many of you do not want to give a thing. You ungrateful people should be ashamed of yourselves. You Wittenbergers have been relieved of schools and hospitals, which have been taken over by the common chest, and now you want to know why you are asked to give four pennies. They are for the ministers, schoolteachers, and sacristans. The first labor for your salvation, preach to you the precious treasure of the gospel, administer the sacraments, and visit you at great personal risk in the plague. The second train children to be good magistrates, judges, and ministers. The third care for the poor. So far the common chest has cared for these, and now that you are asked to give four miserable pennies you are up in arms. What does this mean if not that you do not want the gospel preached, the children taught, and the poor helped? I am not saying this for myself. I receive nothing from you. I am the prince’s beggar. But I am sorry I ever freed you from the tyrants and the papists. You ungrateful beasts, you are not worthy of the treasure of the gospel. If you don’t improve, I will stop preaching rather than cast pearls before swine.
And now another point: couples to be blessed by the curate before a wedding should come early. There are stated hours: in summer, mornings at eight and afternoons at three; in winter, mornings at nine and afternoons at two. If you come later, I will bless you myself, and you won’t thank me for it. And the invited guests should prepare themselves in good time for the wedding and let not Miss Goose wait for Mrs. Duck.
Luther Rages “Against the Murdering and Robbing Bands of Peasants”
Martin Luther
(1525)
In my preceding pamphlet [on the "Twelve Articles"] I had no occasion to condemn the peasants, because they promised to yield to law and better instruction, as Christ also demands (Matt. vii. 1). But before I can turn around, they go out and appeal to force, in spite of their promises, and rob and pillage and act like mad dogs. From this it is quite apparent what they had in their false minds, and that what they put forth under the name of the gospel in the “Twelve Articles” was all vain pretense. In short, they practice mere devil’s work, and it is the arch-devil himself who reigns at Muhlhausen,[1] indulging in nothing but robbery, murder, and bloodshed; as Christ says of the devil in John viii. 44, “he was a murderer from the beginning.” Since, therefore, those peasants and miserable wretches allow themselves to be led astray and act differently from what they declared, I likewise must write differently concerning them; and first bring their sins before their eyes, as God commands (Isa. lviii. 1; Ezek. ii. 7), whether perchance some of them may come to their senses; and, further, I would instruct those in authority how to conduct themselves in this matter.
With threefold horrible sins against God and men have these peasants loaded themselves, for which they have deserved a manifold death of body and soul.
First, they have sworn to their true and gracious rulers to be submissive and obedient, in accord with God’s command. … But since they have deliberately and sacrilegiously abandoned their obedience, and in addition have dared to oppose their lords, they have thereby forfeited body and soul, as perfidious, perjured, lying, disobedient wretches and scoundrels are wont to do. …
Second, they cause uproar and sacrilegiously rob and pillage monasteries and castles that do not belong to them, for which, like public highwaymen and murderers, they deserve the twofold death of body and soul. It is right and lawful to slay at the first opportunity a rebellious person, who is known as such, for he is already under God’s and the emperor’s ban. Every man is at once judge and executioner of a public rebel; just as, when a fire starts, he who can extinguish it first is the best fellow. Rebellion is not simply vile murder, but is like a great fire that kindles and devastates a country; it fills the land with murder and bloodshed, makes widows and orphans, and destroys everything, like the greatest calamity. Therefore, whosoever can, should smite, strangle, and stab, secretly or publicly, and should remember that there is nothing more poisonous, pernicious, and devilish than a rebellious man. Just as one must slay a mad dog, so, if you do not fight the rebels, they will fight you, and the whole country with you.
Third, they cloak their frightful and revolting sins with the gospel, call themselves Christian brethren, swear allegiance, and compel people to join them in such abominations. Thereby they become the greatest blasphemers and violators of God’s holy name, and serve and honor the devil under the semblance of the gospel, so that they have ten times deserved death of body and soul, for never have I heard of uglier sins. And I believe also that the devil foresees the judgment day, that he undertakes such an unheard-of measure; as if he said, “It is the last and therefore it shall be the worst; I’ll stir up the dregs and knock the very bottom out.” May the Lord restrain him! Lo, how mighty a prince is the devil, how he holds the world in his hands and can put it to confusion: who else could so soon capture so many thousands of peasants, lead them astray, blind and deceive them, stir them to revolt, and make them the willing executioners of his malice. …
And should the peasants prevail (which God forbid!),–for all things are possible to God, and we know not but that he is preparing for the judgment day, which cannot be far distant, and may purpose to destroy, by means of the devil, all order and authority and throw the world into wild chaos,–yet surely they who are found, sword in hand, shall perish in the wreck with clear consciences, leaving to the devil the kingdom of this world and receiving instead the eternal kingdom. For we are come upon such strange times that a prince may more easily win heaven by the shedding of blood than others by prayers.
Institutes: Calvin on Predestination and the Elect
John Calvin
(1539)
Therefore we say that the Scripture shows that God, by His eternal and immutable counsel once for all determined both those whom He desired one day to admit to salvation and those whom He would give back to destruction. We affirm that this counsel as to the elect is founded upon His gratuitous mercy, without any respect to human merit; but to those whom He had handed over to damnation, by His just and blameless though incomprehensible judgment, the way of life is closed.
In the case of the elect we regard calling as an evidence of election, and justification another token of its manifestation, until they arrive in glory, where its fulness shall be found. Just as God seals His elect by calling and justification, so by shutting out the rejected ones either from the knowledge of His name or the sanctification of His spirit He makes known to them the judgment that awaits them.
Religious Law and Order in Calvin’s Geneva
John Calvin
(1537)
Our Lord established excommunication as a means of correction and discipline, by which those who led a disordered life unworthy of a Christian, and who despised to mend their ways and return to the strait way after they had been admonished, should be expelled from the body of the church and cut off as rotten members until they come to themselves and acknowledge their fault. … We have an example given by St. Paul (1 Tim. i and 1 Cor. v), in a solemn warning that we should not keep company with one who is called a Christian but who is, none the less, a fornicator, covetous, an idolater, a railer, a drunkard, or an extortioner. So if there be in us any fear of God, this ordinance should be enforced in our Church.
To accomplish this we have determined to petition you [i.e. the town council] to establish and choose, according to your good pleasure, certain persons [namely, the elders] of upright life and good repute among all the faithful, likewise constant and not easy to corrupt, who shall be assigned and distributed in all parts of the town and have an eye on the life and conduct of every individual. If one of these see any obvious vice which is to be reprehended, he shall bring this to the attention of some one of the ministers, who shall admonish whoever it may be who is at fault and exhort him in a brotherly way to correct his ways. If it is apparent that such remonstrances do no good, he shall be warned that his obstinacy will be reported to the church. Then if he repents, there is in that alone excellent fruit of this form of discipline. If he will not listen to warnings, it shall be time for the minister, being informed by those who have the matter in charge, to declare publicly to the congregation the efforts which have been made to bring the sinner to amend, and how all has been in vain.
Should it appear that he proposes to persevere in his hardness of heart, it shall be time to excommunicate him; that is to say, that the offender shall be regarded as cast out from the companionship of Christians and left in the power of the devil for his temporal confusion, until he shall give good proofs of penitence and amendment. In sign of his casting out he shall be excluded from the communion, and the faithful shall be forbidden to hold familiar converse with him. Nevertheless he shall not omit to attend the sermons in order to receive instruction, so that it may be seen whether it shall please the Lord to turn his heart to the right way.
The offenses to be corrected in this manner are those named by St. Paul above, and others like them. When others than the said deputies–for example, neighbors or relatives–shall first have knowledge of such offenses, they may make the necessary remonstrances themselves. If they accomplish nothing, then they shall notify the deputies to do their duty.
This then is the manner in which it would seem expedient to us to introduce excommunication into our Church and maintain it in its full force; for beyond this form of correction the Church does not go. But should there be insolent persons, abandoned to all perversity, who only laugh when they are excommunicated and do not mind living and dying in that condition of rejection, it shall be your affair to determine whether you should long suffer such contempt and mocking of God to pass unpunished. …
If those who agree with us in faith should be punished by excommunication for their offenses, how much more should the Church refuse to tolerate those who oppose us in religion? The remedy that we have thought of is to petition you to require all the inhabitants of your city to make a confession and give an account of their faith, so that you may know who agree with the gospel and who, on the contrary, would prefer the kingdom of the pope to the kingdom of Jesus Christ.
The Trial of Michael Servetus in Calvin’s Geneva
Nicholas de la Fontaine
(1553)
Nicholas de la Fontaine asserts that he has instituted proceedings against Michael Servetus, and on this account he has allowed himself to be held prisoner in criminal process.
1. In the first place that about twenty-four years ago the defendant commenced to annoy the churches of Germany with his errors and heresies, and was condemned and took to flight in order to escape the punishment prepared for him.
2. Item, that on or about this time he printed a wretched book, which has infected many people.
3. Item, that since that time he has not ceased by all means in his power to scatter his poison, as much by his construction of biblical text, as by certain annotations which he has made upon Ptolemy.
4. Item, that since that time he has printed in secrecy another book containing endless blasphemies.
5. Item, that while detained in prison in the city of Vienne [in France], when he saw that they were willing to pardon him on condition of his recanting, he found means to escape from prison.
Said Nicholas demands that said Servetus be examined upon all these points.
And since he is able to evade the question by pretending that his blasphemies and heresies are nought else than good doctrine, said Nicholas proposes certain articles upon which he demands said heretic be examined.
6. To wit, whether he has not written and falsely taught and published that to believe that in a single essence of God there are three distinct persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, is to create four phantoms, which cannot and ought not to be imagined.
7. Item, that to put such distinction into the essence of God is to cause God to be divided into three parts, and that this is a threeheaded devil, like to Cerberus, whom the ancient poets have called the dog of hell, a monster, and things equally injurious. …
9. Item, whether he does not say that our Lord Jesus Christ is not the Son of God, except in so much as he was conceived of the Holy Ghost in the womb of the virgin Mary.
10. Item, that those who believe Jesus Christ to have been the word of God the Father, engendered through all eternity, have a scheme of redemption which is fanciful and of the nature of sorcery.
11. Item, that Jesus Christ is God, insomuch as God has caused him to be such. …
27. Item, that the soul of man is mortal, and that the only thing which is immortal is an elementary breath, which is the substance that Jesus Christ now possesses in heaven and which is also the elementary and divine and incorruptible substance of the Holy Ghost. …
32. Item, that the baptism of little children is an invention of the Devil, an infernal falsehood tending to the destruction of all Christianity. …
37. Item, that in the person of M. Calvin, minister of the word of God in the Church of Geneva, he has defamed with printed book the doctrine which he preached, uttering all the injurious and blasphemous things which it is possible to invent. …
The Council of Trent and Catholic Reformation
Acts of the Council of Trent
(1563)
The universal Church has always understood that the complete confession of sins was instituted by the Lord, and is of divine right necessary for all who have fallen into sin after baptism; because our Lord Jesus Christ, when about to ascend from earth to heaven, left priests, his own vicars, as leaders and judges, before whom all the mortal offenses into which the faithful of Christ may have fallen should be carried, in order that, in accordance with the power of the keys, they may pronounce the sentence of forgiveness or of retention of sins. For it is manifest that priests could not have exercised this judgment without knowledge of the case….
This holy Council enjoins on all bishops and others who are charged with teaching, that they instruct the faithful diligently concerning the intercession and invocation of saints, the honor paid to relics, and the legitimate use of images. Let them teach that the saints, who reign together with Christ, offer up their own prayers to God for men; that it is good and useful suppliantly to invoke them, and to have recourse to their prayers and aid in obtaining benefits from God, through his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who is our sole Redeemer and Saviour; and that those persons think impiously who deny that the saints, who enjoy eternal happiness in heaven, are to be invoked; or who assert that the saints do not pray for men, or that the invocation of them to pray for each of us individually is idolatry; or who declare that it is repugnant to the word of God, and opposed to the honor of the “one mediator of God and men, Christ Jesus,” or that it is foolish to supplicate, orally or mentally, those who reign in heaven. …
If any one saith that the New Testament does not provide for a distinct, visible priesthood; or that this priesthood has not any power of consecrating and offering up the true body and blood of the Lord, and of forgiving and retaining sins, but is only an office and bare ministry of preaching the gospel; or that those who do not preach are not priests at all; let him be anathema. …
If any one saith that by sacred ordination the Holy Ghost is not given, and that vainly therefore do the bishops say, “Receive ye the Holy Ghost”; or that a character is not imprinted by that ordination; or that he who has once been a priest can again become a layman; let him be anathema. …
If any one saith that in the Catholic Church there is not a hierarchy instituted by divine ordination, consisting of bishops, priests, and ministers; let him be anathema.
If any one saith that the sacraments of the new law were not all instituted by Jesus Christ, our Lord; or that they are more or less than seven, to wit, baptism, confirmation, the eucharist, penance, extreme unction, orders, and matrimony; or even that any one of these seven is not truly and properly a sacrament; let him be anathema. …
In order that the faithful may approach and receive the sacraments with greater reverence and devotion of mind, this Holy Council enjoins on all bishops that, not only when they are themselves about to administer them to the people they shall first explain, in a manner suited to the capacity of those who receive them, the efficacy and use of those sacraments, but they shall endeavor that the same be done piously and prudently by every parish priest; and this even in the vernacular tongue, if need be, and if it can be conveniently done.
Such instruction shall be given in accordance with the form which will be prescribed for each of the sacraments by this holy Council in a catechism, which the bishops shall take care to have faithfully translated into the vulgar tongue, and to have expounded to the people by all parish priests. They shall also explain in the said vulgar tongue, during the solemnization of mass, or the celebration of the divine offices, on all festivals or solemnities, the sacred oracles and the maxims of salvation; and, setting aside all unprofitable questions, they shall endeavor to impress them on the hearts of all, and to instruct their hearers in the law of the Lord. …
It is to be desired that those who undertake the office of bishop should understand what their portion is, and comprehend that they are called, not to their own convenience, not to riches or luxury, but to labors and cares, for the glory of God. For it is not to be doubted that the rest of the faithful also will be more easily excited to religion and innocence if they shall see those who are set over them not fixing their thoughts on the things of this world, but on the salvation of souls and on their heavenly country. Wherefore this holy Council, being minded that these things are of the greatest importance towards restoring ecclesiastical discipline, admonishes all bishops that, often mediating thereon, they show themselves conformable to their office by their actual deeds and the actions of their lives; which is a kind of perpetual sermon; but, above all, that they so order their whole conversation that others may thence be able to derive examples of frugality, modesty, continency, and of that holy humility which so much commends us to God.
Wherefore, after the example of our fathers in the Council of Carthage, this Council not only orders that bishops be content with modest furniture, and a frugal table and diet, but that they also give heed that in the rest of their manner of living, and in their whole house, there be nothing seen which is alien to this holy institution, and which does not manifest simplicity, zeal toward God, and a contempt of vanities.
It strictly forbids them, moreover, to strive to enrich their own kindred or domestics out of the revenues of the Church; seeing that even the canons of the apostles forbid them to give to their kindred the property of the Church, which belongs to God; but if their kindred be poor, let them distribute to them thereof as poor, but not misapply or waste the Church’s goods for their sakes: yea, this holy Council, with the utmost earnestness, admonishes them completely to lay aside all this human and carnal affection towards brothers, nephews, and kindred, which is the seed plot of many evils in the Church. And what has been said of bishops, the same is to be observed by all who hold ecclesiastical benefices, whether secular or regular, each according to the nature of his rank. …
The Religious Peace of Augsburg
Imperial Diet, Augsburg
(1555)
In order that … peace, which is especially necessary in view of the divided religions, as is seen from the causes before mentioned, and is demanded by the sad necessity of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, may be the better established and made secure and enduring between his Roman Imperial Majesty and us, on the one hand, and the electors, princes, and estates of the Holy Empire of the German nation on the other, therefore his Imperial Majesty, and we, and the electors, princes, and estates of the Holy Empire will not make war upon any estate of the empire on account of the Augsburg Confession and the doctrine, religion, and faith of the same, nor injure nor do violence to those estates that hold it, nor force them, against their conscience, knowledge, and will, to abandon the religion, faith, church usages, ordinances, and ceremonies of the Augsburg Confession, where these have been established, or may hereafter be established, in their principalities, lands, and dominions. Nor shall we, through mandate or in any other way, trouble or disparage them, but shall let them quietly and peacefully enjoy their religion, faith, church usages, ordinances, and ceremonies, as well as their possessions, real and personal property, lands, people, dominions, governments, honors, and rights. …
On the other hand, the estates that have accepted the Augsburg Confession shall suffer his Imperial Majesty, us, and the electors, princes, and other estates of the Holy Empire, adhering to the old religion, to abide in like manner by their religion, faith, church usages, ordinances, and ceremonies. They shall also leave undisturbed their possessions, real and personal property, lands, people, dominions, government, honors, and rights, rents, interest, and tithes. …
But all others who are not adherents of either of the above-mentioned religions are not included in this peace, but shall be altogether excluded. …
No estate shall urge another estate, or the subjects of the same, to embrace its religion.
But when our subjects and those of the electors, princes, and estates, adhering to the old religion or to the Augsburg Confession, wish, for the sake of their religion, to go with wife and children to another place in the lands, principalities, and cities of the electors, princes, and estates of the Holy Empire, and settle there, such going and coming, and the sale of property and goods, in return for reasonable compensation for serfdom and arrears of taxes, … shall be everywhere unhindered, permitted, and granted. …
The Scaffold Speech of a Condemned English Jesuit
Robert Johnson
(1582)
Johnson. I am a Catholic, and am condemn’d for conspiring the queen’s death at Rheims, with the other company who were condemn’d with me. I protest, that as for some of them with whom I was condemn’d to have conspired withal, I did never see them before we met at the barr, neither did I ever write unto them, or receive letters from them: and as for any treasons, I am not guilty in deed nor thought …
Sheriff. Dost thou acknowledge the queen for lawful queen? Repent thee, and notwithstanding thy traitorous practices, we have authority from the queen to carry thee back.
Johnson. I do acknowledge her as lawful as Queen Mary was. I can say no more; but pray to God to give her grace, and that she may now stay her hand from shedding of innocent blood.
Sheriff. Dost thou acknowledge her supreme head of the church in ecclesiastical matters?
Johnson. I acknowledge her to have as full and great authority as ever Queen Mary had; and more with safety and conscience I cannot give her.
Sheriff. Thou art a traitor most obstinate.
Johnson. If I be a traitor for maintaining this faith, then all the kings and queens of this realm heretofore, and all our ancestors, were traitors, for they maintain’d the same.
Sheriff. What! You will preach treason also, if we suffer you!
Johnson. I teach but the Catholic religion.
Hereupon the rope was put about his neck, and he was willed to pray, which he did in Latin. They willed him to pray in English, that they might witness with him; he said, “I pray that prayer which Christ taught, in a tongue I well understand.” Aminister cried out, “Pray as Christ taught”: to whom Mr. Johnson replied, “What! do you think Christ taught in English?” He went on, saying in Latin his Pater, Ave, and Creed, and In manus tuas,[1] etc. And so the cart was drawn away, and he finish’d this life as the rest did …
Primary Sources: Age of Exploration & Religious Wars
The Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans: A Lamentation
Ducas (c. 1465)
And the entire City [its inhabitants and wealth] was to be seen in the tents of the [Turkish] camp, the city deserted, lying lifeless, naked, soundless, without either form or beauty. O City, City, head of all cities! O City, City, center of the four corners of the world! O City, City, pride of the Romans, civilizer of the barbarians! O City, second paradise planted toward the west, possessing all kinds of vegetation, laden with spiritual fruits! Where is your beauty, O paradise, where the beneficent strength of the charms of your spirit, soul, and body? Where are the bodies of the Apostles of my Lord, which were implanted long ago in the always-green paradise, having in their midst the purple cloak, the lance, the sponge, the reed, which, when we kissed them, made us believe that we were seeing him who was raised on the Cross? Where are the relics of the saints, those of the martyrs? Where the remains of Constantine the Great and the other emperors? Roads, courtyards, crossroads, fields, and vineyard enclosures, all teem with the relics of saints, with the bodies of nobles, of the chaste, and of male and female ascetics. Oh what a loss! “The dead bodies of thy servants, O Lord, have they given to be meat unto the fowls of the heaven, the flesh of thy saints unto the beasts of the earth round about New Sion and there was none to bury them [Psalm 78:2-3].”
O temple [Hagia Sophia]! O earthly heaven! O heavenly altar! O sacred and divine places! O magnificence of the churches! O holy books and words of God! O ancient and modern laws! O tablets inscribed by the finger of God! O Scriptures spoken by his mouth! O divine discourses of angels who bore flesh! O doctrines of men filled with the Holy Spirit! O teachings of semi-divine heroes! O commonwealth! O citizens! O army, formerly beyond number, now removed from sight like a ship sunk into the sea! O houses and palaces of every type! O sacred walls! Today I invoke you all, and as if incarnate beings I mourn with you, having Jeremiah as [choral] leader of this lamentable tragedy!
Malleus Maleficarum: How to Torture a Witch
Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer (1486)
The method of beginning an examination by torture is as follows: First, the jailers prepare the implements of torture, then they strip the prisoner (if it be a woman, she has already been stripped by other women, upright and of good report). This stripping is lest some means of witchcraft may have been sewed into the clothing–such as often, taught by the Devil, they prepare from the bodies of unbaptized infants, [murdered] that they may forfeit salvation. And when the implements of torture have been prepared, the judge, both in person and through other good men zealous in the faith, tries to persuade the prisoner to confess the truth freely; but, if he will not confess, he bids attendants make the prisoner fast to the strappado or some other implement of torture. The attendants obey forthwith, yet with feigned agitation. Then, at the prayer of some of those present, the prisoner is loosed again and is taken aside and once more persuaded to confess, being led to believe that he will in that case not be put to death.
Here it may be asked whether the judge, in the case of a prisoner much defamed, convicted both by witnesses and by proofs, nothing being lacking but his own confession, can properly lead him to hope that his life will be spared–when, even if he confess his crime, he will be punished with death.
It must be answered that opinions vary. Some hold that even a witch of very ill repute, against whom the evidence justifies violent suspicion, and who, as a ringleader of the witches, is accounted very dangerous, may be assured her life, and condemned instead to perpetual imprisonment on bread and water, in case she will give sure and convincing testimony against other witches; yet this penalty of perpetual imprisonment must not be announced to her, but only that her life will be spared, and that she will be punished in some other fashion, perhaps by exile. And doubtless such notorious witches, especially those who prepare witch-potions or who by magical methods cure those bewitched, would be peculiarly suited to be thus preserved, in order to aid the bewitched or to accuse other witches, were it not that their accusations cannot be trusted, since the Devil is a liar, unless confirmed by proofs and witnesses.
Others hold, as to this point, that for a time the promise made to the witch sentenced to imprisonment is to be kept, but that after a time she should be burned.
A third view is, that the judge may safely promise witches to spare their lives, if only he will later excuse himself from pronouncing the sentence and will let another do this in his place. …
But if, neither by threats nor by promises such as these, the witch can be induced to speak the truth, then the jailers must carry out the sentence, and torture the prisoner according to the accepted methods, with more or less of severity as the delinquent’s crime may demand. And, while he is being tortured, he must be questioned on the articles of accusation, and this frequently and persistently, beginning with the lighter charges–for he will more readily confess the lighter than the heavier. And, while this is being done, the notary must write down everything in his record of the trial–how the prisoner is tortured, on what points he is questioned, and how he answers.
And note that, if he confesses under the torture, he must afterward be conducted to another place, that he may confirm it and certify that it was not due alone to the force of the torture.
But, if the prisoner will not confess the truth satisfactorily, other sorts of tortures must be placed before him, with the statement that, unless he will confess the truth, he must endure these also. But, if not even thus he can be brought into terror and to the truth, then the next day or the next but one is to be set for a continuation of the tortures–not a repetition, for they must not be repeated unless new evidences be produced.
The judge must then address to the prisoners the following sentence: We, the judge, etc., do assign to you, –, such and such a day for the continuation of the tortures, that from your own mouth the truth may be heard, and that the whole may be recorded by the notary.
And during the interval, before the day assigned, the judge, in person or through approved men, must in the manner above described try to persuade the prisoner to confess, promising her (if there is aught to be gained by this promise) that her life shall be spared.
The judge shall see to it, moreover, that throughout this interval guards are constantly with the prisoner, so that she may not be left alone; because she will be visited by the Devil and tempted into suicide.
Fifteenth-Century Slave Trade: The Portuguese in West Africa
Alvise da Cadamosto (1455-1456)
You should also know that behind this Cauo Bianco on the land, is a place called Hoden,[1] which is about six days inland by camel. This place is not walled, but is frequented by Arabs, and is a market where the caravans arrive from Tanbutu [Timbuktu], and from other places in the land of the Blacks, on their way to our nearer Barbary. The food of the peoples of this place is dates, and barley, of which there is sufficient, for they grow in some of these places, but not abundantly. They drink the milk of camels and other animals, for they have no wine. They also have cows and goats, but not many, for the land is dry. Their oxen and cows, compared with ours, are small.
They are Muhammadans, and very hostile to Christians. They never remain settled, but are always wandering over these deserts. These are the men who go to the land of the Blacks, and also to our nearer Barbary. They are very numerous, and have many camels on which they carry brass and silver from Barbary and other things to Tanbuto and to the land of the Blacks. Thence they carry away gold and pepper, which they bring hither. They are brown complexioned, and wear white cloaks edged with a red stripe: their women also dress thus, without shifts. On their heads the men wear turbans in the Moorish fashion, and they always go barefooted. In these sandy districts there are many lions, leopards, and ostriches, the eggs of which I have often eaten and found good.
You should know that the said Lord Infante of Portugal [the crown prince, Henry the Navigator] has leased this island of Argin to Christians [for ten years], so that no one can enter the bay to trade with the Arabs save those who hold the license. These have dwellings on the island and factories where they buy and sell with the said Arabs who come to the coast to trade for merchandise of various kinds, such as woollen cloths, cotton, silver, and “alchezeli,” that is, cloaks, carpets, and similar articles and above all, corn, for they are always short of food. They give in exchange slaves whom the Arabs bring from the land of the Blacks, and gold tiber. The Lord Infante therefore caused a castle to be built on the island to protect this trade for ever. For this reason, Portuguese caravels are coming and going all the year to this island.
These Arabs also have many Berber horses, which they trade, and take to the Land of the Blacks, exchanging them with the rulers for slaves. Ten or fifteen slaves are given for one of these horses, according to their quality. The Arabs likewise take articles of Moorish silk, made in Granata and in Tunis of Barbary, silver, and other goods, obtaining in exchange any number of these slaves, and some gold. These slaves are brought to the market and town of Hoden; there they are divided: some go to the mountains of Barcha, and thence to Sicily, [others to the said town of Tunis and to all the coasts of Barbary], and others again are taken to this place, Argin, and sold to the Portuguese leaseholders. As a result every year the Portuguese carry away from Argin a thousand slaves. Note that before this traffic was organized, the Portuguese caravels, sometimes four, sometimes more, were wont to come armed to the Golfo d’Argin, and descending on the land by night, would assail the fisher villages, and so ravage the land. Thus they took of these Arabs both men and women, and carried them to Portugal for sale: behaving in a like manner along all the rest of the coast, which stretches from Cauo Bianco to the Rio di Senega and even beyond. …
[1] Wadan, an important desert market about 350 miles east of Arguim. Later, in 1487, when the Portuguese were endeavouring to penetrate the interior they attempted to establish a trading factory at Wadan which acted as a feeder to Arguim, tapping the north-bound caravan traffic and diverting some of it to the west coast.
Social Structure of France on the Eve of the Wars of Religion
Giovanni Sorano (1558)
The inhabitants of the kingdom are divided into four classes of persons, viz: nobles; men of the long robe; peasantry; and clergy. The nobles, under which designation are included lords and princes, do not dwell in the cities, but in the villages, in their castles, and for the most part give little attention to letters, but are either soldiers or follow the court, leaving the management of the house and the revenues to their wives.
The French are, generally speaking, suspicious, high spirited and impatient of restraint, wherefore it is noticeable that in war, after the first dash is over, they are almost useless. They are more liberal away from home than at home; nevertheless, whoever accommodates himself to their moods will find them for the most part courteous. They avoid labor in so far as they are able, and above all it is a peculiarity of the Frenchman that he reflects little, and therefore very many of their conclusions are hastily arrived at; whence it often happens that they have no sooner finished an undertaking than they perceive its error and repent of it; but the strength of the kingdom is great enough to overcome all these errors.
There is no special burden upon the nobility beyond that which arises from their feudal holdings, which is to go to war at their own expense with such a number of horsemen as may be determined by the conditions of their investiture, in default of which they are condemned to pay money, and now the burden has become so great by reason of continued warfare that the nobility of France is seen to be almost wholly impoverished.
This militia is called the arriere-ban, because those who compose it are the last who are obliged to go to war and are for the defence of the kingdom. They are able to bring out about 16,000 horse, and they do not all come out at one time, but only that part for which an immediate need is felt; and from the fact that it is a very inferior soldiery, since the lords do not themselves go to war, but send their retainers and these badly equipped, it is understood that the king intends to do away with the obligation to send men to war and substitute a proportionate money payment, with which he may increase the number of his men-at-arms.
The second class embraces those who are called men of the long robe, and is divided into two groups. The first, which is the better bred, is made up of those who occupy judicial positions and all the other officials of the palace and those as well who manage the finances and accounts of the king. All these offices his majesty sells for the lifetime of the purchaser, and their honor and advantage is so great that they are bought at high prices. They enjoy also many important privileges, as though they were nobles, and easily secure the same for their descendants.
The other group is that of the merchants, who have personally no way of gaining a share in any sort of distinction, but if they wish to give a certain position to their sons they have them made doctors, whereby a judicial career is open to them equally with the members of the former group; and it may be said moreover that in them principally the wealth of France is to be found. No special burden is laid upon this class beyond the maintenance of 50,000 infantry for four months, for the defence of the kingdom in time of war, which contribution has been for some time so modified that all the inhabitants of the cities and other walled places now contribute to it. But because the greater part of these who have offices from the king are exempt by special privilege, the burden has come to rest wholly upon those who are least able to bear it.
The third class is the peasantry, who are extremely poor, principally on account of the heavy taxes which they pay to the king, since they are obliged to pay an ordinary taille of four millions of francs; and also on account of the aides,which amount to six hundred thousand; in addition to this a million francs to augment the number of men-at-arms; and, outside of all this, in times of war, the taille has at times been increased in amount two millions of francs; to which burdens those peasants alone contribute who work the soil. The assessments are made first upon the provinces, are then distributed by villages, and the peasants arrange the further per capitaassessment, each one being responsible for the others, in such a way that the king actually receives the whole amount that he has demanded.
The fourth class is the clergy, in which are comprised the 117 bishoprics, 15 archbishoprics and 1230 abbacies, besides an infinite number of priories and benefices, which altogether amount in value to six million francs of income, and in ordinary time the king levies upon these an annual tax of four-tenths; and sometimes, in case of war, even up to six-tenths. But from the fact that the assessment is made very loosely and upon an estimate of incomes as they existed many years ago, they do not render more than 300,000 francs for each tenth. The disposition of all these benefices belongs to the king, except in the case of those which become vacant through the death of those prelates who die at the Roman court, and these belong to the pope. The authority for this disposition was first granted by pope Leo; then enlarged by Clement and finally confirmed by pope Julius II; nor shall I omit to say that these benefices are for the most part awarded with little respect for sacred things and by simple favor, or to recompense benefits conferred, with little consideration for the personality of the applicant; in such a way that whoever has served the king in war or otherwise desires no better thing by way of being rewarded than with benefices; wherefore it is a common thing to see a man who yesterday was a soldier or merchant, today a bishop or abbot: and if he has a wife and cannot assume ecclesiastical garb he is allowed to put his benefice under the name of another and retain the revenues for himself. And it is on this account, as well as through the evil tendencies of the time, that heresy has increased to such an extent in this realm, that they say there are at present 400,000 Lutherans,[1] so united by intercourse and mutual understanding that it is with great difficulty that any method may be found of remedying this state of affairs.
[1] “Lutherans” was the label that Roman Catholics in the sixteenth century often applied to all Protestants, irrespective of confession. Here, these “Lutherans” were in fact mostly Calvinists.
Michel de Montaigne on the Fallibility of Human Understanding
Michel de Montaigne
(1580)
I do not know what to say about it, but it is evident from experience that so many interpretations disperse the truth and shatter it. Aristotle wrote to be understood; if he did not succeed, still less will another man, less able, and not treating his own ideas. By diluting the substance we allow it to escape and spill it all over the place; of one subject we make a thousand, and, multiplying and subdividing, fall back into Epicurus’ infinity of atoms. Never did two men judge alike about the same thing, and it is impossible to find two opinions exactly alike, not only in different men, but in the same man at different times. Ordinarily I find subject for doubt in what the commentary has not deigned to touch on. I am more apt to trip on flat ground, like certain horses I know which stumble more often on a smooth road.
Who would not say that glosses increase doubts and ignorance, since there is no book to be found, whether human or divine, with which the world busies itself, whose difficulties are cleared up by interpretation? The hundredth commentator hands it on to his successor thornier and rougher than the first one had found it. When do we agree and say, “There has been enough about this book; henceforth there is nothing more to say about it”?
This is best seen in law practice. We give legal authority to numberless doctors, numberless decisions, and as many interpretations. Do we therefore find any end to the need of interpreting? Do we see any progress and advance toward tranquillity? Do we need fewer lawyers and judges than when this mass of law was still in its infancy? On the contrary, we obscure and bury the meaning; we no longer find it except hidden by so many enclosures and barriers.
Men do not know the natural infirmity of their mind: it does nothing but ferret and quest, and keeps incessantly whirling around, building up and becoming entangled in its own work, like our silkworms, and is suffocated in it.A mouse in a pitch barrel [Erasmus]. It thinks it notices from a distance some sort of glimmer of imaginary light and truth; but while running toward it, it is crossed by so many difficulties and obstacles, and diverted by so many new quests, that it strays from the road, bewildered. …
It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other. The world is swarming with commentaries; of authors there is a great scarcity.
Is it not the chief and most reputed learning of our times to learn to understand the learned? Is that not the common and ultimate end of all studies?
Our opinions are grafted upon one another. The first serves as a stock for the second, the second for the third. Thus we scale the ladder, step by step. And thence it happens that he who has mounted highest has often more honor than merit; for he has only mounted one speck higher on the shoulders of the next last.
How often and perhaps how stupidly have I extended my book to make it speak for itself! Stupidly, if only for this reason, that I should have remembered what I say of others who do the same: that these frequent sheep’s eyes at their own work testify that their heart thrills with love for it, and that even the rough, disdainful blows with which they beat it are only the love taps and affectations of maternal fondness; in keeping with Aristotle, to whom self-appreciation and self-depreciation often spring from the same sort of arrogance. For as for my excuse, that I ought to have more liberty in this than others, precisely because I write of myself and my writings as of my other actions, because my theme turns in upon itself–I do not know whether everyone will accept it.
I have observed in Germany that Luther has left as many divisions and altercations over the uncertainty of his opinions, and more, as he raised about the Holy Scriptures.
Our disputes are purely verbal. I ask what is “nature,” “pleasure,” “circle,” “substitution.” The question is one of words, and is answered in the same way. “A stone is a body.” But if you pressed on: “And what is a body?”–”Substance.”–”And what is substance?” and so on, you would finally drive the respondent to the end of his lexicon. We exchange one word for another word, often more unknown. I know better what is man than I know what is animal, or mortal, or rational. To satisfy one doubt, they give me three; it is the Hydra’s head.
Socrates asked Meno what virtue was. “There is,” said Meno, “the virtue of a man and a woman, of a magistrate and of a private individual, of a child and of an old man.” “That’s fine,” exclaimed Socrates; “we were in search of one virtue, and here is a whole swarm of them.”
Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes Grants Limited Toleration to the Huguenots
Henry IV
(1598)
Among the infinite benefits which it has pleased God to heap upon us, the most signal and precious is his granting us the strength and ability to withstand the fearful disorders and troubles which prevailed on our advent in this kingdom. The realm was so torn by innumerable factions and sects that the most legitimate of all the parties was fewest in numbers. God has given us strength to stand out against this storm; we have finally surmounted the waves and made our port of safety,–peace for our state. For which his be the glory all in all, and ours a free recognition of his grace in making use of our instrumentality in the good work. … We implore and await from the Divine Goodness the same protection and favor which he has ever granted to this kingdom from the beginning. …
We have, by this perpetual and irrevocable edict, established and proclaimed and do establish and proclaim:
I. First, that the recollection of everything done by one party or the other between March, 1585, and our accession to the crown, and during all the preceding period of troubles, remain obliterated and forgotten, as if no such things had ever happened.
III. We ordain that the Catholic Apostolic and Roman religion shall be restored and reestablished in all places and localities of this our kingdom and countries subject to our sway, where the exercise of the same has been interrupted, in order that it may be peaceably and freely exercised, without any trouble or hindrance; forbidding very expressly all persons, of whatsoever estate, quality, or condition, from troubling, molesting, or disturbing ecclesiastics in the celebration of divine service, in the enjoyment or collection of tithes, fruits, or revenues of their benefices, and all other rights and dues belonging to them; and that all those who during the troubles have taken possession of churches, houses, goods or revenues, belonging to the said ecclesiastics, shall surrender to them entire possession and peaceable enjoyment of such rights, liberties, and sureties as they had before they were deprived of them.
VI. And in order to leave no occasion for troubles or differences between our subjects, we have permitted, and herewith permit, those of the said religion called Reformed to live and abide in all the cities and places of this our kingdom and countries of our sway, without being annoyed, molested, or compelled to do anything in the matter of religion contrary to their consciences, … upon conditions that they comport themselves in other respects according to that which is contained in this our present edict.
VII. It is permitted to all lords, gentlemen, and other persons making profession of the said religion called Reformed, holding the right of high justice [or a certain feudal tenure], to exercise the said religion in their houses.
IX. We also permit those of the said religion to make and continue the exercise of the same in all villages and places of our dominion where it was established by them and publicly enjoyed several and divers times in the year 1597, up to the end of the month of August, notwithstanding all decrees and judgments to the contrary.
XIII. We very expressly forbid to all those of the said religion its exercise, either in respect to ministry, regulation, discipline, or the public instruction of children, or otherwise, in this our kingdom and lands of our dominion, otherwise than in the places permitted and granted by the present edict.
XIV. It is forbidden as well to perform any function of the said religion on our court or retinue, or in our lands and territories beyond the mountains, or in our city of Paris, or within five leagues of the said city.
XVIII. We also forbid all our subjects, of whatever quality and condition, from carrying off by force or persuasion, against the will of their parents, the children of the said religion, in order to cause them to be baptized or confirmed in the Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church; and the same is forbidden to those of the said religion called Reformed, upon penalty of being punished with special severity.
XXI. Books concerning the said religion called Reformed may not be printed and publicly sold, except in cities and places where the public exercise of the said religion is permitted.
XXII. We ordain that there shall be no difference or distinction made in respect to the said religion, in receiving pupils to be instructed in universities, colleges, and schools; or in receiving the sick and poor into hospitals, retreats and public charities.
XXIII. Those of the said religion called Reformed shall be obliged to respect the laws of the Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church, recognized in this our kingdom, for the consummation of marriages contracted, or to be contracted, as regards to the degrees of consanguinity and kinship.
The Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans: A Lamentation
Ducas (c. 1465)
And the entire City [its inhabitants and wealth] was to be seen in the tents of the [Turkish] camp, the city deserted, lying lifeless, naked, soundless, without either form or beauty. O City, City, head of all cities! O City, City, center of the four corners of the world! O City, City, pride of the Romans, civilizer of the barbarians! O City, second paradise planted toward the west, possessing all kinds of vegetation, laden with spiritual fruits! Where is your beauty, O paradise, where the beneficent strength of the charms of your spirit, soul, and body? Where are the bodies of the Apostles of my Lord, which were implanted long ago in the always-green paradise, having in their midst the purple cloak, the lance, the sponge, the reed, which, when we kissed them, made us believe that we were seeing him who was raised on the Cross? Where are the relics of the saints, those of the martyrs? Where the remains of Constantine the Great and the other emperors? Roads, courtyards, crossroads, fields, and vineyard enclosures, all teem with the relics of saints, with the bodies of nobles, of the chaste, and of male and female ascetics. Oh what a loss! “The dead bodies of thy servants, O Lord, have they given to be meat unto the fowls of the heaven, the flesh of thy saints unto the beasts of the earth round about New Sion and there was none to bury them [Psalm 78:2-3].”
O temple [Hagia Sophia]! O earthly heaven! O heavenly altar! O sacred and divine places! O magnificence of the churches! O holy books and words of God! O ancient and modern laws! O tablets inscribed by the finger of God! O Scriptures spoken by his mouth! O divine discourses of angels who bore flesh! O doctrines of men filled with the Holy Spirit! O teachings of semi-divine heroes! O commonwealth! O citizens! O army, formerly beyond number, now removed from sight like a ship sunk into the sea! O houses and palaces of every type! O sacred walls! Today I invoke you all, and as if incarnate beings I mourn with you, having Jeremiah as [choral] leader of this lamentable tragedy!
Malleus Maleficarum: How to Torture a Witch
Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer (1486)
The method of beginning an examination by torture is as follows: First, the jailers prepare the implements of torture, then they strip the prisoner (if it be a woman, she has already been stripped by other women, upright and of good report). This stripping is lest some means of witchcraft may have been sewed into the clothing–such as often, taught by the Devil, they prepare from the bodies of unbaptized infants, [murdered] that they may forfeit salvation. And when the implements of torture have been prepared, the judge, both in person and through other good men zealous in the faith, tries to persuade the prisoner to confess the truth freely; but, if he will not confess, he bids attendants make the prisoner fast to the strappado or some other implement of torture. The attendants obey forthwith, yet with feigned agitation. Then, at the prayer of some of those present, the prisoner is loosed again and is taken aside and once more persuaded to confess, being led to believe that he will in that case not be put to death.
Here it may be asked whether the judge, in the case of a prisoner much defamed, convicted both by witnesses and by proofs, nothing being lacking but his own confession, can properly lead him to hope that his life will be spared–when, even if he confess his crime, he will be punished with death.
It must be answered that opinions vary. Some hold that even a witch of very ill repute, against whom the evidence justifies violent suspicion, and who, as a ringleader of the witches, is accounted very dangerous, may be assured her life, and condemned instead to perpetual imprisonment on bread and water, in case she will give sure and convincing testimony against other witches; yet this penalty of perpetual imprisonment must not be announced to her, but only that her life will be spared, and that she will be punished in some other fashion, perhaps by exile. And doubtless such notorious witches, especially those who prepare witch-potions or who by magical methods cure those bewitched, would be peculiarly suited to be thus preserved, in order to aid the bewitched or to accuse other witches, were it not that their accusations cannot be trusted, since the Devil is a liar, unless confirmed by proofs and witnesses.
Others hold, as to this point, that for a time the promise made to the witch sentenced to imprisonment is to be kept, but that after a time she should be burned.
A third view is, that the judge may safely promise witches to spare their lives, if only he will later excuse himself from pronouncing the sentence and will let another do this in his place. …
But if, neither by threats nor by promises such as these, the witch can be induced to speak the truth, then the jailers must carry out the sentence, and torture the prisoner according to the accepted methods, with more or less of severity as the delinquent’s crime may demand. And, while he is being tortured, he must be questioned on the articles of accusation, and this frequently and persistently, beginning with the lighter charges–for he will more readily confess the lighter than the heavier. And, while this is being done, the notary must write down everything in his record of the trial–how the prisoner is tortured, on what points he is questioned, and how he answers.
And note that, if he confesses under the torture, he must afterward be conducted to another place, that he may confirm it and certify that it was not due alone to the force of the torture.
But, if the prisoner will not confess the truth satisfactorily, other sorts of tortures must be placed before him, with the statement that, unless he will confess the truth, he must endure these also. But, if not even thus he can be brought into terror and to the truth, then the next day or the next but one is to be set for a continuation of the tortures–not a repetition, for they must not be repeated unless new evidences be produced.
The judge must then address to the prisoners the following sentence: We, the judge, etc., do assign to you, –, such and such a day for the continuation of the tortures, that from your own mouth the truth may be heard, and that the whole may be recorded by the notary.
And during the interval, before the day assigned, the judge, in person or through approved men, must in the manner above described try to persuade the prisoner to confess, promising her (if there is aught to be gained by this promise) that her life shall be spared.
The judge shall see to it, moreover, that throughout this interval guards are constantly with the prisoner, so that she may not be left alone; because she will be visited by the Devil and tempted into suicide.
Fifteenth-Century Slave Trade: The Portuguese in West Africa
Alvise da Cadamosto (1455-1456)
You should also know that behind this Cauo Bianco on the land, is a place called Hoden,[1] which is about six days inland by camel. This place is not walled, but is frequented by Arabs, and is a market where the caravans arrive from Tanbutu [Timbuktu], and from other places in the land of the Blacks, on their way to our nearer Barbary. The food of the peoples of this place is dates, and barley, of which there is sufficient, for they grow in some of these places, but not abundantly. They drink the milk of camels and other animals, for they have no wine. They also have cows and goats, but not many, for the land is dry. Their oxen and cows, compared with ours, are small.
They are Muhammadans, and very hostile to Christians. They never remain settled, but are always wandering over these deserts. These are the men who go to the land of the Blacks, and also to our nearer Barbary. They are very numerous, and have many camels on which they carry brass and silver from Barbary and other things to Tanbuto and to the land of the Blacks. Thence they carry away gold and pepper, which they bring hither. They are brown complexioned, and wear white cloaks edged with a red stripe: their women also dress thus, without shifts. On their heads the men wear turbans in the Moorish fashion, and they always go barefooted. In these sandy districts there are many lions, leopards, and ostriches, the eggs of which I have often eaten and found good.
You should know that the said Lord Infante of Portugal [the crown prince, Henry the Navigator] has leased this island of Argin to Christians [for ten years], so that no one can enter the bay to trade with the Arabs save those who hold the license. These have dwellings on the island and factories where they buy and sell with the said Arabs who come to the coast to trade for merchandise of various kinds, such as woollen cloths, cotton, silver, and “alchezeli,” that is, cloaks, carpets, and similar articles and above all, corn, for they are always short of food. They give in exchange slaves whom the Arabs bring from the land of the Blacks, and gold tiber. The Lord Infante therefore caused a castle to be built on the island to protect this trade for ever. For this reason, Portuguese caravels are coming and going all the year to this island.
These Arabs also have many Berber horses, which they trade, and take to the Land of the Blacks, exchanging them with the rulers for slaves. Ten or fifteen slaves are given for one of these horses, according to their quality. The Arabs likewise take articles of Moorish silk, made in Granata and in Tunis of Barbary, silver, and other goods, obtaining in exchange any number of these slaves, and some gold. These slaves are brought to the market and town of Hoden; there they are divided: some go to the mountains of Barcha, and thence to Sicily, [others to the said town of Tunis and to all the coasts of Barbary], and others again are taken to this place, Argin, and sold to the Portuguese leaseholders. As a result every year the Portuguese carry away from Argin a thousand slaves. Note that before this traffic was organized, the Portuguese caravels, sometimes four, sometimes more, were wont to come armed to the Golfo d’Argin, and descending on the land by night, would assail the fisher villages, and so ravage the land. Thus they took of these Arabs both men and women, and carried them to Portugal for sale: behaving in a like manner along all the rest of the coast, which stretches from Cauo Bianco to the Rio di Senega and even beyond. …
[1] Wadan, an important desert market about 350 miles east of Arguim. Later, in 1487, when the Portuguese were endeavouring to penetrate the interior they attempted to establish a trading factory at Wadan which acted as a feeder to Arguim, tapping the north-bound caravan traffic and diverting some of it to the west coast.
Social Structure of France on the Eve of the Wars of Religion
Giovanni Sorano (1558)
The inhabitants of the kingdom are divided into four classes of persons, viz: nobles; men of the long robe; peasantry; and clergy. The nobles, under which designation are included lords and princes, do not dwell in the cities, but in the villages, in their castles, and for the most part give little attention to letters, but are either soldiers or follow the court, leaving the management of the house and the revenues to their wives.
The French are, generally speaking, suspicious, high spirited and impatient of restraint, wherefore it is noticeable that in war, after the first dash is over, they are almost useless. They are more liberal away from home than at home; nevertheless, whoever accommodates himself to their moods will find them for the most part courteous. They avoid labor in so far as they are able, and above all it is a peculiarity of the Frenchman that he reflects little, and therefore very many of their conclusions are hastily arrived at; whence it often happens that they have no sooner finished an undertaking than they perceive its error and repent of it; but the strength of the kingdom is great enough to overcome all these errors.
There is no special burden upon the nobility beyond that which arises from their feudal holdings, which is to go to war at their own expense with such a number of horsemen as may be determined by the conditions of their investiture, in default of which they are condemned to pay money, and now the burden has become so great by reason of continued warfare that the nobility of France is seen to be almost wholly impoverished.
This militia is called the arriere-ban, because those who compose it are the last who are obliged to go to war and are for the defence of the kingdom. They are able to bring out about 16,000 horse, and they do not all come out at one time, but only that part for which an immediate need is felt; and from the fact that it is a very inferior soldiery, since the lords do not themselves go to war, but send their retainers and these badly equipped, it is understood that the king intends to do away with the obligation to send men to war and substitute a proportionate money payment, with which he may increase the number of his men-at-arms.
The second class embraces those who are called men of the long robe, and is divided into two groups. The first, which is the better bred, is made up of those who occupy judicial positions and all the other officials of the palace and those as well who manage the finances and accounts of the king. All these offices his majesty sells for the lifetime of the purchaser, and their honor and advantage is so great that they are bought at high prices. They enjoy also many important privileges, as though they were nobles, and easily secure the same for their descendants.
The other group is that of the merchants, who have personally no way of gaining a share in any sort of distinction, but if they wish to give a certain position to their sons they have them made doctors, whereby a judicial career is open to them equally with the members of the former group; and it may be said moreover that in them principally the wealth of France is to be found. No special burden is laid upon this class beyond the maintenance of 50,000 infantry for four months, for the defence of the kingdom in time of war, which contribution has been for some time so modified that all the inhabitants of the cities and other walled places now contribute to it. But because the greater part of these who have offices from the king are exempt by special privilege, the burden has come to rest wholly upon those who are least able to bear it.
The third class is the peasantry, who are extremely poor, principally on account of the heavy taxes which they pay to the king, since they are obliged to pay an ordinary taille of four millions of francs; and also on account of the aides,which amount to six hundred thousand; in addition to this a million francs to augment the number of men-at-arms; and, outside of all this, in times of war, the taille has at times been increased in amount two millions of francs; to which burdens those peasants alone contribute who work the soil. The assessments are made first upon the provinces, are then distributed by villages, and the peasants arrange the further per capitaassessment, each one being responsible for the others, in such a way that the king actually receives the whole amount that he has demanded.
The fourth class is the clergy, in which are comprised the 117 bishoprics, 15 archbishoprics and 1230 abbacies, besides an infinite number of priories and benefices, which altogether amount in value to six million francs of income, and in ordinary time the king levies upon these an annual tax of four-tenths; and sometimes, in case of war, even up to six-tenths. But from the fact that the assessment is made very loosely and upon an estimate of incomes as they existed many years ago, they do not render more than 300,000 francs for each tenth. The disposition of all these benefices belongs to the king, except in the case of those which become vacant through the death of those prelates who die at the Roman court, and these belong to the pope. The authority for this disposition was first granted by pope Leo; then enlarged by Clement and finally confirmed by pope Julius II; nor shall I omit to say that these benefices are for the most part awarded with little respect for sacred things and by simple favor, or to recompense benefits conferred, with little consideration for the personality of the applicant; in such a way that whoever has served the king in war or otherwise desires no better thing by way of being rewarded than with benefices; wherefore it is a common thing to see a man who yesterday was a soldier or merchant, today a bishop or abbot: and if he has a wife and cannot assume ecclesiastical garb he is allowed to put his benefice under the name of another and retain the revenues for himself. And it is on this account, as well as through the evil tendencies of the time, that heresy has increased to such an extent in this realm, that they say there are at present 400,000 Lutherans,[1] so united by intercourse and mutual understanding that it is with great difficulty that any method may be found of remedying this state of affairs.
[1] “Lutherans” was the label that Roman Catholics in the sixteenth century often applied to all Protestants, irrespective of confession. Here, these “Lutherans” were in fact mostly Calvinists.
Michel de Montaigne on the Fallibility of Human Understanding
Michel de Montaigne
(1580)
I do not know what to say about it, but it is evident from experience that so many interpretations disperse the truth and shatter it. Aristotle wrote to be understood; if he did not succeed, still less will another man, less able, and not treating his own ideas. By diluting the substance we allow it to escape and spill it all over the place; of one subject we make a thousand, and, multiplying and subdividing, fall back into Epicurus’ infinity of atoms. Never did two men judge alike about the same thing, and it is impossible to find two opinions exactly alike, not only in different men, but in the same man at different times. Ordinarily I find subject for doubt in what the commentary has not deigned to touch on. I am more apt to trip on flat ground, like certain horses I know which stumble more often on a smooth road.
Who would not say that glosses increase doubts and ignorance, since there is no book to be found, whether human or divine, with which the world busies itself, whose difficulties are cleared up by interpretation? The hundredth commentator hands it on to his successor thornier and rougher than the first one had found it. When do we agree and say, “There has been enough about this book; henceforth there is nothing more to say about it”?
This is best seen in law practice. We give legal authority to numberless doctors, numberless decisions, and as many interpretations. Do we therefore find any end to the need of interpreting? Do we see any progress and advance toward tranquillity? Do we need fewer lawyers and judges than when this mass of law was still in its infancy? On the contrary, we obscure and bury the meaning; we no longer find it except hidden by so many enclosures and barriers.
Men do not know the natural infirmity of their mind: it does nothing but ferret and quest, and keeps incessantly whirling around, building up and becoming entangled in its own work, like our silkworms, and is suffocated in it.A mouse in a pitch barrel [Erasmus]. It thinks it notices from a distance some sort of glimmer of imaginary light and truth; but while running toward it, it is crossed by so many difficulties and obstacles, and diverted by so many new quests, that it strays from the road, bewildered. …
It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other. The world is swarming with commentaries; of authors there is a great scarcity.
Is it not the chief and most reputed learning of our times to learn to understand the learned? Is that not the common and ultimate end of all studies?
Our opinions are grafted upon one another. The first serves as a stock for the second, the second for the third. Thus we scale the ladder, step by step. And thence it happens that he who has mounted highest has often more honor than merit; for he has only mounted one speck higher on the shoulders of the next last.
How often and perhaps how stupidly have I extended my book to make it speak for itself! Stupidly, if only for this reason, that I should have remembered what I say of others who do the same: that these frequent sheep’s eyes at their own work testify that their heart thrills with love for it, and that even the rough, disdainful blows with which they beat it are only the love taps and affectations of maternal fondness; in keeping with Aristotle, to whom self-appreciation and self-depreciation often spring from the same sort of arrogance. For as for my excuse, that I ought to have more liberty in this than others, precisely because I write of myself and my writings as of my other actions, because my theme turns in upon itself–I do not know whether everyone will accept it.
I have observed in Germany that Luther has left as many divisions and altercations over the uncertainty of his opinions, and more, as he raised about the Holy Scriptures.
Our disputes are purely verbal. I ask what is “nature,” “pleasure,” “circle,” “substitution.” The question is one of words, and is answered in the same way. “A stone is a body.” But if you pressed on: “And what is a body?”–”Substance.”–”And what is substance?” and so on, you would finally drive the respondent to the end of his lexicon. We exchange one word for another word, often more unknown. I know better what is man than I know what is animal, or mortal, or rational. To satisfy one doubt, they give me three; it is the Hydra’s head.
Socrates asked Meno what virtue was. “There is,” said Meno, “the virtue of a man and a woman, of a magistrate and of a private individual, of a child and of an old man.” “That’s fine,” exclaimed Socrates; “we were in search of one virtue, and here is a whole swarm of them.”
Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes Grants Limited Toleration to the Huguenots
Henry IV
(1598)
Among the infinite benefits which it has pleased God to heap upon us, the most signal and precious is his granting us the strength and ability to withstand the fearful disorders and troubles which prevailed on our advent in this kingdom. The realm was so torn by innumerable factions and sects that the most legitimate of all the parties was fewest in numbers. God has given us strength to stand out against this storm; we have finally surmounted the waves and made our port of safety,–peace for our state. For which his be the glory all in all, and ours a free recognition of his grace in making use of our instrumentality in the good work. … We implore and await from the Divine Goodness the same protection and favor which he has ever granted to this kingdom from the beginning. …
We have, by this perpetual and irrevocable edict, established and proclaimed and do establish and proclaim:
I. First, that the recollection of everything done by one party or the other between March, 1585, and our accession to the crown, and during all the preceding period of troubles, remain obliterated and forgotten, as if no such things had ever happened.
III. We ordain that the Catholic Apostolic and Roman religion shall be restored and reestablished in all places and localities of this our kingdom and countries subject to our sway, where the exercise of the same has been interrupted, in order that it may be peaceably and freely exercised, without any trouble or hindrance; forbidding very expressly all persons, of whatsoever estate, quality, or condition, from troubling, molesting, or disturbing ecclesiastics in the celebration of divine service, in the enjoyment or collection of tithes, fruits, or revenues of their benefices, and all other rights and dues belonging to them; and that all those who during the troubles have taken possession of churches, houses, goods or revenues, belonging to the said ecclesiastics, shall surrender to them entire possession and peaceable enjoyment of such rights, liberties, and sureties as they had before they were deprived of them.
VI. And in order to leave no occasion for troubles or differences between our subjects, we have permitted, and herewith permit, those of the said religion called Reformed to live and abide in all the cities and places of this our kingdom and countries of our sway, without being annoyed, molested, or compelled to do anything in the matter of religion contrary to their consciences, … upon conditions that they comport themselves in other respects according to that which is contained in this our present edict.
VII. It is permitted to all lords, gentlemen, and other persons making profession of the said religion called Reformed, holding the right of high justice [or a certain feudal tenure], to exercise the said religion in their houses.
IX. We also permit those of the said religion to make and continue the exercise of the same in all villages and places of our dominion where it was established by them and publicly enjoyed several and divers times in the year 1597, up to the end of the month of August, notwithstanding all decrees and judgments to the contrary.
XIII. We very expressly forbid to all those of the said religion its exercise, either in respect to ministry, regulation, discipline, or the public instruction of children, or otherwise, in this our kingdom and lands of our dominion, otherwise than in the places permitted and granted by the present edict.
XIV. It is forbidden as well to perform any function of the said religion on our court or retinue, or in our lands and territories beyond the mountains, or in our city of Paris, or within five leagues of the said city.
XVIII. We also forbid all our subjects, of whatever quality and condition, from carrying off by force or persuasion, against the will of their parents, the children of the said religion, in order to cause them to be baptized or confirmed in the Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church; and the same is forbidden to those of the said religion called Reformed, upon penalty of being punished with special severity.
XXI. Books concerning the said religion called Reformed may not be printed and publicly sold, except in cities and places where the public exercise of the said religion is permitted.
XXII. We ordain that there shall be no difference or distinction made in respect to the said religion, in receiving pupils to be instructed in universities, colleges, and schools; or in receiving the sick and poor into hospitals, retreats and public charities.
XXIII. Those of the said religion called Reformed shall be obliged to respect the laws of the Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church, recognized in this our kingdom, for the consummation of marriages contracted, or to be contracted, as regards to the degrees of consanguinity and kinship.
Primary Sources – Unit Five – Absolutism and Constitutionalism in Western Europe (ca 1589-1715)
Charles I Authorizes Sunday Recreations
Charles I
(1633)
Our dear father of blessed memory, [James I], in his return from Scotland, coming through Lancashire, found that his subjects were debarred from lawful recreations upon Sundays after evening prayers ended and, upon holydays; and he prudently considered that if these times were taken from them, the meaner sort, who labor hard all the week, should have no recreations at all to refresh their spirits; and after his return he further saw that his loyal subjects in all other parts of his kingdom did suffer in the same kind, though perhaps not in the same degree; and did therefore, in his princely wisdom, publish a declaration to all his loving subjects concerning lawful sports to be used at such times … in the year 1618. …
Our pleasure likewise is, that the bishop of that diocese take the like strait order with all the Puritans and precisians within the same, either constraining them to conform themselves or to leave the country, according to the laws of our kingdom and canons of our Church, and so to strike equally on both hands against the contemners of our authority and adversaries of our Church; and as for our good people’s lawful recreation, our pleasure likewise is, that after the end of divine service our good people be not disturbed, letted, or discouraged from any lawful recreation, such as dancing, either men or women; archery for men, leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation, nor from having of May-games, Whitsun-ales, and Morris-dances, and the setting up of Maypoles and other sports therewith used, so as the same be had in due and convenient time, without impediment or neglect of divine service; and that women shall have leave to carry rushes to the church for the decorating of it, according to their old custom; but withal we do here account still as prohibited all unlawful games to be used upon Sundays only, as bear and bull baitings, interludes, and at all times in the meaner sort of people by law prohibited, bowling.
Richelieu Evaluates the State of the French Monarchy
Richelieu
(1624)
At the time when your Majesty resolved to admit me both to your council and to an important place in your confidence for the direction of your affairs, I may say that the Huguenots shared the state with you; that the nobles conducted themselves as if they were not your subjects, and the most powerful governors of the provinces as if they were sovereign in their offices.
I may say that the bad example of all these was so injurious to this realm that even the best regulated parlementswere affected by it, and endeavored, in certain cases, to diminish your royal authority as far as they were able in order to stretch their own powers beyond the limits of reason.
I may say that every one measured his own merit by his audacity; that in place of estimating the benefits which they received from your Majesty at their proper worth, all valued them only in so far as they satisfied the extravagant demands of their imagination; that the most arrogant were held to be the wisest, and found themselves the most prosperous.
I may also say that the foreign alliances were unfortunate, individual interests being preferred to those of the public; in a word, the dignity of the royal majesty was so disparaged, and so different from what it should be, owing to the malfeasance of those who conducted your affairs, that it was almost impossible to perceive its existence.
It was impossible, without losing all, to tolerate longer the conduct of those to whom your Majesty had entrusted the helm of state; and, on the other hand, everything could not be changed at once without violating the laws of prudence, which do not permit the abrupt passing from one extreme to another.
The sad state of your affairs seemed to force you to hasty decisions, without permitting a choice of time or of means; and yet it was necessary to make a choice of both, in order to profit by the change which necessity demanded from your prudence.
Thoughtful observers did not think that it would be possible to escape all the rocks in so tempestuous a period; the court was full of people who censured the temerity of those who wished to undertake a reform; all well knew that princes are quick to impute to those who are near them the bad outcome of the undertakings upon which they have been well advised; few people consequently expected good results from the change which it was announced that I wished to make, and many believed my fall assured even before your Majesty had elevated me.
Notwithstanding these difficulties which I represented to your Majesty, knowing how much kings may do when they make good use of their power, I ventured to promise you, with confidence, that you would soon get control of your state, and that in a short time your prudence, your courage, and the benediction of God would give a new aspect to the realm.
I promised your Majesty to employ all my industry and all the authority which it should please you to give me to ruin the Huguenot party, to abase the pride of the nobles, to bring back all your subjects to their duty, and to elevate your name among foreign nations to the point where it belongs.
Richelieu and Louis XIII Demolish Feudal Castles
Louis XIII
(1626)
Whereas formerly the assemblies of the estates of this realm and those of notable persons chosen to give advice to ourselves, and to the late king, our very honorable lord and father, on important affairs of this realm, and likewise the assembly of the estates of the province of Brittany held by us in the year 1614, have repeatedly requested and very humbly supplicated our said lord and father and ourselves to cause the demolition of many strongholds in divers places of this realm, which, being neither on hostile frontiers nor in important passes or places, only serve to augment our expenses by the maintenance of useless garrisons, and also serve as retreats for divers persons who on the least provocation disturb the provinces where they are located; …
For these reasons, we announce, declare, ordain, and will that all the strongholds, either towns or castles, which are in the interior of our realm or provinces of the same, not situated in places of importance either for frontier or defense or other considerations of weight, shall be razed and demolished; even ancient walls shall be destroyed so far as it shall be deemed necessary for the well-being and repose of our subjects and the security of this state, so that our said subjects henceforth need not fear that the said places will cause them any inconvenience, and so that we shall be freed from the expense of supporting garrisons in them.
Parliament Chastises Charles I: The Grand Remonstrance
English Parliament (1641)
The Commons in this present Parliament assembled, having with much earnestness and faithfulness of affection and zeal to the public good of this kingdom, and His Majesty’s honour and service for the space of twelve months, wrestled with great dangers and fears, the pressing miseries and calamities, the various distempers and disorders which had not only assaulted, but even overwhelmed and extinguished the liberty, peace and prosperity of this kingdom, the comfort and hopes of all His Majesty’s good subjects, and exceedingly weakened and undermined the foundation and strength of his own royal throne, do yet find an abounding malignity and opposition in those parties and factions who have been the cause of those evils, and do still labour to cast aspersions upon that which hath been done, and to raise many difficulties for the hindrance of that which remains yet undone, and to foment jealousies between the king and Parliament, that so they may deprive him and his people of the fruit of his own gracious intentions, and their humble desires of procuring the public peace, safety and happiness of this realm.
For the preventing of those miserable effects which such malicious endeavours may produce, we have thought good to declare the root and the growth of these mischievous designs: the maturity and ripeness to which they have attained before the beginning of the Parliament: the effectual means which have been used for the extirpation of those dangerous evils, and the progress which hath therein been made by His Majesty’s goodness and the wisdom of the Parliament: the ways of obstruction and opposition by which that progress hath been interrupted: the courses to be taken for the removing [of] those obstacles, and for the accomplishing of our most dutiful and faithful intentions and endeavours of restoring and establishing the ancient honour, greatness and security of this Crown and nation.
The root of all this mischief we find to be a malignant and pernicious design of subverting the fundamental laws and principles of government, upon which the religion and justice of this kingdom are firmly established. The actors and promoters hereof have been:
1. The Jesuited papists, who hate the laws, as the obstacles of that change and subversion of religion which they so much long for.
2. The bishops, and the corrupt part of the clergy, who cherish formality and superstition as the natural effects and more probable supports of their own ecclesiastical tyranny and usurpation.
3. Such councillors and courtiers as for private ends have engaged themselves to further the interests of some foreign princes or states to the prejudice of His Majesty and the state at home. …
In the beginning of His Majesty’s reign the [Catholic] party began to revive and flourish again. …
[There follows a long list of protests against arbitrary and excessive taxation.]
37. The Court of Star Chamber hath abounded in extravagant censures, not only for the maintenance and improvement of monopolies and other unlawful taxes, but for divers other causes where there hath been no offence, or very small; whereby His Majesty’s subjects have been oppressed by grievous fines, imprisonments, stigmatising, mutilations, whippings, pillories, gags, confinements, banishments; after so rigid a manner as hath not only deprived men of the society of their friends, exercise of their professions, comfort of books, use of paper or ink, but even violated that near union which God hath established between men and their wives, by forced and constrained separation. …
48. Titles of honour, judicial places, sergeantships at law, and other offices have been sold for great sums of money, whereby the common justice of the kingdom hath been much endangered, not only by opening a way of employment in places of great trust, and advantage to men of weak parts, but also by giving occasion to bribery, extortion, partiality, it seldom happening that places ill-gotten are well used. …
51. The bishops and the rest of the clergy did triumph in the suspensions, excommunications, deprivations, and degradations of divers painful, learned and pious ministers, in the vexation and grievous oppression of great numbers of His Majesty’s good subjects.
52. The [ecclesiastical court of] High Commission grew to such excess of sharpness and severity as was not much less than the Romish Inquisition, and yet in many cases by the archbishop’s power was made much more heavy, being assisted and strengthened by authority of the Council Table.
53. The bishops and their courts were as eager in the country; although their jurisdiction could not reach so high in rigour and extremity of punishment, yet were they no less grievous in respect of the generality and multiplicity of vexations, which lighting upon the meaner sort of tradesmen and artificers did impoverish many thousands.
54. And so afflict and trouble others, that great numbers to avoid their miseries departed out of the kingdom, some into New England and other parts of America, others into Holland. …
An Anonymous Pamphlet Urges Restoration of the Stuart Dynasty
Anonymous
(1659)
If we take a view of the several pretensions, carried on in the nation apart, we shall find the most considerable to be the Roman Catholic, the Royalist, the Presbyterian, the Anabaptist, the Army, the Protectorian, and that of the Parliament.
1. ‘Tis the Roman Catholic’s aim not only to abrogate the penal laws, and become capable of all employments in the Commonwealth, but to introduce his religion, to restore the rights of the Church, and utterly eradicate all that he esteems heresy.
2. ‘Tis the Royalist’s desire to bring in the king as a conqueror, to recover their losses in the late war, be rendered capable of civil employments, and have the former government of the Church.
3. ‘Tis the Presbyterian’s desire to set up his discipline, to have the covenant re‘nforced, and only such as take it to be employed in church or state; to be indemnified in reference to what they have done, and secured of what they possess.
4. ‘Tis the wish of the baptized churches that there might be no ecclesiastical government of any kind, nor ministerial function, or provision for it; and that only persons so minded should be capable of employment; likewise to be indemnified for what they have done.
5. ‘Tis the aim of the Army to govern the nation, to keep themselves from being disbanded, or engaged in war, to secure their pay, and to be indemnified for all past action.
6. ‘Tis the desire of the family of the late Protector to establish the heir of the house, that they may rule him, and he the nation, and so both preserve and advance themselves.
7. ‘Tis the wish of the present Parliament (as far as they have one common design) to continue themselves in absolute power by the specious name of a popular government; to new-model and divide, and, at last, take down, the Army; and, finally, under the pretences of a committee of Parliament, or council of state, set up an oligarchy resembling that of the Thirty Tyrants in Athens.
Lastly, ‘t is the general interest of the nation to establish the ancient fundamental laws, upon which every one’s propriety and liberty are built, to settle religion, to procure a general indemnity for all actions past, to revive their languishing and almost dead trade, gain an alliance with our neighbour states; to put the government in such hands as, besides present force, can plead a legal title to it; into the hands of such with whose private interest that of the public not only consists, but in which ‘t is necessarily involved, which likewise does least contradict the aims of particular parties; lastly, the hands of such whose counsel is fit to direct in matters of deliberation, and courage fit to vindicate the injuries of the nation.
From which premises we may conclude that the pretensions of no party now on foot in the nation are attainable; or, if attained, are consistent with the good of other parties, or of the nation; or, in fine, with their own; and from hence likewise one would be apt to conclude that the ruin of the public is inevitable; there being no door of hope left open to receive, no method visible to unite, such distant and incompatible ends.
But, notwithstanding all this, ‘t is not impossible–no, nor hard–to find an expedient that shall evacuate all these difficulties; not only establish the general concernment, but (exorbitant passion only retrenched) satisfy the real interest of every party–nay, single person–in the nation.
Now to the cheerful reception of such an overture, I suppose there is no need to persuade, nor even to admonish, that words and names, however rendered odious, ought not to frighten us from our certain benefit and dearest interest. All that is demanded here is that if, upon serious consideration, the proposal be found reasonable, men would be so kind to themselves as to receive it. The assertion I doubt not to make most plain and evident, and therefore shall as plainly pronounce it. ‘T is this: the calling in the king is the certain and only means for the preservation of the kingdom, and also of the rights and interests of all single persons in it.
The English Bill of Rights
Parliament
(1689)
And whereas the said late King James II having abdicated the government, and the throne being thereby vacant, his Highness the prince of Orange (whom it hath pleased Almighty God to make the glorious instrument of delivering this kingdom from popery and arbitrary power) did (by the advice of the lords spiritual and temporal, and diverse principal persons of the Commons) cause letters to be written to the lords spiritual and temporal, being Protestants, and other letters to the several counties, cities, universities, boroughs, and Cinque Ports [five port towns on the English Channel, having special privileges], for the choosing of such persons to represent them, as were of right to be sent to parliament, to meet and sit at Westminster upon the two and twentieth day of January, in this year 1689, in order to provide such an establishment as that their religion, laws, and liberties might not again be in danger of being subverted; upon which letters elections have been accordingly made.
And thereupon the said lords spiritual and temporal and Commons, pursuant to their respective letters and elections, being now assembled in a full and free representation of this nation, taking into their most serious consideration the best means for attaining the ends aforesaid, do in the first place (as their ancestors in like case have usually done), for the vindication and assertion of their ancient rights and liberties, declare:
1. That the pretended power of suspending laws, or the execution of laws, by regal authority, without consent of parliament is illegal.
2. That the pretended power of dispensing with the laws, or the execution of law by regal authority, as it hath been assumed and exercised of late, is illegal.
3. That the commission for erecting the late court of commissioners for ecclesiastical causes, and all other commissions and courts of like nature, are illegal and pernicious.
4. That levying money for or to the use of the crown by pretense of prerogative, without grant of parliament, for longer time or in other manner than the same is or shall be granted, is illegal.
5. That it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal.
6. That the raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with consent of parliament, is against law.
7. That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defense suitable to their conditions, and as allowed by law.
8. That election of members of parliament ought to be free.
9. That the freedom of speech, and debates or proceedings in parliament, ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of parliament.
10. That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
11. That jurors ought to be duly impaneled and returned, and jurors which pass upon men in trials for high treason ought to be freeholders.
12. That all grants and promises of fines and forfetures of particular persons before conviction are illegal and void.
13. And that for redress of all grievances, and for the amending, strengthening, and preserving of the laws, parliament ought to be held frequently.
The Puritan Ethic Revealed
Richard Baxter
(1673)
Every man that is able, must be steadily and ordinarily employed in such work as is serviceable to God, and to the common good. … Everyone that is a member of a church or commonwealth must employ their parts to the utmost for the good of the church and commonwealth, public service is God’s greatest service. To neglect this, and to say, I will pray and meditate, is as if your servant should refuse your greatest work, and to tie himself to some lesser easy part; and God has commanded you some way or another to labour for your daily bread, and not to live as drones on the sweat of others only. Innocent Adam was put into the Garden of Eden to dress it, and fallen man must eat his bread in the sweat of his brow (Genesis 3:19). And he that will not work must be forbidden to eat (2 Thes. 3:6, 10 and 12). And indeed, it is necessary for ourselves, for the health of our bodies, which will grow diseased with idleness. And for the health of our souls, which will fail if the body fail. And man in flesh must have work for his body as well as his soul. And he that will do nothing but pray and meditate, his like will (by sickness or melancholy) be disabled ere long to pray or meditate, unless he have a body extraordinary strong …
It gloryeth God, by showing the excellency of faith, when we contemn the riches and honor of the world, and live above the worldling’s life, accounting that a despicable thing, which he accounts his happiness, and loses his soul for … When seeming Christians are worldly and ambitious as others, and make as great matter of the gain, and wealth and honour, it shows that they do but cover the base and sordid spirit of worldlings, with the visor of the Christian name …
As labour is thus necessary so understand how needful a state a calling is, for the right performance of your labours. A calling is a stated course of labour. This is very needful for these reasons: (1) Out of a calling a man’s labours are but occasional or inconstant, so more time is spent in idleness than labour; (2) A man is best skilled in that which he is used to; (3) And he will be best provided for it with instruments and necessaries; (4) Therefore he does it better than he could do any other work, and so wrongs not others, but attains more the end of his labour; (5) And he does it more easily, when a man unused and unskilled and unfurnished, toils himself much in doing little; (6) And he will do his work more orderly, when another is in continual confusion, and his business knows not its time and place, but one part contradicts another. Therefore some certain calling or trade of life is best for everyman …
The first and principal thing to be intended in the choice of a trade or calling for yourselves or children is the service of God, and the public good. And, therefore, ceteris paribus [other things being equal], that calling which most conduces to the public good is to be preferred. The callings most useful to the public good are the magistrate, the pastor, the teacher of the church, schoolmaster, physician, lawyer, etc., husbandmen (ploughmen, graziers and shepherds); and next to them are mariners, clothiers, booksellers, tailors and such others that are employed about things most necessary to mankind. And some callings are employed about matters of so little use, as tobacco-sellers, lace-sellers, feather-makers, periwig-makers, and many more such, that he that may choose better, should be loath to take up with one of these, though possibly in itself it may be lawful. It is a great satisfaction to an honest mind, to spend his life in doing the greatest good he can, and a prison and a constant calamity, to be tied to spend one’s life in doing little good at all to others, though he should grow rich by it …
If thou be called to the poorest laborious calling, do not carnally murmur at it; because it is wearisome to the flesh, nor imagine that God accepts the less of thy work and thee. But cheerfully follow it, and make it the matter of thy pleasure and joy that thou art still in thy heavenly master’s services, though it be the lowest thing. And that He who knows what is best for thee, has chosen this for thy good, and tries and values thy obedience to Him the more, by how much the meaner work thou stoopest to at His command. But see that thou do it all in obedience to God, and not merely for thy own necessity. Thus every servant must serve the Lord, in serving their master, and from God expect their chief reward …
In doing good to others we do good to ourselves: because we are living members of Christ’s body, and by love and communion feel their joys, as well as pains.
Good works are comfortable evidence that faith is sincere, and that the heart dissembles not with God.
Good works are much to the honour of religion, and consequently of God, and much tend to men’s conviction, conversion and salvation.
Hobbes Describes the Natural State of War
Thomas Hobbes
(1651)
Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man. For war, consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time, is to be considered in the nature of war; as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather, lieth not in a shower or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace.
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
It may seem strange to some man, that has not well weighed these things; that nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to invade, and destroy one another: and he may therefore, not trusting to this inference, made from the passions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by experience. Let him therefore consider with himself, when taking a journey, he arms himself, and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his doors; when even in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knows there be laws, and public officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall be done him; what opinion he has of his fellow-subjects, when he rides armed; of his fellow citizens, when he locks his doors; and of his children, and servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words? But neither of us accuse man’s nature in it. The desires, and other passions of man, are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions, that proceed from those passions, till they know a law that forbids them: which till laws be made they cannot know: nor can any law be made, till they have agreed upon the person that shall make it.
It may peradventure be thought, there was never such a time, nor condition of war as this; and I believe it was never generally so, over all the world: but there are many places, where they live so now. For the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small families, the concord whereof dependeth on natural lust, have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before. Howsoever, it may be perceived what manner of life there would be, where there were no common power to fear, by the manner of life, which men that have formerly lived under a peaceful government, use to degenerate into, in a civil war.
But though there had never been any time, wherein particular men were in a condition of war one against another; yet in all times, kings, and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies, and in the state and posture of gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns upon the frontiers of their kingdoms; and continual spies upon their neighbours; which is a posture of war. But because they uphold thereby, the industry of their subjects; there does not follow from it, that misery, which accompanies the liberty of particular men.
To this war of every man, against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law: where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues. Justice, and injustice are none of the faculties neither of the body, nor mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his senses, and passions. They are qualities, that relate to men in society, not in solitude. It is consequent also to the same condition, that there be no propriety, no dominion, no mine and thine distinct; but only that to be every man’s, that he can get; and for so long, as he can keep it. And thus much for the ill condition, which man by mere nature is actually placed in; though with a possibility to come out of it, consisting partly in the passions, partly in his reason.
The passions that incline men to peace, are fear of death; desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a hope by their industry to obtain them. And reason suggesteth convenient articles of peace, upon which men may be drawn to agreement. These articles, are they, which otherwise are called the Laws of Nature …
John Locke’s Vindication for the Glorious Revolution: The Social Contract
John Locke
(1690)
87. Man being born, as has been proved, with a Title to perfect Freedom, and an uncontrouled enjoyment of all the Rights and Privileges of the Law of Nature, equally with any other Man, or Number of Men in the World, hath by Nature a Power, not only to preserve his Property, that is, his Life, Liberty and Estate, against the Injuries and Attempts of other Men; but to judge of, and punish the breaches of that Law in others, as he is perswaded the Offence deserves, even with Death it self, in Crimes where the heinousness of the Fact, in his Opinion, requires it. But because no Political Society can be, nor subsist without having in it self the Power to preserve the Property, and in order thereunto punish the Offences of all those of that Society; there, and there only is Political Society,where every one of the Members hath quitted this natural Power, resign’d it up into the hands of the Community in all cases that exclude him not from appealing for Protection to the Law established by it. And thus all private judgement of every particular Member being excluded, the Community comes to be Umpire, by settled standing Rules, indifferent, and the same to all Parties; and by Men having Authority from the Community, for the execution of those Rules, decides all the differences that may happen between any Members of that Society, concerning any matter of right; and punishes those Offences, which any Member hath committed against the Society, with such Penalties as the Law has established: Whereby it is easie o discern who are, and who are not, in Political Society together. Those who are united into one Body, and have a common establish’d Law and Judicature to appeal to, with Authority to decide Controversies between them, and punish Offenders, are in Civil Society one with another: but those who have no such common Appeal, I mean on Earth, are still in the state of Nature, each being, where there is no other, Judge for himself, and Executioner; which is, as I have before shew’d it, the perfect state of Nature.
88. And thus the Commonwealth comes by a Power to set down, what punishment shall belong to the several transgressions which they think worthy of it, committed amongst the Members of that Society, (which is thepower of making Laws) as well as it has the power to punish any Injury done unto any of its Members, by any one that is not of it, (which is the power of War and Peace;) and all this for the preservation of the property of all the Members of that Society, as far as is possible. But though every Man who has enter’d into civil Society, and is become a member of any Commonwealth, has thereby quitted his power to punish Offences against the Law of Nature, in prosecution of his own private Judgment; yet with the Judgment of Offences which he has given up to the Legislative in all Cases, where he can Appeal to the Magistrate, he has given a right to the Commonwealth to imploy his force, for the Execution of the Judgments of the Commonwealth, whenever he shall be called to it; which indeed are his own Judgments, they being made by himself, or his Representative. And herein we have the original of the Legislative and Executive Power of Civil Society, which is to judge by standing Laws how far Offences are to be punished, when committed within the Commonwealth; and also to determin, by occasional Judgments founded on the present Circumstances of the Fact, how far Injuries from without are to be vindicated, and in both these to imploy all the force of all the Members when there shall be need.
89. Where-ever therefore any number of Men are so united into one Society, as to quit every one his Executive Power of the Law of Nature, and to resign it to the publick, there and there only is a Political , or Civil Society. And this is done where-ever any number of Men, in the state of Nature, enter into Society to make one People, one Body Politick under one Supreme Government, or else when any one joyns himself to, and incorporates with any Government already made. For hereby he authorizes the Society, or which is all one, the Legislative thereof to make Laws for him as the publick good of the Society shall require; to the Execution whereof, his own assistance (as to his own Decrees) is due. And this puts Men out of a State of Nature into that of a Commonwealth, by setting up a Judge on Earth, with Authority to determine all the Controversies, and redress the Injuries, that may happen to any Member of the Commonwealth; which Judge is the Legislative, or Magistrates appointed by it. And where-ever there are any number of Men, however associated, that have no such decisive power to appeal to, there they are still in the state of Nature.
90. Hence it is evident, that Absolute Monarchy, which by some Men is counted the only Government in the World, is indeed inconsistent with Civil Society, and so can be no Form of Civil Government at all. For the end of Civil Society, being to avoid, and remedy those inconveniencies of the State of Nature, which necessarily follow from every Man’s being Judge in his own Case, by setting up a known Authority, to which every one of that Society may Appeal upon any injury received, or Controversie that may arise, and which every one of the Society ought to obey; where-ever any persons are, who have not such an Authority to Appeal to, for the decision of any difference between them, there those persons are still in the state of Nature. And so is everyAbsolute Prince in respect of those who are under his Dominion.
91. For he being suppos’d to have all, both Legislative and Executive Power in himself alone, there is no Judge to be found, no Appeal lies open to any one, who may fairly, and indifferently, and with Authority decide, and from whose decision relief and redress may be expected of any Injury or Inconveniency, that may be suffered from the Prince or by his Order: So that such a Man, however intitled, Czar, or Grand Signior, or how you please, is as much in the state of Nature with all under his Dominion, as he is with the rest of Mankind. For where-ever any two Men are, who have no standing Rule, and common Judge to Appeal to on Earth for the determination of Controversies of Right betwixt them, there they are still in the state of Nature,and under all the inconveniencies of it, with only this woful difference to the Subject, or rather Slave of an Absolute Prince: That whereas, in the ordinary State of Nature, he has a liberty to judge of his Right, and according to the best of his Power, to maintain it; now whenever his Property is invaded by the Will and Order of his Monarch, he has not only no Appeal, as those in Society ought to have, but as if he were degraded from the common state of Rational Creatures, is denied a liberty to judge of, or to defend his Right, and so is exposed to all the Misery and Inconveniencies that a Man can fear from one, who being in the unrestrained state of Nature, is yet corrupted with Flattery, and armed with Power.
92. For he that thinks absolute Power purifies Mens Bloods, and corrects the baseness of Humane Nature, need read but the History of this, or any other Age to be convinced of the contrary. He that would have been insolent and injurious in the Woods of America,would not probably be much better in a Throne; where perhaps Learning and Religion shall be found out to justifie all, that he shall do to his Subjects, and the Sword presently silence all those that dare question it. For what the Protection of Absolute Monarchy is, what kind of Fathers of their Countries it makes Princes to be, and to what a degree of Happiness and Security it carries Civil Society where this sort of Government is grown to perfection, he that will look into the late Relation ofCeylon, may easily see.
The Sun King Describes the State of France at the Dawn of His Reign
Louis XIV
(1661)
From my early infancy the very name of rois faineants or maires du palais [1] displeased me when mentioned in my presence. But I must point out the state of affairs: grievous disturbances throughout the kingdom before and after my majority; a foreign war in which these troubles at home had lost to France thousands and thousands of advantages; a Prince of my blood and of great name at the head of my enemies; many Cabals in the State; the Parliaments still in the possession and enjoyment of a usurped authority; at my Court very little disinterested fidelity and, on this account, my subjects, though outwardly most submissive, as much a responsibility and cause of misgiving to me as the most rebellious; a minister re-established in power despite so many factions, very skilful and very adroit, but whose views and methods were naturally very different from mine, whom, nevertheless, I could not gainsay, nor abate the least portion of his credit, without running the risk of again raising against him by some misleading appearance of disgrace those very storms which had been allayed with so much difficulty. I myself was still very young, though I had reached the majority of kings, which the State laws anticipate in order to avoid still greater evils, but not the age at which mere private persons begin to regulate freely their own affairs. I only knew to its full extent the greatness of my burden, without having yet learned my own capabilities. …
I made a beginning by casting my eyes over all the different parties in the State, not indifferently, but with the glance of experience, sensibly touched at seeing nothing which did not invite and urge me to take it in hand, but carefully watching what the occasion and the state of affairs would permit. Everywhere was disorder. …
The finances, which give movement and action to the great organisation of the monarchy, were entirely exhausted, so much so that we could hardly find the ways and means. Much of the most necessary and most privileged expenses of my house and my own privy purse were in arrears beyond all that was fitting, or maintained only on credit, to be a further subsequent burden. At the same time a prodigality showed itself among public men, masking on the one hand their malversations by every king of artifice, and revealing them on the other in insolent and daring luxury, as though they feared I might take no notice of them.
The Church, apart from its usual troubles, after lengthy disputes on matters of the schools, a knowledge of which they allowed was unnecessary to salvation for any one, with points of disagreement augmenting day by day through the heat and obstinacy of their minds, and ceaselessly involving fresh human interests, was finally threatened with open schism by men who were all the more dangerous because they were capable of being very serviceable and greatly deserving, had they themselves been less opinionated. …
The least of the ills affecting the order of Nobility was the fact of its being shared by an infinite number of usurpers possessing no right to it, or one acquired by money without any claim from service rendered. The tyranny exercised by the nobles over their vassals and neighbours in some of my provinces could no longer be suffered or suppressed save by making severe and rigorous examples. The range for dueling–somewhat modified by the exact observance of the latest regulations, over which I was always inflexible–was only noticeable in a now well advanced recovery from so inveterate an ill, so that there was no reason to despair of the remedy.
The administration of Justice itself, whose duty it is to reform others, appeared to me the most difficult to reform. An infinity of things contributed to this state of affairs: the appointments filled haphazard or by money rather than by selection and merit; scant experience and less knowledge on the part of some of the judges; the regulations referring to age and service almost everywhere eluded; chicanery firmly established through many centuries, and fertile in inventing means of evading the most salutary laws. And what especially conduced to this was the fact that these insatiable gentry loved litigation and fostered it as their own peculiar property, applying themselves only to prolong and to add to it. Even my Council, instead of supervising the other jurisdictions, too often only introduced disorder by issuing a strange number of contrary regulations, all in my name and as though by my command, which rendered the confusion far more disgraceful.
All this collection of evils, their consequences and effects, fell principally upon the people, who in addition, were loaded with impositions, some crushed down by poverty, others suffering want from their own laziness since the peace, and needing above all to be alleviated and occupied. …
[1] “Do-nothing kings” and mayors of the palace: terms dating from the time of the weak Merovian kings of France and their Carolingian successors.
Saint-Simon Describes Louis XIV
Duke of Saint-Simon
(c. 1695)
The king’s great qualities shone more brilliantly by reason of an exterior so unique and incomparable as to lend infinite distinction to his slightest actions; the very figure of a hero, so impregnated with a natural but most imposing majesty that it appeared even in his most insignificant gestures and movements, without arrogance but with simple gravity; proportions such as a sculptor would choose to model; a perfect countenance and the grandest air and mien ever vouchsafed to man; all these advantages enhanced by a natural grace which enveloped all his actions with a singular charm which has never perhaps been equaled. He was as dignified and majestic in his dressing gown as when dressed in robes of state, or on horseback at the head of his troops.
He excelled in all sorts of exercise and liked to have every facility for it. No fatigue nor stress of weather made any impression on that heroic figure and bearing; drenched with rain or snow, pierced with cold, bathed in sweat or covered with dust, he was always the same. I have often observed with admiration that except in the most extreme and exceptional weather nothing prevented his spending considerable time out of doors every day.
A voice whose tones corresponded with the rest of his person; the ability to speak well and to listen with quick comprehension; much reserve of manner adjusted with exactness to the quality of different persons; a courtesy always grave, always dignified, always distinguished, and suited to the age, rank, and sex of each individual, and, for the ladies, always an air of natural gallantry. So much for his exterior, which has never been equaled nor even approached.
In whatever did not concern what he believed to be his rightful authority and prerogative, he showed a natural kindness of heart and a sense of justice which made one regret the education, the flatteries, the artifice which resulted in preventing him from being his real self except on the rare occasions when he gave way to some natural impulse and showed that,–prerogative aside, which choked and stifled everything,–he loved truth, justice, order, reason,–that he loved even to let himself be vanquished.
Nothing could be regulated with greater exactitude than were his days and hours. In spite of all his variety of places, affairs, and amusements, with an almanac and a watch one might tell, three hundred leagues away, exactly what he was doing. … Except at Marly, any man could have an opportunity to speak to him five or six times during the day; he listened, and almost always replied, “I will see,” in order not to accord or decide anything lightly. Never a reply or a speech that would give pain; patient to the last degree in business and in matters of personal service; completely master of his face, manner, and bearing; never giving way to impatience or anger. If he administered reproof, it was rarely, in few words, and never hastily. He did not lose control of himself ten times in his whole life, and then only with inferior persons, and not more than four or five times seriously. …
Louis XIV’s vanity was without limit or restraint; it colored everything and convinced him that no one even approached him in military talents, in plans and enterprises, in government. Hence those pictures and inscriptions in the gallery of Versailles which disgust every foreigner; those opera prologues that he himself tried to sing; that flood of prose and verse in his praise for which his appetite was insatiable; those dedications of statues copied from pagan sculpture, and the insipid and sickening compliments that were continually offered to him in person and which he swallowed with unfailing relish; hence his distaste for all merit, intelligence, education, and, most of all, for all independence of character and sentiment in others; his mistakes of judgment in matters of importance; his familiarity and favor reserved entirely for those to whom he felt himself superior in acquirements and ability; and, above everything else, a jealously of his own authority which determined and took precedence of every other sort of justice, reason, and consideration whatever.
Saint-Simon Describes the Consequences of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes
Duke of Saint-Simon
(1685)
The revocation of the Edict of Nantes, without the slightest pretext or necessity, and the various proscriptions that followed it, were the fruits of a frightful plot, in which the new spouse was one of the chief conspirators, and which depopulated a quarter of the realm; ruined its commerce; weakened it in every direction; gave it up for a long time to the public and avowed pillage of the dragoons; authorized torments and punishments by which many innocent people of both sexes were killed by thousands; ruined a numerous class; tore in pieces a world of families; armed relatives against relatives, so as to seize their property and leave them to die of hunger; banished our manufactures to foreign lands; made those lands flourish and overflow at the expense of France, and enabled them to build new cities; gave to the world the spectacle of a prodigious population proscribed without crime, stripped, fugitive, wandering, and seeking shelter far from their country; sent to the galleys nobles, rich old men, people much esteemed for their piety, learning, and virtue, people carefully nurtured, weak, and delicate;–and all solely on account of religion; in fact, to heap up the measure of horror, filled the realm with perjury and sacrilege, in the midst of the echoed cries of these unfortunate victims of error, while so many others sacrificed their conscience to their wealth and their repose, and purchased both by simulated abjuration, from which without pause they were dragged to adore what they did not believe in, and to receive the divine body of the Most Holy whilst remaining persuaded that they were only eating bread which they ought to abhor!
Such was the general abomination born of flattery and cruelty. From torture to abjuration, and from that to communion, there was often only a space of twenty-four hours; and executioners were the guides of the converts and their witnesses. … The king received from all sides detailed news of these conversions. It was by thousands that those who had abjured and taken the communion were counted; ten thousand in one place, six thousand in another,–all at once and instantly. The king congratulated himself on his power and his piety. He believed himself to have brought back the days of the apostles, and attributed to himself all the honor. The bishops wrote panegyrics of him; the Jesuits made the pulpit resound with his praise. All France was filled with horror and confusion; and yet there was never such triumph and joy, such boundless laudation of the king.
Charles I Authorizes Sunday Recreations
Charles I
(1633)
Our dear father of blessed memory, [James I], in his return from Scotland, coming through Lancashire, found that his subjects were debarred from lawful recreations upon Sundays after evening prayers ended and, upon holydays; and he prudently considered that if these times were taken from them, the meaner sort, who labor hard all the week, should have no recreations at all to refresh their spirits; and after his return he further saw that his loyal subjects in all other parts of his kingdom did suffer in the same kind, though perhaps not in the same degree; and did therefore, in his princely wisdom, publish a declaration to all his loving subjects concerning lawful sports to be used at such times … in the year 1618. …
Our pleasure likewise is, that the bishop of that diocese take the like strait order with all the Puritans and precisians within the same, either constraining them to conform themselves or to leave the country, according to the laws of our kingdom and canons of our Church, and so to strike equally on both hands against the contemners of our authority and adversaries of our Church; and as for our good people’s lawful recreation, our pleasure likewise is, that after the end of divine service our good people be not disturbed, letted, or discouraged from any lawful recreation, such as dancing, either men or women; archery for men, leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation, nor from having of May-games, Whitsun-ales, and Morris-dances, and the setting up of Maypoles and other sports therewith used, so as the same be had in due and convenient time, without impediment or neglect of divine service; and that women shall have leave to carry rushes to the church for the decorating of it, according to their old custom; but withal we do here account still as prohibited all unlawful games to be used upon Sundays only, as bear and bull baitings, interludes, and at all times in the meaner sort of people by law prohibited, bowling.
Richelieu Evaluates the State of the French Monarchy
Richelieu
(1624)
At the time when your Majesty resolved to admit me both to your council and to an important place in your confidence for the direction of your affairs, I may say that the Huguenots shared the state with you; that the nobles conducted themselves as if they were not your subjects, and the most powerful governors of the provinces as if they were sovereign in their offices.
I may say that the bad example of all these was so injurious to this realm that even the best regulated parlementswere affected by it, and endeavored, in certain cases, to diminish your royal authority as far as they were able in order to stretch their own powers beyond the limits of reason.
I may say that every one measured his own merit by his audacity; that in place of estimating the benefits which they received from your Majesty at their proper worth, all valued them only in so far as they satisfied the extravagant demands of their imagination; that the most arrogant were held to be the wisest, and found themselves the most prosperous.
I may also say that the foreign alliances were unfortunate, individual interests being preferred to those of the public; in a word, the dignity of the royal majesty was so disparaged, and so different from what it should be, owing to the malfeasance of those who conducted your affairs, that it was almost impossible to perceive its existence.
It was impossible, without losing all, to tolerate longer the conduct of those to whom your Majesty had entrusted the helm of state; and, on the other hand, everything could not be changed at once without violating the laws of prudence, which do not permit the abrupt passing from one extreme to another.
The sad state of your affairs seemed to force you to hasty decisions, without permitting a choice of time or of means; and yet it was necessary to make a choice of both, in order to profit by the change which necessity demanded from your prudence.
Thoughtful observers did not think that it would be possible to escape all the rocks in so tempestuous a period; the court was full of people who censured the temerity of those who wished to undertake a reform; all well knew that princes are quick to impute to those who are near them the bad outcome of the undertakings upon which they have been well advised; few people consequently expected good results from the change which it was announced that I wished to make, and many believed my fall assured even before your Majesty had elevated me.
Notwithstanding these difficulties which I represented to your Majesty, knowing how much kings may do when they make good use of their power, I ventured to promise you, with confidence, that you would soon get control of your state, and that in a short time your prudence, your courage, and the benediction of God would give a new aspect to the realm.
I promised your Majesty to employ all my industry and all the authority which it should please you to give me to ruin the Huguenot party, to abase the pride of the nobles, to bring back all your subjects to their duty, and to elevate your name among foreign nations to the point where it belongs.
Richelieu and Louis XIII Demolish Feudal Castles
Louis XIII
(1626)
Whereas formerly the assemblies of the estates of this realm and those of notable persons chosen to give advice to ourselves, and to the late king, our very honorable lord and father, on important affairs of this realm, and likewise the assembly of the estates of the province of Brittany held by us in the year 1614, have repeatedly requested and very humbly supplicated our said lord and father and ourselves to cause the demolition of many strongholds in divers places of this realm, which, being neither on hostile frontiers nor in important passes or places, only serve to augment our expenses by the maintenance of useless garrisons, and also serve as retreats for divers persons who on the least provocation disturb the provinces where they are located; …
For these reasons, we announce, declare, ordain, and will that all the strongholds, either towns or castles, which are in the interior of our realm or provinces of the same, not situated in places of importance either for frontier or defense or other considerations of weight, shall be razed and demolished; even ancient walls shall be destroyed so far as it shall be deemed necessary for the well-being and repose of our subjects and the security of this state, so that our said subjects henceforth need not fear that the said places will cause them any inconvenience, and so that we shall be freed from the expense of supporting garrisons in them.
Parliament Chastises Charles I: The Grand Remonstrance
English Parliament (1641)
The Commons in this present Parliament assembled, having with much earnestness and faithfulness of affection and zeal to the public good of this kingdom, and His Majesty’s honour and service for the space of twelve months, wrestled with great dangers and fears, the pressing miseries and calamities, the various distempers and disorders which had not only assaulted, but even overwhelmed and extinguished the liberty, peace and prosperity of this kingdom, the comfort and hopes of all His Majesty’s good subjects, and exceedingly weakened and undermined the foundation and strength of his own royal throne, do yet find an abounding malignity and opposition in those parties and factions who have been the cause of those evils, and do still labour to cast aspersions upon that which hath been done, and to raise many difficulties for the hindrance of that which remains yet undone, and to foment jealousies between the king and Parliament, that so they may deprive him and his people of the fruit of his own gracious intentions, and their humble desires of procuring the public peace, safety and happiness of this realm.
For the preventing of those miserable effects which such malicious endeavours may produce, we have thought good to declare the root and the growth of these mischievous designs: the maturity and ripeness to which they have attained before the beginning of the Parliament: the effectual means which have been used for the extirpation of those dangerous evils, and the progress which hath therein been made by His Majesty’s goodness and the wisdom of the Parliament: the ways of obstruction and opposition by which that progress hath been interrupted: the courses to be taken for the removing [of] those obstacles, and for the accomplishing of our most dutiful and faithful intentions and endeavours of restoring and establishing the ancient honour, greatness and security of this Crown and nation.
The root of all this mischief we find to be a malignant and pernicious design of subverting the fundamental laws and principles of government, upon which the religion and justice of this kingdom are firmly established. The actors and promoters hereof have been:
1. The Jesuited papists, who hate the laws, as the obstacles of that change and subversion of religion which they so much long for.
2. The bishops, and the corrupt part of the clergy, who cherish formality and superstition as the natural effects and more probable supports of their own ecclesiastical tyranny and usurpation.
3. Such councillors and courtiers as for private ends have engaged themselves to further the interests of some foreign princes or states to the prejudice of His Majesty and the state at home. …
In the beginning of His Majesty’s reign the [Catholic] party began to revive and flourish again. …
[There follows a long list of protests against arbitrary and excessive taxation.]
37. The Court of Star Chamber hath abounded in extravagant censures, not only for the maintenance and improvement of monopolies and other unlawful taxes, but for divers other causes where there hath been no offence, or very small; whereby His Majesty’s subjects have been oppressed by grievous fines, imprisonments, stigmatising, mutilations, whippings, pillories, gags, confinements, banishments; after so rigid a manner as hath not only deprived men of the society of their friends, exercise of their professions, comfort of books, use of paper or ink, but even violated that near union which God hath established between men and their wives, by forced and constrained separation. …
48. Titles of honour, judicial places, sergeantships at law, and other offices have been sold for great sums of money, whereby the common justice of the kingdom hath been much endangered, not only by opening a way of employment in places of great trust, and advantage to men of weak parts, but also by giving occasion to bribery, extortion, partiality, it seldom happening that places ill-gotten are well used. …
51. The bishops and the rest of the clergy did triumph in the suspensions, excommunications, deprivations, and degradations of divers painful, learned and pious ministers, in the vexation and grievous oppression of great numbers of His Majesty’s good subjects.
52. The [ecclesiastical court of] High Commission grew to such excess of sharpness and severity as was not much less than the Romish Inquisition, and yet in many cases by the archbishop’s power was made much more heavy, being assisted and strengthened by authority of the Council Table.
53. The bishops and their courts were as eager in the country; although their jurisdiction could not reach so high in rigour and extremity of punishment, yet were they no less grievous in respect of the generality and multiplicity of vexations, which lighting upon the meaner sort of tradesmen and artificers did impoverish many thousands.
54. And so afflict and trouble others, that great numbers to avoid their miseries departed out of the kingdom, some into New England and other parts of America, others into Holland. …
An Anonymous Pamphlet Urges Restoration of the Stuart Dynasty
Anonymous
(1659)
If we take a view of the several pretensions, carried on in the nation apart, we shall find the most considerable to be the Roman Catholic, the Royalist, the Presbyterian, the Anabaptist, the Army, the Protectorian, and that of the Parliament.
1. ‘Tis the Roman Catholic’s aim not only to abrogate the penal laws, and become capable of all employments in the Commonwealth, but to introduce his religion, to restore the rights of the Church, and utterly eradicate all that he esteems heresy.
2. ‘Tis the Royalist’s desire to bring in the king as a conqueror, to recover their losses in the late war, be rendered capable of civil employments, and have the former government of the Church.
3. ‘Tis the Presbyterian’s desire to set up his discipline, to have the covenant re‘nforced, and only such as take it to be employed in church or state; to be indemnified in reference to what they have done, and secured of what they possess.
4. ‘Tis the wish of the baptized churches that there might be no ecclesiastical government of any kind, nor ministerial function, or provision for it; and that only persons so minded should be capable of employment; likewise to be indemnified for what they have done.
5. ‘Tis the aim of the Army to govern the nation, to keep themselves from being disbanded, or engaged in war, to secure their pay, and to be indemnified for all past action.
6. ‘Tis the desire of the family of the late Protector to establish the heir of the house, that they may rule him, and he the nation, and so both preserve and advance themselves.
7. ‘Tis the wish of the present Parliament (as far as they have one common design) to continue themselves in absolute power by the specious name of a popular government; to new-model and divide, and, at last, take down, the Army; and, finally, under the pretences of a committee of Parliament, or council of state, set up an oligarchy resembling that of the Thirty Tyrants in Athens.
Lastly, ‘t is the general interest of the nation to establish the ancient fundamental laws, upon which every one’s propriety and liberty are built, to settle religion, to procure a general indemnity for all actions past, to revive their languishing and almost dead trade, gain an alliance with our neighbour states; to put the government in such hands as, besides present force, can plead a legal title to it; into the hands of such with whose private interest that of the public not only consists, but in which ‘t is necessarily involved, which likewise does least contradict the aims of particular parties; lastly, the hands of such whose counsel is fit to direct in matters of deliberation, and courage fit to vindicate the injuries of the nation.
From which premises we may conclude that the pretensions of no party now on foot in the nation are attainable; or, if attained, are consistent with the good of other parties, or of the nation; or, in fine, with their own; and from hence likewise one would be apt to conclude that the ruin of the public is inevitable; there being no door of hope left open to receive, no method visible to unite, such distant and incompatible ends.
But, notwithstanding all this, ‘t is not impossible–no, nor hard–to find an expedient that shall evacuate all these difficulties; not only establish the general concernment, but (exorbitant passion only retrenched) satisfy the real interest of every party–nay, single person–in the nation.
Now to the cheerful reception of such an overture, I suppose there is no need to persuade, nor even to admonish, that words and names, however rendered odious, ought not to frighten us from our certain benefit and dearest interest. All that is demanded here is that if, upon serious consideration, the proposal be found reasonable, men would be so kind to themselves as to receive it. The assertion I doubt not to make most plain and evident, and therefore shall as plainly pronounce it. ‘T is this: the calling in the king is the certain and only means for the preservation of the kingdom, and also of the rights and interests of all single persons in it.
The English Bill of Rights
Parliament
(1689)
And whereas the said late King James II having abdicated the government, and the throne being thereby vacant, his Highness the prince of Orange (whom it hath pleased Almighty God to make the glorious instrument of delivering this kingdom from popery and arbitrary power) did (by the advice of the lords spiritual and temporal, and diverse principal persons of the Commons) cause letters to be written to the lords spiritual and temporal, being Protestants, and other letters to the several counties, cities, universities, boroughs, and Cinque Ports [five port towns on the English Channel, having special privileges], for the choosing of such persons to represent them, as were of right to be sent to parliament, to meet and sit at Westminster upon the two and twentieth day of January, in this year 1689, in order to provide such an establishment as that their religion, laws, and liberties might not again be in danger of being subverted; upon which letters elections have been accordingly made.
And thereupon the said lords spiritual and temporal and Commons, pursuant to their respective letters and elections, being now assembled in a full and free representation of this nation, taking into their most serious consideration the best means for attaining the ends aforesaid, do in the first place (as their ancestors in like case have usually done), for the vindication and assertion of their ancient rights and liberties, declare:
1. That the pretended power of suspending laws, or the execution of laws, by regal authority, without consent of parliament is illegal.
2. That the pretended power of dispensing with the laws, or the execution of law by regal authority, as it hath been assumed and exercised of late, is illegal.
3. That the commission for erecting the late court of commissioners for ecclesiastical causes, and all other commissions and courts of like nature, are illegal and pernicious.
4. That levying money for or to the use of the crown by pretense of prerogative, without grant of parliament, for longer time or in other manner than the same is or shall be granted, is illegal.
5. That it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal.
6. That the raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with consent of parliament, is against law.
7. That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defense suitable to their conditions, and as allowed by law.
8. That election of members of parliament ought to be free.
9. That the freedom of speech, and debates or proceedings in parliament, ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of parliament.
10. That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
11. That jurors ought to be duly impaneled and returned, and jurors which pass upon men in trials for high treason ought to be freeholders.
12. That all grants and promises of fines and forfetures of particular persons before conviction are illegal and void.
13. And that for redress of all grievances, and for the amending, strengthening, and preserving of the laws, parliament ought to be held frequently.
The Puritan Ethic Revealed
Richard Baxter
(1673)
Every man that is able, must be steadily and ordinarily employed in such work as is serviceable to God, and to the common good. … Everyone that is a member of a church or commonwealth must employ their parts to the utmost for the good of the church and commonwealth, public service is God’s greatest service. To neglect this, and to say, I will pray and meditate, is as if your servant should refuse your greatest work, and to tie himself to some lesser easy part; and God has commanded you some way or another to labour for your daily bread, and not to live as drones on the sweat of others only. Innocent Adam was put into the Garden of Eden to dress it, and fallen man must eat his bread in the sweat of his brow (Genesis 3:19). And he that will not work must be forbidden to eat (2 Thes. 3:6, 10 and 12). And indeed, it is necessary for ourselves, for the health of our bodies, which will grow diseased with idleness. And for the health of our souls, which will fail if the body fail. And man in flesh must have work for his body as well as his soul. And he that will do nothing but pray and meditate, his like will (by sickness or melancholy) be disabled ere long to pray or meditate, unless he have a body extraordinary strong …
It gloryeth God, by showing the excellency of faith, when we contemn the riches and honor of the world, and live above the worldling’s life, accounting that a despicable thing, which he accounts his happiness, and loses his soul for … When seeming Christians are worldly and ambitious as others, and make as great matter of the gain, and wealth and honour, it shows that they do but cover the base and sordid spirit of worldlings, with the visor of the Christian name …
As labour is thus necessary so understand how needful a state a calling is, for the right performance of your labours. A calling is a stated course of labour. This is very needful for these reasons: (1) Out of a calling a man’s labours are but occasional or inconstant, so more time is spent in idleness than labour; (2) A man is best skilled in that which he is used to; (3) And he will be best provided for it with instruments and necessaries; (4) Therefore he does it better than he could do any other work, and so wrongs not others, but attains more the end of his labour; (5) And he does it more easily, when a man unused and unskilled and unfurnished, toils himself much in doing little; (6) And he will do his work more orderly, when another is in continual confusion, and his business knows not its time and place, but one part contradicts another. Therefore some certain calling or trade of life is best for everyman …
The first and principal thing to be intended in the choice of a trade or calling for yourselves or children is the service of God, and the public good. And, therefore, ceteris paribus [other things being equal], that calling which most conduces to the public good is to be preferred. The callings most useful to the public good are the magistrate, the pastor, the teacher of the church, schoolmaster, physician, lawyer, etc., husbandmen (ploughmen, graziers and shepherds); and next to them are mariners, clothiers, booksellers, tailors and such others that are employed about things most necessary to mankind. And some callings are employed about matters of so little use, as tobacco-sellers, lace-sellers, feather-makers, periwig-makers, and many more such, that he that may choose better, should be loath to take up with one of these, though possibly in itself it may be lawful. It is a great satisfaction to an honest mind, to spend his life in doing the greatest good he can, and a prison and a constant calamity, to be tied to spend one’s life in doing little good at all to others, though he should grow rich by it …
If thou be called to the poorest laborious calling, do not carnally murmur at it; because it is wearisome to the flesh, nor imagine that God accepts the less of thy work and thee. But cheerfully follow it, and make it the matter of thy pleasure and joy that thou art still in thy heavenly master’s services, though it be the lowest thing. And that He who knows what is best for thee, has chosen this for thy good, and tries and values thy obedience to Him the more, by how much the meaner work thou stoopest to at His command. But see that thou do it all in obedience to God, and not merely for thy own necessity. Thus every servant must serve the Lord, in serving their master, and from God expect their chief reward …
In doing good to others we do good to ourselves: because we are living members of Christ’s body, and by love and communion feel their joys, as well as pains.
Good works are comfortable evidence that faith is sincere, and that the heart dissembles not with God.
Good works are much to the honour of religion, and consequently of God, and much tend to men’s conviction, conversion and salvation.
Hobbes Describes the Natural State of War
Thomas Hobbes
(1651)
Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man. For war, consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time, is to be considered in the nature of war; as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather, lieth not in a shower or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace.
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
It may seem strange to some man, that has not well weighed these things; that nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to invade, and destroy one another: and he may therefore, not trusting to this inference, made from the passions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by experience. Let him therefore consider with himself, when taking a journey, he arms himself, and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his doors; when even in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knows there be laws, and public officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall be done him; what opinion he has of his fellow-subjects, when he rides armed; of his fellow citizens, when he locks his doors; and of his children, and servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words? But neither of us accuse man’s nature in it. The desires, and other passions of man, are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions, that proceed from those passions, till they know a law that forbids them: which till laws be made they cannot know: nor can any law be made, till they have agreed upon the person that shall make it.
It may peradventure be thought, there was never such a time, nor condition of war as this; and I believe it was never generally so, over all the world: but there are many places, where they live so now. For the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small families, the concord whereof dependeth on natural lust, have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before. Howsoever, it may be perceived what manner of life there would be, where there were no common power to fear, by the manner of life, which men that have formerly lived under a peaceful government, use to degenerate into, in a civil war.
But though there had never been any time, wherein particular men were in a condition of war one against another; yet in all times, kings, and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies, and in the state and posture of gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns upon the frontiers of their kingdoms; and continual spies upon their neighbours; which is a posture of war. But because they uphold thereby, the industry of their subjects; there does not follow from it, that misery, which accompanies the liberty of particular men.
To this war of every man, against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law: where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues. Justice, and injustice are none of the faculties neither of the body, nor mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his senses, and passions. They are qualities, that relate to men in society, not in solitude. It is consequent also to the same condition, that there be no propriety, no dominion, no mine and thine distinct; but only that to be every man’s, that he can get; and for so long, as he can keep it. And thus much for the ill condition, which man by mere nature is actually placed in; though with a possibility to come out of it, consisting partly in the passions, partly in his reason.
The passions that incline men to peace, are fear of death; desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a hope by their industry to obtain them. And reason suggesteth convenient articles of peace, upon which men may be drawn to agreement. These articles, are they, which otherwise are called the Laws of Nature …
John Locke’s Vindication for the Glorious Revolution: The Social Contract
John Locke
(1690)
87. Man being born, as has been proved, with a Title to perfect Freedom, and an uncontrouled enjoyment of all the Rights and Privileges of the Law of Nature, equally with any other Man, or Number of Men in the World, hath by Nature a Power, not only to preserve his Property, that is, his Life, Liberty and Estate, against the Injuries and Attempts of other Men; but to judge of, and punish the breaches of that Law in others, as he is perswaded the Offence deserves, even with Death it self, in Crimes where the heinousness of the Fact, in his Opinion, requires it. But because no Political Society can be, nor subsist without having in it self the Power to preserve the Property, and in order thereunto punish the Offences of all those of that Society; there, and there only is Political Society,where every one of the Members hath quitted this natural Power, resign’d it up into the hands of the Community in all cases that exclude him not from appealing for Protection to the Law established by it. And thus all private judgement of every particular Member being excluded, the Community comes to be Umpire, by settled standing Rules, indifferent, and the same to all Parties; and by Men having Authority from the Community, for the execution of those Rules, decides all the differences that may happen between any Members of that Society, concerning any matter of right; and punishes those Offences, which any Member hath committed against the Society, with such Penalties as the Law has established: Whereby it is easie o discern who are, and who are not, in Political Society together. Those who are united into one Body, and have a common establish’d Law and Judicature to appeal to, with Authority to decide Controversies between them, and punish Offenders, are in Civil Society one with another: but those who have no such common Appeal, I mean on Earth, are still in the state of Nature, each being, where there is no other, Judge for himself, and Executioner; which is, as I have before shew’d it, the perfect state of Nature.
88. And thus the Commonwealth comes by a Power to set down, what punishment shall belong to the several transgressions which they think worthy of it, committed amongst the Members of that Society, (which is thepower of making Laws) as well as it has the power to punish any Injury done unto any of its Members, by any one that is not of it, (which is the power of War and Peace;) and all this for the preservation of the property of all the Members of that Society, as far as is possible. But though every Man who has enter’d into civil Society, and is become a member of any Commonwealth, has thereby quitted his power to punish Offences against the Law of Nature, in prosecution of his own private Judgment; yet with the Judgment of Offences which he has given up to the Legislative in all Cases, where he can Appeal to the Magistrate, he has given a right to the Commonwealth to imploy his force, for the Execution of the Judgments of the Commonwealth, whenever he shall be called to it; which indeed are his own Judgments, they being made by himself, or his Representative. And herein we have the original of the Legislative and Executive Power of Civil Society, which is to judge by standing Laws how far Offences are to be punished, when committed within the Commonwealth; and also to determin, by occasional Judgments founded on the present Circumstances of the Fact, how far Injuries from without are to be vindicated, and in both these to imploy all the force of all the Members when there shall be need.
89. Where-ever therefore any number of Men are so united into one Society, as to quit every one his Executive Power of the Law of Nature, and to resign it to the publick, there and there only is a Political , or Civil Society. And this is done where-ever any number of Men, in the state of Nature, enter into Society to make one People, one Body Politick under one Supreme Government, or else when any one joyns himself to, and incorporates with any Government already made. For hereby he authorizes the Society, or which is all one, the Legislative thereof to make Laws for him as the publick good of the Society shall require; to the Execution whereof, his own assistance (as to his own Decrees) is due. And this puts Men out of a State of Nature into that of a Commonwealth, by setting up a Judge on Earth, with Authority to determine all the Controversies, and redress the Injuries, that may happen to any Member of the Commonwealth; which Judge is the Legislative, or Magistrates appointed by it. And where-ever there are any number of Men, however associated, that have no such decisive power to appeal to, there they are still in the state of Nature.
90. Hence it is evident, that Absolute Monarchy, which by some Men is counted the only Government in the World, is indeed inconsistent with Civil Society, and so can be no Form of Civil Government at all. For the end of Civil Society, being to avoid, and remedy those inconveniencies of the State of Nature, which necessarily follow from every Man’s being Judge in his own Case, by setting up a known Authority, to which every one of that Society may Appeal upon any injury received, or Controversie that may arise, and which every one of the Society ought to obey; where-ever any persons are, who have not such an Authority to Appeal to, for the decision of any difference between them, there those persons are still in the state of Nature. And so is everyAbsolute Prince in respect of those who are under his Dominion.
91. For he being suppos’d to have all, both Legislative and Executive Power in himself alone, there is no Judge to be found, no Appeal lies open to any one, who may fairly, and indifferently, and with Authority decide, and from whose decision relief and redress may be expected of any Injury or Inconveniency, that may be suffered from the Prince or by his Order: So that such a Man, however intitled, Czar, or Grand Signior, or how you please, is as much in the state of Nature with all under his Dominion, as he is with the rest of Mankind. For where-ever any two Men are, who have no standing Rule, and common Judge to Appeal to on Earth for the determination of Controversies of Right betwixt them, there they are still in the state of Nature,and under all the inconveniencies of it, with only this woful difference to the Subject, or rather Slave of an Absolute Prince: That whereas, in the ordinary State of Nature, he has a liberty to judge of his Right, and according to the best of his Power, to maintain it; now whenever his Property is invaded by the Will and Order of his Monarch, he has not only no Appeal, as those in Society ought to have, but as if he were degraded from the common state of Rational Creatures, is denied a liberty to judge of, or to defend his Right, and so is exposed to all the Misery and Inconveniencies that a Man can fear from one, who being in the unrestrained state of Nature, is yet corrupted with Flattery, and armed with Power.
92. For he that thinks absolute Power purifies Mens Bloods, and corrects the baseness of Humane Nature, need read but the History of this, or any other Age to be convinced of the contrary. He that would have been insolent and injurious in the Woods of America,would not probably be much better in a Throne; where perhaps Learning and Religion shall be found out to justifie all, that he shall do to his Subjects, and the Sword presently silence all those that dare question it. For what the Protection of Absolute Monarchy is, what kind of Fathers of their Countries it makes Princes to be, and to what a degree of Happiness and Security it carries Civil Society where this sort of Government is grown to perfection, he that will look into the late Relation ofCeylon, may easily see.
The Sun King Describes the State of France at the Dawn of His Reign
Louis XIV
(1661)
From my early infancy the very name of rois faineants or maires du palais [1] displeased me when mentioned in my presence. But I must point out the state of affairs: grievous disturbances throughout the kingdom before and after my majority; a foreign war in which these troubles at home had lost to France thousands and thousands of advantages; a Prince of my blood and of great name at the head of my enemies; many Cabals in the State; the Parliaments still in the possession and enjoyment of a usurped authority; at my Court very little disinterested fidelity and, on this account, my subjects, though outwardly most submissive, as much a responsibility and cause of misgiving to me as the most rebellious; a minister re-established in power despite so many factions, very skilful and very adroit, but whose views and methods were naturally very different from mine, whom, nevertheless, I could not gainsay, nor abate the least portion of his credit, without running the risk of again raising against him by some misleading appearance of disgrace those very storms which had been allayed with so much difficulty. I myself was still very young, though I had reached the majority of kings, which the State laws anticipate in order to avoid still greater evils, but not the age at which mere private persons begin to regulate freely their own affairs. I only knew to its full extent the greatness of my burden, without having yet learned my own capabilities. …
I made a beginning by casting my eyes over all the different parties in the State, not indifferently, but with the glance of experience, sensibly touched at seeing nothing which did not invite and urge me to take it in hand, but carefully watching what the occasion and the state of affairs would permit. Everywhere was disorder. …
The finances, which give movement and action to the great organisation of the monarchy, were entirely exhausted, so much so that we could hardly find the ways and means. Much of the most necessary and most privileged expenses of my house and my own privy purse were in arrears beyond all that was fitting, or maintained only on credit, to be a further subsequent burden. At the same time a prodigality showed itself among public men, masking on the one hand their malversations by every king of artifice, and revealing them on the other in insolent and daring luxury, as though they feared I might take no notice of them.
The Church, apart from its usual troubles, after lengthy disputes on matters of the schools, a knowledge of which they allowed was unnecessary to salvation for any one, with points of disagreement augmenting day by day through the heat and obstinacy of their minds, and ceaselessly involving fresh human interests, was finally threatened with open schism by men who were all the more dangerous because they were capable of being very serviceable and greatly deserving, had they themselves been less opinionated. …
The least of the ills affecting the order of Nobility was the fact of its being shared by an infinite number of usurpers possessing no right to it, or one acquired by money without any claim from service rendered. The tyranny exercised by the nobles over their vassals and neighbours in some of my provinces could no longer be suffered or suppressed save by making severe and rigorous examples. The range for dueling–somewhat modified by the exact observance of the latest regulations, over which I was always inflexible–was only noticeable in a now well advanced recovery from so inveterate an ill, so that there was no reason to despair of the remedy.
The administration of Justice itself, whose duty it is to reform others, appeared to me the most difficult to reform. An infinity of things contributed to this state of affairs: the appointments filled haphazard or by money rather than by selection and merit; scant experience and less knowledge on the part of some of the judges; the regulations referring to age and service almost everywhere eluded; chicanery firmly established through many centuries, and fertile in inventing means of evading the most salutary laws. And what especially conduced to this was the fact that these insatiable gentry loved litigation and fostered it as their own peculiar property, applying themselves only to prolong and to add to it. Even my Council, instead of supervising the other jurisdictions, too often only introduced disorder by issuing a strange number of contrary regulations, all in my name and as though by my command, which rendered the confusion far more disgraceful.
All this collection of evils, their consequences and effects, fell principally upon the people, who in addition, were loaded with impositions, some crushed down by poverty, others suffering want from their own laziness since the peace, and needing above all to be alleviated and occupied. …
[1] “Do-nothing kings” and mayors of the palace: terms dating from the time of the weak Merovian kings of France and their Carolingian successors.
Saint-Simon Describes Louis XIV
Duke of Saint-Simon
(c. 1695)
The king’s great qualities shone more brilliantly by reason of an exterior so unique and incomparable as to lend infinite distinction to his slightest actions; the very figure of a hero, so impregnated with a natural but most imposing majesty that it appeared even in his most insignificant gestures and movements, without arrogance but with simple gravity; proportions such as a sculptor would choose to model; a perfect countenance and the grandest air and mien ever vouchsafed to man; all these advantages enhanced by a natural grace which enveloped all his actions with a singular charm which has never perhaps been equaled. He was as dignified and majestic in his dressing gown as when dressed in robes of state, or on horseback at the head of his troops.
He excelled in all sorts of exercise and liked to have every facility for it. No fatigue nor stress of weather made any impression on that heroic figure and bearing; drenched with rain or snow, pierced with cold, bathed in sweat or covered with dust, he was always the same. I have often observed with admiration that except in the most extreme and exceptional weather nothing prevented his spending considerable time out of doors every day.
A voice whose tones corresponded with the rest of his person; the ability to speak well and to listen with quick comprehension; much reserve of manner adjusted with exactness to the quality of different persons; a courtesy always grave, always dignified, always distinguished, and suited to the age, rank, and sex of each individual, and, for the ladies, always an air of natural gallantry. So much for his exterior, which has never been equaled nor even approached.
In whatever did not concern what he believed to be his rightful authority and prerogative, he showed a natural kindness of heart and a sense of justice which made one regret the education, the flatteries, the artifice which resulted in preventing him from being his real self except on the rare occasions when he gave way to some natural impulse and showed that,–prerogative aside, which choked and stifled everything,–he loved truth, justice, order, reason,–that he loved even to let himself be vanquished.
Nothing could be regulated with greater exactitude than were his days and hours. In spite of all his variety of places, affairs, and amusements, with an almanac and a watch one might tell, three hundred leagues away, exactly what he was doing. … Except at Marly, any man could have an opportunity to speak to him five or six times during the day; he listened, and almost always replied, “I will see,” in order not to accord or decide anything lightly. Never a reply or a speech that would give pain; patient to the last degree in business and in matters of personal service; completely master of his face, manner, and bearing; never giving way to impatience or anger. If he administered reproof, it was rarely, in few words, and never hastily. He did not lose control of himself ten times in his whole life, and then only with inferior persons, and not more than four or five times seriously. …
Louis XIV’s vanity was without limit or restraint; it colored everything and convinced him that no one even approached him in military talents, in plans and enterprises, in government. Hence those pictures and inscriptions in the gallery of Versailles which disgust every foreigner; those opera prologues that he himself tried to sing; that flood of prose and verse in his praise for which his appetite was insatiable; those dedications of statues copied from pagan sculpture, and the insipid and sickening compliments that were continually offered to him in person and which he swallowed with unfailing relish; hence his distaste for all merit, intelligence, education, and, most of all, for all independence of character and sentiment in others; his mistakes of judgment in matters of importance; his familiarity and favor reserved entirely for those to whom he felt himself superior in acquirements and ability; and, above everything else, a jealously of his own authority which determined and took precedence of every other sort of justice, reason, and consideration whatever.
Saint-Simon Describes the Consequences of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes
Duke of Saint-Simon
(1685)
The revocation of the Edict of Nantes, without the slightest pretext or necessity, and the various proscriptions that followed it, were the fruits of a frightful plot, in which the new spouse was one of the chief conspirators, and which depopulated a quarter of the realm; ruined its commerce; weakened it in every direction; gave it up for a long time to the public and avowed pillage of the dragoons; authorized torments and punishments by which many innocent people of both sexes were killed by thousands; ruined a numerous class; tore in pieces a world of families; armed relatives against relatives, so as to seize their property and leave them to die of hunger; banished our manufactures to foreign lands; made those lands flourish and overflow at the expense of France, and enabled them to build new cities; gave to the world the spectacle of a prodigious population proscribed without crime, stripped, fugitive, wandering, and seeking shelter far from their country; sent to the galleys nobles, rich old men, people much esteemed for their piety, learning, and virtue, people carefully nurtured, weak, and delicate;–and all solely on account of religion; in fact, to heap up the measure of horror, filled the realm with perjury and sacrilege, in the midst of the echoed cries of these unfortunate victims of error, while so many others sacrificed their conscience to their wealth and their repose, and purchased both by simulated abjuration, from which without pause they were dragged to adore what they did not believe in, and to receive the divine body of the Most Holy whilst remaining persuaded that they were only eating bread which they ought to abhor!
Such was the general abomination born of flattery and cruelty. From torture to abjuration, and from that to communion, there was often only a space of twenty-four hours; and executioners were the guides of the converts and their witnesses. … The king received from all sides detailed news of these conversions. It was by thousands that those who had abjured and taken the communion were counted; ten thousand in one place, six thousand in another,–all at once and instantly. The king congratulated himself on his power and his piety. He believed himself to have brought back the days of the apostles, and attributed to himself all the honor. The bishops wrote panegyrics of him; the Jesuits made the pulpit resound with his praise. All France was filled with horror and confusion; and yet there was never such triumph and joy, such boundless laudation of the king.
Primary Sources – Unit Six – Age of Absolutism in Eastern EuropeThe Law Code of 1649 Strengthens the Rules of Serfdom in Muscovite Russia
Russian Zemskii Sobor
(1649)
1. Any peasants of the Sovereign and labourers of the crown villages and black volosts [administrative areas] who have fled from the Sovereign’s crown villages and from the black volosts … are to be brought to the crown villages of the Sovereign and to the black volosts to their old lots according to the registers of inquisition with wives and children and with all their peasant property without term of years.
2. Also should there be any lords holding an estate by inheritance of service who start to petition the Sovereign about their fugitive peasants and labourers and say that their peasants and labourers who have fled from them live in the crown villages of the Sovereign and in black volosts or among the artisans in the artisan quarters of towns or among the musketeers, cossacks or among the gunners, or among any other serving men in the towns … [there follows a long list of all the possible places to which fugitives might have fled] then those peasants and labourers in accordance with law and the [right of] search are to be handed over according to the inquisition registers which the officers handed in to the Service Tenure Department.
20. But if any people come to anyone in an estate held by inheritance or service and say that they are free and those people want to live under them as peasants or as labourers, then those people to whom they come are to question them: who are those free people, and where is their birthplace and under whom did they live and where have they come from, and are they not somebody’s runaway people, peasants and labourers, and whether they have charters of manumission. And if any say they do not have charters of manumission on them, those holding estates by service and inheritance are to get to know genuinely about such people, are they really free people; and after genuinely getting to know, to take them the same year to be registered. …
22. And if any peasants’ children deny their fathers and mothers they are to be tortured.
Peter the Great Imposes Western Styles on the Russians
Peter the Great
(1701-1705)
Peter’ s Decree on W earing German Clothes, 1701
[All ranks of the service nobility, leading merchants, military personnel, and inhabitants of Moscow and the other towns, except the clergy] are to wear German clothes and hats and footwear and to ride in German saddles; and their wives and children without exception are also so to dress. Henceforth nobody is to wear [traditional] Russian or cossack clothes or to ride in Russian [i.e., Tatar-style] saddles; nor are craftsmen to make such things or to trade in them. And if contrary to this the Great Sovereign’s decree some people wear such Russian or cossack clothes and ride in Russian saddles, the town gatekeepers are to exact a fine from them, [so much] for those on foot and [much more] from those on horseback. Also, craftsmen who make such things and trade in them will be, for their disobedience, severely punished.
Peter’s Decree on Shaving, 1705
All courtiers and officials in Moscow and all the other towns, as well as leading merchants and other townsmen, except priests and deacons, must henceforth by this the Great Sovereign’s decree shave their beards and mustaches. And whosoever does not wish to do so, but to go about with [traditional Russian] beard and mustache, is to pay a [hefty] fine, according to his rank. … And the Department of Land Affairs [in Moscow] is to give [such persons] a badge in receipt, as will the government offices in the other towns, which badges they must wear. And from the peasants a [small] toll is to be exacted every day at the town gates, without which they cannot enter or leave the town. …
Russian Zemskii Sobor
(1649)
1. Any peasants of the Sovereign and labourers of the crown villages and black volosts [administrative areas] who have fled from the Sovereign’s crown villages and from the black volosts … are to be brought to the crown villages of the Sovereign and to the black volosts to their old lots according to the registers of inquisition with wives and children and with all their peasant property without term of years.
2. Also should there be any lords holding an estate by inheritance of service who start to petition the Sovereign about their fugitive peasants and labourers and say that their peasants and labourers who have fled from them live in the crown villages of the Sovereign and in black volosts or among the artisans in the artisan quarters of towns or among the musketeers, cossacks or among the gunners, or among any other serving men in the towns … [there follows a long list of all the possible places to which fugitives might have fled] then those peasants and labourers in accordance with law and the [right of] search are to be handed over according to the inquisition registers which the officers handed in to the Service Tenure Department.
20. But if any people come to anyone in an estate held by inheritance or service and say that they are free and those people want to live under them as peasants or as labourers, then those people to whom they come are to question them: who are those free people, and where is their birthplace and under whom did they live and where have they come from, and are they not somebody’s runaway people, peasants and labourers, and whether they have charters of manumission. And if any say they do not have charters of manumission on them, those holding estates by service and inheritance are to get to know genuinely about such people, are they really free people; and after genuinely getting to know, to take them the same year to be registered. …
22. And if any peasants’ children deny their fathers and mothers they are to be tortured.
Peter the Great Imposes Western Styles on the Russians
Peter the Great
(1701-1705)
Peter’ s Decree on W earing German Clothes, 1701
[All ranks of the service nobility, leading merchants, military personnel, and inhabitants of Moscow and the other towns, except the clergy] are to wear German clothes and hats and footwear and to ride in German saddles; and their wives and children without exception are also so to dress. Henceforth nobody is to wear [traditional] Russian or cossack clothes or to ride in Russian [i.e., Tatar-style] saddles; nor are craftsmen to make such things or to trade in them. And if contrary to this the Great Sovereign’s decree some people wear such Russian or cossack clothes and ride in Russian saddles, the town gatekeepers are to exact a fine from them, [so much] for those on foot and [much more] from those on horseback. Also, craftsmen who make such things and trade in them will be, for their disobedience, severely punished.
Peter’s Decree on Shaving, 1705
All courtiers and officials in Moscow and all the other towns, as well as leading merchants and other townsmen, except priests and deacons, must henceforth by this the Great Sovereign’s decree shave their beards and mustaches. And whosoever does not wish to do so, but to go about with [traditional Russian] beard and mustache, is to pay a [hefty] fine, according to his rank. … And the Department of Land Affairs [in Moscow] is to give [such persons] a badge in receipt, as will the government offices in the other towns, which badges they must wear. And from the peasants a [small] toll is to be exacted every day at the town gates, without which they cannot enter or leave the town. …
Primary Sources – Unit Seven – Scientific Revolution & the Enlightenment
Commentariolus: Copernicus Outlines His Thesis
Nicolaus Copernicus
(1514)
Our ancestors assumed, I observe, a large number of celestial spheres for this reason especially, to explain the apparent motion of the planets by the principle of regularity. For they thought it altogether absurd that a heavenly body, which is a perfect sphere, should not always move uniformly. They saw that by connecting and combining regular motions in various ways they could make any body appear to move to any position.
Callippus and Eudoxus, who endeavored to solve the problem by the use of concentric spheres, were unable to account for all the planetary movements; they had to explain not merely the apparent revolutions of the planets but also the fact that these bodies appear to us sometimes to mount higher in the heavens, sometimes to descend; and this fact is incompatible with the principle of concentricity. Therefore it seemed better to employ eccentrics and epicycles, a system which most scholars finally accepted.
Yet the planetary theories of Ptolemy and most other astronomers, although consistent with the numerical data, seemed likewise to present no small difficulty. For these theories were not adequate unless certain equants were also conceived; it then appeared that a planet moved with uniform velocity neither on its deferent nor about the center of its epicycle. Hence a system of this sort seemed neither sufficiently absolute nor sufficiently pleasing to the mind.
Having become aware of these defects, I often considered whether there could perhaps be found a more reasonable arrangement of circles, from which every apparent inequality would be derived and in which everything would move uniformly about its proper center, as the rule of absolute motion requires. After I had addressed myself to this very difficult and almost insoluble problem, the suggestion at length came to me how it could be solved with fewer and much simpler constructions than were formerly used, if some assumptions (which are called axioms) were granted me. They follow in this order.
Assumptions
1. There is no one center of all the celestial circles or spheres.
2. The center of the earth is not the center of the universe, but only of gravity and of the lunar sphere.
3. All the spheres revolve about the sun as their mid-point, and therefore the sun is the center of the universe.
4. The ratio of the earth’s distance from the sun to the height of the firmament is so much smaller than the ratio of the earth’s radius to its distance from the sun that the distance from the earth to the sun is imperceptible in comparison with the height of the firmament.
5. Whatever motion appears in the firmament arises not from any motion of the firmament, but from the earth’s motion. The earth together with its circumjacent elements performs a complete rotation on its fixed poles in a daily motion, while the firmament and highest heaven abide unchanged.
6. What appear to us as motions of the sun arise not from its motion but from the motion of the earth and our sphere, with which we revolve about the sun like any other planet. The earth has, then, more than one motion.
7. The apparent retrograde and direct motion of the planets arises not from their motion but from the earth’s. The motion of the earth alone, therefore, suffices to explain so many apparent inequalities in the heavens.
Having set forth these assumptions, I shall endeavor briefly to show how uniformity of the motions can be saved in a systematic way. However, I have thought it well, for the sake of brevity, to omit from this sketch mathematical demonstrations, reserving these for my larger work. But in the explanation of the circles I shall set down here the lengths of the radii; and from these the reader who is not unacquainted with mathematics will readily perceive how closely this arrangement of circles agrees with the numerical data and observations.
Accordingly, let no one suppose that I have gratuitously asserted, with the Pythagoreans, the motion of the earth; strong proof will be found in my exposition of the circles. For the principal arguments by which the natural philosophers attempt to establish the immobility of the earth rest for the most part on the appearances; it is particularly such arguments that collapse here, since I treat the earth’s immobility as due to an appearance.
Editing Copernicus: The Preface to De Revolutionibus
Andres Osiander
(1543)
To the Reader Concerning the Hypotheses of This Work:
There have already been widespread reports about the novel hypotheses of this work, which declares that the earth moves whereas the sun is at rest in the center of the universe. Hence certain scholars, I have no doubt, are deeply offended and believe that the liberal arts, which were established long ago on a sound basis, should not be thrown into confusion. But if these men are willing to examine the matter closely, they will find that the author of this work has done nothing blameworthy. For it is the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial motions through careful and expert study. Then he must conceive and devise the causes of these motions or hypotheses about them. Since he cannot in any way attain to the true causes, he will adopt whatever suppositions enable the motions to be computed correctly from the principles of geometry for the future as well as the past. The present author has performed both these duties excellently. For these hypotheses need not be true nor even probable. On the contrary, if they provide a calculus consistent with the observations, that alone is enough. Perhaps there is someone who is so ignorant of geometry and optics that he regards the epicycle of Venus as probable, or thinks that it is the reason why Venus sometimes precedes and sometimes follows the sun by forty degrees and even more. Is there anyone who is not aware that from this assumption it necessarily follows that the diameter of the planet at perigee should appear more than four times, and the body of the planet more than sixteen times, as great as at apogee? Yet this variation is refuted by the experience of every age. In this science there are some other no less important absurdities, which need not be set forth at the moment. For this art, it is quite clear, is completely and absolutely ignorant of the causes of the apparent nonuniform motions. And if any causes are devised by the imagination, as indeed very many are, they are not put forward to convince anyone that they are true, but merely to provide a reliable basis for computation. However, since different hypotheses are sometimes offered for one and the same motion (for example, eccentricity and an epicycle for the sun’s motion), the astronomer will take as his first choice that hypothesis which is the easiest to grasp. The philosopher will perhaps rather seek the semblance of the truth. But neither of them will understand or state anything certain, unless it has been divinely revealed to him.
Therefore alongside the ancient hypotheses, which are no more probable, let us permit these new hypotheses also to become known, especially since they are admirable as well as simple and bring with them a huge treasure of very skillful observations. So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it. Farewell.
Galileo Discovers the Moons of Jupiter
Galileo Galilei
(1610)
On the seventh day of January in this present year 1610, at the first hour of night, when I was viewing the heavenly bodies with a telescope, Jupiter presented itself to me; and because I had prepared a very excellent instrument for myself, I perceived (as I had not before, on account of the weakness of my previous instrument) that beside the planet there were three starlets, small indeed, but very bright. Though I believed them to be among the host of fixed stars, they aroused my curiosity somewhat by appearing to lie in an exact straight line parallel to the ecliptic, and by their being more splendid than others of their size. Their arrangement with respect to Jupiter and each other was the following:
East * * O * West
that is, there were two stars on the eastern side and one to the west … on January eighth–led by what, I do not know–I found a very different arrangement. The three starlets were now all to the west of Jupiter, closer together, and at equal intervals from one another as shown in the following sketch:
East O * * * West
At this time, though I did not yet turn my attention to the way the stars had come together, I began to concern myself with the question how Jupiter could be east of all these stars when on the previous day it had been west of two of them. …
On the tenth of January, however, the stars appeared in this position with respect to Jupiter:
East * * O West
that is, there were but two of them, both easterly, the third (as I supposed) being hidden behind Jupiter. As at first, they were in the same straight line with Jupiter and were arranged precisely in the line of the zodiac. Noticing this, and knowing that there was no way in which such alterations could be attributed to Jupiter’s motion, yet being certain that these were still the same stars I had observed (in fact no other was to be found along the line of the zodiac for a long way on either side of Jupiter), my perplexity was now transformed into amazement. I was sure that the apparent changes belonged not to Jupiter but to the observed stars, and I resolved to pursue this investigation with greater care and attention.
And thus, on the eleventh of January, I saw the following disposition:
East * * O West
… I had now decided beyond all question that there existed in the heavens three stars wandering about Jupiter as do Venus and Mercury about the sun, and this became plainer than daylight from observations on similar occasions which followed. Nor were there just three such stars; four wanderers complete their revolutions about Jupiter, and of their alterations as observed more precisely later on we shall give a description here. Also I measured the distances between them by means of the telescope, using the method explained before. Moreover I recorded the times of the observations, especially when more than one was made during the same night–for the revolutions of these planets are so speedily completed that it is usually possible to take even their hourly variations. [Galileo continues to make similar observations until March 2, noting the changes in the "stars" adjacent to Jupiter.] …
Such are the observations concerning the four Medicean planets recently first discovered by me, and although from this data their periods have not yet been reconstructed in numerical form, it is legitimate at least to put in evidence some facts worthy of note. Above all, since they sometimes follow and sometimes precede Jupiter by the same intervals, and they remain within very limited distances either to east or west of Jupiter, accompanying that planet in both its retrograde and direct movements in a constant manner, no one can doubt that they complete their revolutions about Jupiter and at the same time effect all together a twelve-year period about the center of the universe. That they also revolve in unequal circles is manifestly deduced from the fact that at the greatest elongation from Jupiter it is never possible to see two of these planets in conjunction, whereas in the vicinity of Jupiter they are found united two, three, and sometimes all four together. It is also observed that the revolutions are swifter in those planets which describe smaller circles about Jupiter, since the stars closest to Jupiter are usually seen to the east when on the previous day they appeared to the west, and vice versa, while the planet which traces the largest orbit appears upon accurate observation of its returns to have a semimonthly period.
Here we have a fine and elegant argument for quieting the doubts of those who, while accepting with tranquil mind the revolutions of the planets about the sun in the Copernican system, are mightily disturbed to have the moon alone revolve about the earth and accompany it in an annual rotation about the sun. Some have believed that this structure of the universe should be rejected as impossible. But now we have not just one planet rotating about another while both run through a great orbit around the sun; our own eyes show us four stars which wander around Jupiter as does the moon around the earth, while all together trace out a grand revolution about the sun in the space of twelve years. …
Francis Bacon Rejects Superstition and Extols the Virtue of Science
Francis Bacon
(1620)
The discoveries which have hitherto been made in the sciences are such as lie close to vulgar notions, scarcely beneath the surface. In order to penetrate into the inner and further recesses of nature, it is necessary that both notions and axioms [be] derived from things by a more sure and guarded way, and that a method of intellectual operation be introduced altogether better and more certain. …
There is no soundness in our notions, whether logical or physical. Substance, quality, action, passion, essence itself are not sound notions; much less are heavy, light, dense, rare, moist, dry, generation, corruption, attraction, repulsion, element, matter, form, and the like; but all are fantastical and ill-defined. …
There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and the discovery of middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried. …
It is not to be forgotten that in every age natural philosophy has had a troublesome adversary and hard to deal with,–namely, superstition and the blind and immoderate zeal of religion. For we see among the Greeks that those who first proposed to man’s uninitiated ears the natural causes for thunder and for storms were thereupon found guilty of impiety. Nor was much more forbearance shown by some of the ancient fathers of the Christian Church to those who, on most convincing grounds (such as no one in his senses would now think of contradicting), maintained that the earth was round and, of consequence, asserted the existence of the antipodes.
Moreover, as things now are, to discourse of nature is made harder and more perilous by the summaries and systems of the schoolmen; who, having reduced theology into regular order as well as they were able, and fashioned it into the shape of an art, ended in incorporating the contentious and thorny philosophy of Aristotle, more than was fit, with the body of religion. …
Lastly, some are weakly afraid lest a deeper search into nature should transgress the permitted limits of sobermindedness; wrongfully wresting and transferring what is said in Holy Writ against those who pry into sacred mysteries to the hidden things of nature, which are barred by no prohibition. Others, with more subtlety, surmise and reflect that if secondary causes are unknown everything can be more readily referred to the divine hand and rod,–a point in which they think religion greatly concerned; which is, in fact, nothing else but to seek to gratify God with a lie. Others fear from past example that movements and changes in philosophy will end in assaults on religion; and others again appear apprehensive that in the investigation of nature something may be found to subvert, or at least shake, the authority of religion, especially with the unlearned.
But these two last fears seem to me to savor utterly of carnal wisdom; as if men in the recesses and secret thoughts of their hearts doubted and distrusted the strength of religion, and the empire of faith over the senses, and therefore feared that the investigation of truth in nature might be dangerous to them. But if the matter be truly considered, natural philosophy is, after the word of God, at once the surest medicine against superstition and the most approved nourishment for faith; and therefore she is rightly given to religion as her most faithful handmaid, since the one displays the will of God, the other his power. …
Descartes’ Discourse on Method Offers a New Method of Reasoning
Rene Descartes
(1637)
I was then in Germany, attracted thither by the wars in that country, which have not yet been brought to a termination; and as I was returning to the army from the coronation of the Emperor, the setting in of winter arrested me in a locality where, as I found no society to interest me, and was besides fortunately undisturbed by any cares or passions, I remained the whole day in [a stove-heated room,] with full opportunity to occupy my attention with my own thoughts. Of these one of the very first that occurred to me was, that there is seldom so much perfection in works composed of many separate parts, upon which different hands have been employed, as in those completed by a single master. Thus it is observable that the buildings which a single architect has planned and executed, are generally more elegant and commodious than those which several have attempted to improve, by making old walls serve for purposes for which they were not originally built. Thus also, those ancient cities which, from being at first only villages, have become, in course of time, large towns, are usually but ill laid out compared with the regularly constructed towns which a professional architect has freely planned on an open plain; so that although the several buildings of the former may often equal or surpass in beauty those of the latter, yet when one observes their indiscriminate juxtaposition, there a large one and here a small, and the consequent crookedness and irregularity of the streets, one is disposed to allege that chance rather than any human will guided by reason, must have led to such an arrangement. …
It is true … that it is not customary to pull down all the houses of a town with the single design of rebuilding them differently, and thereby rendering the streets more handsome; but it often happens that a private individual takes down his own with the view of erecting it anew, and that people are even sometimes constrained to this when their houses are in danger of falling from age, or when the foundations are insecure. With this before me by way of example, I was persuaded that it would indeed be preposterous for a private individual to think of reforming a state by fundamentally changing it throughout, and overturning it in order to set it up amended; and the same I thought was true of any similar project for reforming the body of the Sciences, or the order of teaching them established in the Schools [scholastic philosophy]: but as for the opinions which up to that time I had embraced, I thought that I could not do better than resolve at once to sweep them wholly away, that I might afterwards be in a position to admit either others more correct, or even perhaps the same when they had undergone the scrutiny of Reason. I firmly believed that in this way I should much better succeed in the conduct of my life, than if I built only upon old foundations, and leant upon principles which, in my youth, I had taken upon trust. …
Among the branches of Philosophy, I had, at an earlier period, given some attention to Logic, and among those of the Mathematics to Geometrical Analysis and Algebra,–three arts or Sciences which ought, as I conceived, to contribute something to my design. But, on examination, I found that, as for Logic, its syllogisms and the majority of its other precepts are of avail rather in the communication of what we already know … than in the investigation of the unknown; and although this Science contains indeed a number of correct and very excellent precepts, there are, nevertheless, so many others, and these either injurious or superfluous, mingled with the former, that it is almost quite as difficult to effect a severance of the true from the false as it is to extract a Diana or a Minerva from a rough block of marble. … By these considerations I was induced to seek some other Method which would comprise [their] advantages … and be exempt from their defects. And as a multitude of laws often only hampers justice, so that a state is best governed when, with few laws, these are rigidly administered; in like manner, instead of the great number of precepts of which Logic is composed, I believed that the four following would prove perfectly sufficient for me, provided I took the firm and unwavering resolution never in a single instance to fail in observing them.
The first was never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgment than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt.
The second,to divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution.
The third, to conduct my thoughts in such order that, by commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, I might ascend by little and little, and, as it were, step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex; assigning in thought a certain order even to those objects which in their own nature do not stand in a relation of antecedence and sequence.
And the last, in every case to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so general, that I might be assured that nothing was omitted.
The long chains of simple and easy reasonings by means of which geometers are accustomed to reach the conclusions of their most difficult demonstrations, had led me to imagine that all things, to the knowledge of which man is competent, are mutually connected in the same way, and that there is nothing so far removed from us as to be beyond our reach, or so hidden that we cannot discover it, provided only we abstain from accepting the false for the true, and always preserve in our thoughts the order necessary for the deduction of one truth from another. …
Pascal’s Famous Wager on God’s Existence
Blaise Pascal
(1670)
199. Let us imagine a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows, and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of men. …
205. When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me? Memoria hospitis unius diei praetereuntis.
206. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me. …
229. This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is not matter of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there which revealed a Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion; if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But, seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied; wherefore I have a hundred times wished that if a God maintains nature, she should testify to Him unequivocally, and that, if the signs she gives are deceptive, she should suppress them altogether; that she should say everything or nothing, that I might see which cause I ought to follow. Whereas in my present state, ignorant of what I am or of what I ought to do, I know neither my condition nor my duty. My heart inclines wholly to know where is the true good, in order to follow it; nothing would be too dear to me for eternity.
I envy those whom I see living in the faith with such carelessness, and who make such a bad use of a gift of which it seems to me I would make such a different use.
230. It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that He should not exist; that the soul should be joined to the body, and that we should have no soul; that the world should be created, and that it should not be created, etc.; that original sin should be, and that it should not be. …
346. Thought constitutes the greatness of man.
347. Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.
All our dignity consists, then, in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavour, then, to think well; this is the principle of morality.
348. A thinking reed.–It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.
… If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is. This being so, who will dare to undertake the decision of the question? Not we, who have no affinity to Him. …
… But you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.–”That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much.”–Let us see. Since there is equal risk of gain and loss, if you had only to gain two lives, instead of one, you might still wager. But if there were three lives to gain, you would have to play (since you are under the necessity of playing), and you would be imprudent, when you are forced to play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where there is an equal risk of loss and gain. But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain. But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance to gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. It is all divided; wherever the infinite is and there is not an infinity of chances of loss against that of gain, there is no time to hesitate, you must give all. And thus, when one is forced to play, he must renounce reason to preserve his life, rather than risk it for infinite gain, as likely to happen as the loss of nothingness.
For it is no use to say it is uncertain if we will gain, and it is certain that we risk, and that the infinite distance between the certainty of what is staked and the uncertainty of what will be gained, equals the finite good which is certainly staked against the uncertain infinite. It is not so, as every player stakes a certainty to gain an uncertainty, and yet he stakes a finite certainty to gain a finite uncertainty, without transgressing against reason. There is not an infinite distance between the certainty staked and the uncertainty of the gain; that is untrue. In truth, there is an infinity between the certainty of gain and the certainty of loss. But the uncertainty of the gain is proportioned to the certainty of the stake according to the proportion of the chances of gain and loss. Hence it comes that, if there are as many risks on one side as on the other, the course is to play even; and then the certainty of the stake is equal to the uncertainty of the gain, so far is it from fact that there is an infinite distance between them. And so our proposition is of infinite force, when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and loss, and the infinite to gain. This is demonstrable: and if men are capable of any truths, this is one.
Sir Isaac Newton Lays Down the Ground Rules for the Scientific Method
Isaac Newton
(1687)
Rule I
We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.
To this purpose the philosophers say that Nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.
Rule II
Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes.
As to respiration in a man and in a beast; the descent of stones in Europe and in America; the light of our culinary fire and of the sun; the reflection of light in the earth, and in the planets.
Rule III
The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intensification nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever.
For since the qualities of bodies are only known to us by experiments, we are to hold for universal all such as universally agree with experiments; and such as are not liable to diminution can never be quite taken away. We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple, and always consonant to itself. We no other way know the extension of bodies than by our senses, nor do these reach it in all bodies; but because we perceive extension in all that are sensible, therefore we ascribe it universally to all others also. That abundance of bodies are hard, we learn by experience; and because the hardness of the whole arises from the hardness of the parts, we therefore justly infer the hardness of the undivided particles not only of the bodies we feel but of all others. That all bodies are impenetrable, we gather not from reason, but from sensation. The bodies which we handle we find impenetrable, and thence conclude impenetrability to be an universal property of all bodies whatsoever. That all bodies are movable, and endowed with certain powers (which we call the inertia) of persevering in their motion, or in their rest, we only infer from the like properties observed in the bodies which we have seen. The extension, hardness, impenetrability, mobility, and inertia of the whole, result from the extension, hardness, impenetrability, mobility, and inertia of the parts; and hence we conclude the least particles of all bodies to be also all extended, and hard and impenetrable, and movable, and endowed with their proper inertia. And this is the foundation of all philosophy. Moreover, that the divided but contiguous particles of bodies may be separated from one another, is matter of observation; and, in the particles that remain undivided, our minds are able to distinguish yet lesser parts, as is mathematically demonstrated. But whether the parts so distinguished, and not yet divided, may, by the powers of Nature, be actually divided and separated from one another, we cannot certainly determine. Yet, had we the proof of but one experiment that any undivided particle, in breaking a hard and solid body, suffered a division, we might by virtue of this rule conclude that the undivided as well as the divided particles may be divided and actually separated to infinity.
Lastly, if it universally appears, by experiments and astronomical observations, that all bodies about the earth gravitate towards the earth, and that in proportion to the quantity of matter which they severally contain; that the moon likewise, according to the quantity of its matter, gravitates towards the earth; that, on the other hand, our sea gravitates towards the moon; and all the planets one towards another; and the comets in like manner towards the sun; we must, in consequence of this rule, universally allow that all bodies whatsoever are endowed with a principle of mutual gravitation. For the argument from the appearances concludes with more force for the universal gravitation of all bodies than for their impenetrability; of which, among those in the celestial regions, we have no experiments, nor any manner of observation. Not that I affirm gravity to be essential to bodies: by theirvis insita [force of inertia] I mean nothing but their inertia. This is immutable. Their gravity is diminished as they recede from the earth.
Rule IV
In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exceptions.
This rule we must follow, that the argument of induction may not be evaded by hypotheses.
An English Observer Describes the State of Serfdom in Eighteenth-Century Poland
William Coxe
(1783)
Peasants belonging to individuals are at the absolute disposal of their master, and have scarcely any positive security, either for their properties or their lives. Until 1768 the Statutes of Poland only exacted a fine from a lord who killed his slave; but in that year a decree passed, that the murder of a peasant was a capital crime; yet, as the law in question requires such an accumulation of evidence as is seldom to be obtained, it has more appearance of protection than thereality.
How deplorable must be the state of that country, when a law of that nature was thought requisite to be enacted, yet is found incapable of being enforced. The generality, indeed, of the Polish nobles are not inclined either to establish or give efficacy to any regulations in favour of the peasants, whom they scarcely consider as entitled to the common rights of humanity. A few nobles, however, of benevolent hearts and enlightened understandings, have acted upon different principles, and have ventured upon the expedient of giving liberty to their vassals. The event has showed this project to be no less judicious than humane, no less friendly to their own interests than to the happiness of their peasants: for it appears that in the districts, in which the new arrangement has been introduced, the population of their villages is considerably increased, and the revenues of their estates augmented in a triple proportion.
The first noble who granted freedom to his peasants was [Andrzej] Zamoiski, formerly great chancellor, who in 1760 enfranchised six villages in the palatinate of Masovia. These villages were, in 1777, visited by the author of the Patriotic Letters [advocating political reform], from whom I received the following information: on inspecting the parish-registers of births from 1750 to 1760, that is, during the ten years of slavery immediately preceding their enfranchisement, he found the number of births 434; in the first ten years of their freedom, from 1760 to 1770, 620; and from 1770 to the beginning of 1777, 585 births.
By these extracts it appeared that
During the first period there were only 43 births
second period 62 each year
third period 77
If we suppose an improvement of this sort to take place throughout the kingdom, how great would be the increase of national population!
The revenues of the six villages, since their enfranchisement, have been augmented in a much greater proportion than their population. In their state of vassalage Zamoiski was obliged, according to the custom of Poland, to build cottages and barns for his peasants, and to furnish them with feed, horses, ploughs, and every implement of agriculture; since their attainment of liberty they are become so easy in their circumstances, as to provide themselves with all these necessaries at their own expence; and they likewise cheerfully pay an annual rent, in lieu of the manual labour, which their master formerly exacted from them. By these means the receipts of this particular estate have been nearly tripled.
Voltaire on Religious Toleration
Voltaire
(1763)
One does not need great art and skilful eloquence to prove that Christians ought to tolerate each other–nay, even to regard all men as brothers. Why, you say, is the Turk, the Chinese, or the Jew my brother? Assuredly; are we not all children of the same father, creatures of the same God?
But these people despise us and treat us as idolaters. Very well; I will tell them that they are quite wrong. It seems to me that I might astonish, at least, the stubborn pride of a Mohammedan or a Buddhist priest if I spoke to them somewhat as follows:
This little globe, which is but a point, travels in space like many other globes; we are lost in the immensity. Man, about five feet high, is certainly a small thing in the universe. One of these imperceptible beings says to some of his neighbours, in Arabia or South Africa: “Listen to me, for the God of all these worlds has enlightened me. There are nine hundred million little ants like us on the earth, but my ant-hole alone is dear to God. All the others are eternally reprobated by him. Mine alone will be happy.”
They would then interrupt me, and ask who was the fool that talked all this nonsense. I should be obliged to tell them that it was themselves. I would then try to appease them, which would be difficult. …
D’Holbach’s System of Nature Offers a New View of the Human Soul
Baron Paul d’Holbach
(1770)
Man’s ignorance has endured so long, he has taken such slow, irresolute steps to ameliorate his condition, only because he has neglected to study nature, to scrutinize her laws, to search out her resources, to discover her properties. His sluggishness finds its account in permitting himself to be guided by precedent, rather than to follow experience which demands activity; to be led by routine, rather than by his reason which exacts reflection. Hence may be traced the aversion man betrays for everything that swerves from these rules to which he has been accustomed; hence his stupid, his scrupulous respect for antiquity, for the most silly, the most absurd institutions of his fathers; hence those fears that seize him, when the most advantageous changes are proposed to him, or the most probable attempts are made to better his condition. He dreads to examine, because he has been taught to hold it a profanation of something immediately connected with his welfare; he credulously believes the interested advice, and spurns at those who wish to show him the danger of the road he is traveling.
This is the reason why nations linger on in the most scandalous lethargy, groaning under abuses transmitted from century to century, trembling at the very idea of that which alone can remedy their misfortunes. …
The more man reflects, the more he will be convinced that the soul, very far from being distinguished from the body, is only the body itself considered relatively to some of its functions, or to some of the modes of existing or acting of which it is susceptible, whilst it enjoys life. Thus, the soul in man is considered relatively to the faculty he has of feeling, of thinking, and of acting in a mode resulting from his peculiar nature; that is to say, from his properties, from his particular organization, from the modifications, whether durable or transitory, which the beings who act upon him cause his machine to undergo. …
An organized being may be compared to a clock, which, once broken, is no longer suitable to the use for which it was designed. To say that the soul shall feel, shall think, shall enjoy, shall suffer after the death of the body, is to pretend that a clock, shivered into a thousand pieces, will continue to strike the hour and have the faculty of marking the progress of time. Those who say that the soul of man is able to subsist notwithstanding the destruction of the body, evidently support the position that the modification of a body will be enabled to conserve itself after the subject is destroyed; but this is completely absurd.
Rousseau on “Civil Religion”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1762)
Christianity is a purely spiritual religion, occupied solely with heavenly things; the country of a Christian is not of this world. He does his duty, it is true, but he does it with a profound indifference as to the good or ill success of his efforts. Provided he has nothing to reproach himself with, it matters little to him whether things go well or ill here below. If the state is flourishing, he scarcely dares enjoy the public felicity; he fears to become proud of the glory of his country. If the state degenerates, he blesses the hand of God which lies heavy upon his people. …
Should the depository of this [political] power abuse it, he regards this abuse as the rod with which God punishes his children. People would have scruples about driving out the usurper: it would be necessary to disturb the public repose, to use violence, to shed blood; all this accords ill with the gentleness of the Christian, and, after all, what matters it whether one is a slave or free in this vale of misery? The essential thing is to go to paradise, and resignation is but one more means to accomplish it.
Should some foreign war supervene, the citizens march to combat without difficulty. None among them think of flying; they do their duty, but without passion for victory; they know better how to die than to win. Whether they are victors or vanquished, what matters it? Does not Providence know better than they what they need? …
But I am in error in speaking of a Christian republic; each of these words excludes the other. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is too favorable to tyranny not to be taken advantage of by it. Christians are made to be slaves: they know it and do not care; this short life has too little value in their eyes. …
There is, however, a profession of faith purely civil, of which it is the sovereign’s [i.e., the people's] duty to decide upon the articles, not precisely as dogmas of religion, but as sentiments of sociality without which it is impossible to be a good citizen or a faithful subject. Without being able to oblige any one to believe them, the sovereign can banish from the state whoever does not believe them; the sovereign should banish him, not as impious, but as unsocial, as incapable of loving law and justice sincerely, and of sacrificing at need his life to his duty. If any one, having publicly acknowledged these dogmas, conducts himself as if he did not acknowledge them, he should be punished with death; he has committed the greatest of crimes,–he has lied before the law.
The dogmas of civil religion should be simple, few in number, announced with precision, without explanation or commentary. The existence of a powerful, intelligent, benevolent, prescient, and provident Divinity, the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sacredness of the social contract and the law,–these are the positive dogmas.
As to the negative dogmas, I limit them to one,–intolerance: it enters into the religions which we have excluded. Those who make a distinction between civil intolerance and theological intolerance deceive themselves, to my mind. These two intolerances are inseparable. It is impossible to live in peace with people whom one believes to be damned, to love them is to hate God, who punishes them; they must be redeemed or else tortured. Wherever theological intolerance is admitted, it must have some civil effects; and as soon as it has them the sovereign is no more a sovereign even in temporal matters. From that time priests are the true masters; kings are but their officers.
Montesquieu Identifies the Necessity for the Separation of Governmental Powers
Baron de Montesquieu
(1748)
In every government there are three sorts of power: the legislative; the executive in respect to things dependent on the law of nations; and the executive in regard to matters that depend on the civil law.
By virtue of the first, the prince or magistrate enacts temporary or perpetual laws, and amends or abrogates those that have been already enacted. By the second, he makes peace or war, sends or receives embassies, establishes the public security, and provides against invasions. By the third, he punishes criminals, or determines the disputes that arise between individuals. The latter we shall call the judiciary power, and the other simply the executive power of the state.
The political liberty of the subject is a tranquillity of mind arising from the opinion each person has of his safety. In order to have this liberty, it is requisite the government be so constituted as one man need not be afraid of another.
When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.
Again, there is no liberty, if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive. Were it joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control; for the judge would be then the legislator. Were it joined to the executive power, the judge might behave with violence and oppression.
There would be an end of everything, were the same man or the same body, whether of the nobles or of the people, to exercise those three powers, that of enacting laws, that of executing the public resolutions, and of trying the causes of individuals.
Most kingdoms in Europe enjoy a moderate government because the prince who is invested with the two first powers leaves the third to his subjects. In Turkey, where these three powers are united in the Sultan’s person, the subjects groan under the most dreadful oppression.
In the republics of Italy, where these three powers are united, there is less liberty than in our monarchies. Hence their government is obliged to have recourse to as violent methods for its support as even that of the Turks; witness the state inquisitors, and the lion’s mouth into which every informer may at all hours throw his written accusations.
Rousseau Espouses Popular Sovereignty and the General Will
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1762)
Since no man has any natural authority over his fellowmen, and since force is not the source of right, conventions remain as the basis of all lawful authority among men. [Book I, Chapter 4].
Now, as men cannot create any new forces, but only combine and direct those that exist, they have no other means of self-preservation than to form by aggregation a sum of forces which may overcome the resistance, to put them in action by a single motive power, and to make them work in concert.
This sum of forces can be produced only by the combination of many; but the strength and freedom of each man being the chief instruments of his preservation, how can he pledge them without injuring himself, and without neglecting the cares which he owes to himself? This difficulty, applied to my subject, may be expressed in these terms.
“To find a form of association which may defend and protect with the whole force of the community the person and property of every associate, and by means of which each, coalescing with all, may nevertheless obey only himself, and remain as free as before.” Such is the fundamental problem of which the social contract furnishes the solution. …
If then we set aside what is not of the essence of the social contract, we shall find that it is reducible to the following terms: “Each of us puts in common his person and his whole power under the supreme direction of the general will, and in return we receive every member as an indivisible part of the whole.” [Book I, Chapter 6].
But the body politic or sovereign, deriving its existence only from the contract, can never bind itself, even to others, in anything that derogates from the original act, such as alienation of some portion of itself, or submission to another sovereign. To violate the act by which it exists would be to annihilate itself, and what is nothing produces nothing. [Book I, Chapter 7].
It follows from what precedes, that the general will is always right and always tends to the public advantage; but it does not follow that the resolutions of the people have always the same rectitude. Men always desire their own good, but do not always discern it; the people are never corrupted, though often deceived, and it is only then that they seem to will what is evil. [Book II, Chapter 3].
The public force, then, requires a suitable agent to concentrate it and put it in action according to the directions of the general will, to serve as a means of communication between the state and the sovereign, to effect in some manner in the public person what the union of soul and body effects in a man. This is, in the State, the function of government, improperly confounded with the sovereign of which it is only the minister.
What, then, is the government? An intermediate body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual correspondence, charged with the execution of the laws and with the maintenance of liberty both civil and political. [Book III, Chapter 1].
It is not sufficient that the assembled people should have once fixed the constitution of the state by giving their sanction to a body of laws; it is not sufficient that they should have established a perpetual government, or that they should have once for all provided for the election of magistrates. Besides the extraordinary assemblies which unforeseen events may require, it is necessary that there should be fixed and periodical ones which nothing can abolish or prorogue; so that, on the appointed day, the people are rightfully convoked by the law, without needing for that purpose any formal summons. [Book III, Chapter 13].
So soon as the people are lawfully assembled as a sovereign body, the whole jurisdiction of the government ceases, the executive power is suspended, and the person of the meanest citizen is as sacred and inviolable as that of the first magistrate, because where the represented are, there is no longer any representative. [Book III, Chapter 14].
These assemblies, which have as their object the maintenance of the social treaty, ought always to be opened with two propositions, which no one should be able to suppress, and which should pass separately by vote. The first: “Whether it pleases the sovereign to maintain the present form of government.” The second: “Whether it pleases the people to leave the administration to those at present entrusted with it.”
I presuppose here what I believe I have proved, viz., that there is in the State no fundamental law which cannot be revoked, not even this social compact; for if all the citizens assembled in order to break the compact by a solemn agreement, no one can doubt that it could be quite legitimately broken. [Book III, Chapter 18].
An Early English Feminist Denounces the Inequality Inherent in the Institution of Marriage
Mary Astell
(1700)
Tis true, thro’ Want of Learning, and of that Superior Genius which Men as Men lay claim to, she was ignorant of the Natural Inferiority of our Sex, which our Masters lay down as a Self-Evident and Fundamental Truth. She saw nothing in the Reason of Things, to make this either a Principle or a Conclusion, but much to the contrary. …
That the Custom of the World has put Women, generally speaking, into a State of Subjection, is not deny’d; but the Right can no more be prov’d from the Fact, than the Predominancy of Vice can justifie it. …
The Domestic Sovereign [husband] is without Dispute Elected, and the Stipulations and Contract are mutual, is it not then partial in Men to the last degree, to contend for, and practise that Arbitrary Dominion in their Families, which they abhor and exclaim against in the State? For if Arbitrary Power is evil in itself, and an improper Method of Governing Rational and Free Agents, it ought not to be Practis’d any where; Nor is it less, but rather more mischievous in Families than in Kingdoms, by how much 100000 Tyrants are worse than one.
Joseph II, Religious Toleration, and the Austrian Jews
Joseph II
(1781)
In order to make the Jews more useful, the discrimination hitherto observed in relation to their clothing is abolished in its entirety. Consequently the obligation for the men to wear yellow armbands and the women to wear yellow ribbons is abolished. If they behave quietly and decently, then no one has the right to dictate to them on matters of dress.
Within two years the Jews must abandon their own language. … Consequently the Jews may use their own language only during religious services.
Those Jews who do not have the opportunity to send their children to Jewish schools are to be compelled to send them to Christian schools, to learn reading, writing, arithmetic and other subjects.
Jewish youth will also be allowed to attend the imperial universities.
To prevent the Jewish children and the Jews in general suffering as a result of the concessions granted to them, the authorities and the leaders of the local communities must instruct the subjects in a rational manner that the Jews are to be regarded like any other fellow human-beings and that there must be an end to the prejudice and contempt which some subjects, particularly the unintelligent, have shown towards the Jewish nation and which several times in the past have led to deplorable behaviour and even criminal excesses. On the other hand the Jews must be warned to behave like decent citizens and it must be emphasised in particular that they must not allow the beneficence of His Majesty to go to their heads and indulge in wanton and licentious excesses and swindling.
Catherine the Great’s Grand Instruction to the Legislative Commission
Catherine the Great
(1767)
6. Russia is a European state.
7. This is clearly demonstrated by the following observations: the alterations which Peter the Great undertook in Russia succeeded with greater ease because the manners which prevailed at that time, and had been introduced amongst us by a mixture of different nations and the conquest of foreign territories, were quite unsuitable to the climate. Peter the First, by introducing the manners and customs of Europe among theEuropeanpeople in his domains, found at that time such means [success] as even he himself did not expect. …
9. The Sovereign is absolute; for there is no other authority but that which centers in his single person that can act with a vigor proportionate to the extent of such a vast Dominion. …
13. What is the true end of Monarchy? Not to deprive people of their natural liberty but to correct their actions, in order to attain the Supreme Good. …
15. The intention and end of Monarchy is the glory of the Citizens, of the State, and of the Sovereign. …
66. All laws which aim at the extremity of rigor, may be evaded. It is moderation which rules a people, and not excess of severity.
67. Civil liberty flourishes when the laws deduce every punishment from the peculiar nature of every crime. The application of punishment ought not to proceed from the arbitrary will or mere caprice of the Legislator, but from the nature of the crime. …
68. Crimes are divisible into four classes: against religion, against manners [morality], against the peace, against the security of the citizens. …
74. I include under the first class of crimes [only] a direct and immediate attack upon religion, such as sacrilege, distinctly and clearly defined by law. … In order that the punishment for the crime of sacrilege might flow from the nature of the thing, it ought to consist in depriving the offender of those benefits to which we are entitled by religion; for instance, by expulsion from the churches, exclusion from the society of the faithful for a limited time, or for ever. …
76. In the second class of crimes are included those which are contrary to good manners.
77. Such [include] the corruption of the purity of morals in general, either publick or private; that is, every procedure contrary to the rules which show in what manner we ought to enjoy the external conveniences given to man by Nature for his necessities, interest, and satisfaction. The punishments of these crimes ought to flow also from the nature of the thing [offense]: deprivation of those advantages which Society has attached to purity of morals, [for example], monetary penalties, shame, or dishonor … expulsion from the city and the community; in a word, all the punishments which at judicial discretion are sufficient to repress the presumption and disorderly behavior of both sexes. In fact, these offenses do not spring so much from badness of heart as from a certain forgetfulness or mean opinion of one’s self. To this class belong only the crimes which are prejudicial to manners, and not those which at the same time violate publick security, such as carrying off by force and rape; for these are crimes of the fourth class.
78. The crimes of the third class are those which violate the peace and tranquillity of the citizens. The punishments for them ought also to flow from the very nature of the crime, as for instance, imprisonment, banishment, corrections, and the like which reclaim these turbulent people and bring them back to the established order. Crimes against the peace I confine to those things only which consist in a simple breach of the civil polity.
79. The penalties due to crimes of the fourth class are peculiarly and emphatically termed Capital Punishments. They are a kind of retaliation by which Society deprives that citizen of his security who has deprived, or would deprive, another of it. The punishment is taken from the nature of the thing, deduced from Reason, and the sources of Good and Evil. Acitizen deserves death when he has violated the publick security so far as to have taken away, or attempted to take away, the life of another. Capital punishment is the remedy for a distempered society. If publick security is violated with respect to property, reasons may be produced to prove that the offender ought not in such a case suffer capital punishment; but that it seems better and more conformable to Nature that crimes against the publick security with respect to property should be punished by deprivation of property. And this ought inevitably to have been done, if the wealth of everyone had been common, or equal. But as those who have no property are always most ready to invade the property of others, to remedy this defect corporal punishment was obliged to be substituted for pecuniary. What I have here mentioned is drawn from the nature of things, and conduces to the protection of the liberty of the citizens. …
348. The rules of Education are the fundamental institutes which train us up to be citizens. …
350. It is impossible to give a general education to a very numerous people and to bring up all the children in schools; for that reason, it will be proper to establish some general rules which may serve by way of advice to all parents.
351. Every parent is obliged to teach his children the fear of God as the beginning of all Wisdom, and to inculcate in them all those duties which God demands from us in the Ten Commandments and in the rules and traditions of our Orthodox Eastern Greek religion.
352. Also to inculcate in them the love of their Country, and to ensure they pay due respect to the established civil laws, and reverence the courts of judicature in their Country as those who, by the appointment of God, watch over their happiness in this world.
353. Every parent ought to refrain in the presence of his children not only from actions but even from words that tend to injustice and violence, as for instance, quarreling, swearing, fighting, every sort of cruelty, and such like behavior; and not to allow those who are around his children to set them such bad examples. …
511. A Monarchy is destroyed when a Sovereign imagines that he displays his power more by changing the order of things than by adhering to it, and when he is more fond of his own imaginations than of his will, from which the laws proceed and have proceeded.
512. It is true there are cases where Power ought and can exert its full influence without any danger to the State. But there are cases also where it ought to act according to the limits prescribed by itself.
513. The supreme art of governing a State consists in the precise knowledge of that degree of power, whether great or small, which ought to be exerted according to the different exigencies of affairs. For in a Monarchy the prosperity of the State depends, in part, on a mild and condescending government. …
522. Nothing more remains now for the Commission to do but to compare every part of the laws with the rules of this Instruction.
Commentariolus: Copernicus Outlines His Thesis
Nicolaus Copernicus
(1514)
Our ancestors assumed, I observe, a large number of celestial spheres for this reason especially, to explain the apparent motion of the planets by the principle of regularity. For they thought it altogether absurd that a heavenly body, which is a perfect sphere, should not always move uniformly. They saw that by connecting and combining regular motions in various ways they could make any body appear to move to any position.
Callippus and Eudoxus, who endeavored to solve the problem by the use of concentric spheres, were unable to account for all the planetary movements; they had to explain not merely the apparent revolutions of the planets but also the fact that these bodies appear to us sometimes to mount higher in the heavens, sometimes to descend; and this fact is incompatible with the principle of concentricity. Therefore it seemed better to employ eccentrics and epicycles, a system which most scholars finally accepted.
Yet the planetary theories of Ptolemy and most other astronomers, although consistent with the numerical data, seemed likewise to present no small difficulty. For these theories were not adequate unless certain equants were also conceived; it then appeared that a planet moved with uniform velocity neither on its deferent nor about the center of its epicycle. Hence a system of this sort seemed neither sufficiently absolute nor sufficiently pleasing to the mind.
Having become aware of these defects, I often considered whether there could perhaps be found a more reasonable arrangement of circles, from which every apparent inequality would be derived and in which everything would move uniformly about its proper center, as the rule of absolute motion requires. After I had addressed myself to this very difficult and almost insoluble problem, the suggestion at length came to me how it could be solved with fewer and much simpler constructions than were formerly used, if some assumptions (which are called axioms) were granted me. They follow in this order.
Assumptions
1. There is no one center of all the celestial circles or spheres.
2. The center of the earth is not the center of the universe, but only of gravity and of the lunar sphere.
3. All the spheres revolve about the sun as their mid-point, and therefore the sun is the center of the universe.
4. The ratio of the earth’s distance from the sun to the height of the firmament is so much smaller than the ratio of the earth’s radius to its distance from the sun that the distance from the earth to the sun is imperceptible in comparison with the height of the firmament.
5. Whatever motion appears in the firmament arises not from any motion of the firmament, but from the earth’s motion. The earth together with its circumjacent elements performs a complete rotation on its fixed poles in a daily motion, while the firmament and highest heaven abide unchanged.
6. What appear to us as motions of the sun arise not from its motion but from the motion of the earth and our sphere, with which we revolve about the sun like any other planet. The earth has, then, more than one motion.
7. The apparent retrograde and direct motion of the planets arises not from their motion but from the earth’s. The motion of the earth alone, therefore, suffices to explain so many apparent inequalities in the heavens.
Having set forth these assumptions, I shall endeavor briefly to show how uniformity of the motions can be saved in a systematic way. However, I have thought it well, for the sake of brevity, to omit from this sketch mathematical demonstrations, reserving these for my larger work. But in the explanation of the circles I shall set down here the lengths of the radii; and from these the reader who is not unacquainted with mathematics will readily perceive how closely this arrangement of circles agrees with the numerical data and observations.
Accordingly, let no one suppose that I have gratuitously asserted, with the Pythagoreans, the motion of the earth; strong proof will be found in my exposition of the circles. For the principal arguments by which the natural philosophers attempt to establish the immobility of the earth rest for the most part on the appearances; it is particularly such arguments that collapse here, since I treat the earth’s immobility as due to an appearance.
Editing Copernicus: The Preface to De Revolutionibus
Andres Osiander
(1543)
To the Reader Concerning the Hypotheses of This Work:
There have already been widespread reports about the novel hypotheses of this work, which declares that the earth moves whereas the sun is at rest in the center of the universe. Hence certain scholars, I have no doubt, are deeply offended and believe that the liberal arts, which were established long ago on a sound basis, should not be thrown into confusion. But if these men are willing to examine the matter closely, they will find that the author of this work has done nothing blameworthy. For it is the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial motions through careful and expert study. Then he must conceive and devise the causes of these motions or hypotheses about them. Since he cannot in any way attain to the true causes, he will adopt whatever suppositions enable the motions to be computed correctly from the principles of geometry for the future as well as the past. The present author has performed both these duties excellently. For these hypotheses need not be true nor even probable. On the contrary, if they provide a calculus consistent with the observations, that alone is enough. Perhaps there is someone who is so ignorant of geometry and optics that he regards the epicycle of Venus as probable, or thinks that it is the reason why Venus sometimes precedes and sometimes follows the sun by forty degrees and even more. Is there anyone who is not aware that from this assumption it necessarily follows that the diameter of the planet at perigee should appear more than four times, and the body of the planet more than sixteen times, as great as at apogee? Yet this variation is refuted by the experience of every age. In this science there are some other no less important absurdities, which need not be set forth at the moment. For this art, it is quite clear, is completely and absolutely ignorant of the causes of the apparent nonuniform motions. And if any causes are devised by the imagination, as indeed very many are, they are not put forward to convince anyone that they are true, but merely to provide a reliable basis for computation. However, since different hypotheses are sometimes offered for one and the same motion (for example, eccentricity and an epicycle for the sun’s motion), the astronomer will take as his first choice that hypothesis which is the easiest to grasp. The philosopher will perhaps rather seek the semblance of the truth. But neither of them will understand or state anything certain, unless it has been divinely revealed to him.
Therefore alongside the ancient hypotheses, which are no more probable, let us permit these new hypotheses also to become known, especially since they are admirable as well as simple and bring with them a huge treasure of very skillful observations. So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it. Farewell.
Galileo Discovers the Moons of Jupiter
Galileo Galilei
(1610)
On the seventh day of January in this present year 1610, at the first hour of night, when I was viewing the heavenly bodies with a telescope, Jupiter presented itself to me; and because I had prepared a very excellent instrument for myself, I perceived (as I had not before, on account of the weakness of my previous instrument) that beside the planet there were three starlets, small indeed, but very bright. Though I believed them to be among the host of fixed stars, they aroused my curiosity somewhat by appearing to lie in an exact straight line parallel to the ecliptic, and by their being more splendid than others of their size. Their arrangement with respect to Jupiter and each other was the following:
East * * O * West
that is, there were two stars on the eastern side and one to the west … on January eighth–led by what, I do not know–I found a very different arrangement. The three starlets were now all to the west of Jupiter, closer together, and at equal intervals from one another as shown in the following sketch:
East O * * * West
At this time, though I did not yet turn my attention to the way the stars had come together, I began to concern myself with the question how Jupiter could be east of all these stars when on the previous day it had been west of two of them. …
On the tenth of January, however, the stars appeared in this position with respect to Jupiter:
East * * O West
that is, there were but two of them, both easterly, the third (as I supposed) being hidden behind Jupiter. As at first, they were in the same straight line with Jupiter and were arranged precisely in the line of the zodiac. Noticing this, and knowing that there was no way in which such alterations could be attributed to Jupiter’s motion, yet being certain that these were still the same stars I had observed (in fact no other was to be found along the line of the zodiac for a long way on either side of Jupiter), my perplexity was now transformed into amazement. I was sure that the apparent changes belonged not to Jupiter but to the observed stars, and I resolved to pursue this investigation with greater care and attention.
And thus, on the eleventh of January, I saw the following disposition:
East * * O West
… I had now decided beyond all question that there existed in the heavens three stars wandering about Jupiter as do Venus and Mercury about the sun, and this became plainer than daylight from observations on similar occasions which followed. Nor were there just three such stars; four wanderers complete their revolutions about Jupiter, and of their alterations as observed more precisely later on we shall give a description here. Also I measured the distances between them by means of the telescope, using the method explained before. Moreover I recorded the times of the observations, especially when more than one was made during the same night–for the revolutions of these planets are so speedily completed that it is usually possible to take even their hourly variations. [Galileo continues to make similar observations until March 2, noting the changes in the "stars" adjacent to Jupiter.] …
Such are the observations concerning the four Medicean planets recently first discovered by me, and although from this data their periods have not yet been reconstructed in numerical form, it is legitimate at least to put in evidence some facts worthy of note. Above all, since they sometimes follow and sometimes precede Jupiter by the same intervals, and they remain within very limited distances either to east or west of Jupiter, accompanying that planet in both its retrograde and direct movements in a constant manner, no one can doubt that they complete their revolutions about Jupiter and at the same time effect all together a twelve-year period about the center of the universe. That they also revolve in unequal circles is manifestly deduced from the fact that at the greatest elongation from Jupiter it is never possible to see two of these planets in conjunction, whereas in the vicinity of Jupiter they are found united two, three, and sometimes all four together. It is also observed that the revolutions are swifter in those planets which describe smaller circles about Jupiter, since the stars closest to Jupiter are usually seen to the east when on the previous day they appeared to the west, and vice versa, while the planet which traces the largest orbit appears upon accurate observation of its returns to have a semimonthly period.
Here we have a fine and elegant argument for quieting the doubts of those who, while accepting with tranquil mind the revolutions of the planets about the sun in the Copernican system, are mightily disturbed to have the moon alone revolve about the earth and accompany it in an annual rotation about the sun. Some have believed that this structure of the universe should be rejected as impossible. But now we have not just one planet rotating about another while both run through a great orbit around the sun; our own eyes show us four stars which wander around Jupiter as does the moon around the earth, while all together trace out a grand revolution about the sun in the space of twelve years. …
Francis Bacon Rejects Superstition and Extols the Virtue of Science
Francis Bacon
(1620)
The discoveries which have hitherto been made in the sciences are such as lie close to vulgar notions, scarcely beneath the surface. In order to penetrate into the inner and further recesses of nature, it is necessary that both notions and axioms [be] derived from things by a more sure and guarded way, and that a method of intellectual operation be introduced altogether better and more certain. …
There is no soundness in our notions, whether logical or physical. Substance, quality, action, passion, essence itself are not sound notions; much less are heavy, light, dense, rare, moist, dry, generation, corruption, attraction, repulsion, element, matter, form, and the like; but all are fantastical and ill-defined. …
There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and the discovery of middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried. …
It is not to be forgotten that in every age natural philosophy has had a troublesome adversary and hard to deal with,–namely, superstition and the blind and immoderate zeal of religion. For we see among the Greeks that those who first proposed to man’s uninitiated ears the natural causes for thunder and for storms were thereupon found guilty of impiety. Nor was much more forbearance shown by some of the ancient fathers of the Christian Church to those who, on most convincing grounds (such as no one in his senses would now think of contradicting), maintained that the earth was round and, of consequence, asserted the existence of the antipodes.
Moreover, as things now are, to discourse of nature is made harder and more perilous by the summaries and systems of the schoolmen; who, having reduced theology into regular order as well as they were able, and fashioned it into the shape of an art, ended in incorporating the contentious and thorny philosophy of Aristotle, more than was fit, with the body of religion. …
Lastly, some are weakly afraid lest a deeper search into nature should transgress the permitted limits of sobermindedness; wrongfully wresting and transferring what is said in Holy Writ against those who pry into sacred mysteries to the hidden things of nature, which are barred by no prohibition. Others, with more subtlety, surmise and reflect that if secondary causes are unknown everything can be more readily referred to the divine hand and rod,–a point in which they think religion greatly concerned; which is, in fact, nothing else but to seek to gratify God with a lie. Others fear from past example that movements and changes in philosophy will end in assaults on religion; and others again appear apprehensive that in the investigation of nature something may be found to subvert, or at least shake, the authority of religion, especially with the unlearned.
But these two last fears seem to me to savor utterly of carnal wisdom; as if men in the recesses and secret thoughts of their hearts doubted and distrusted the strength of religion, and the empire of faith over the senses, and therefore feared that the investigation of truth in nature might be dangerous to them. But if the matter be truly considered, natural philosophy is, after the word of God, at once the surest medicine against superstition and the most approved nourishment for faith; and therefore she is rightly given to religion as her most faithful handmaid, since the one displays the will of God, the other his power. …
Descartes’ Discourse on Method Offers a New Method of Reasoning
Rene Descartes
(1637)
I was then in Germany, attracted thither by the wars in that country, which have not yet been brought to a termination; and as I was returning to the army from the coronation of the Emperor, the setting in of winter arrested me in a locality where, as I found no society to interest me, and was besides fortunately undisturbed by any cares or passions, I remained the whole day in [a stove-heated room,] with full opportunity to occupy my attention with my own thoughts. Of these one of the very first that occurred to me was, that there is seldom so much perfection in works composed of many separate parts, upon which different hands have been employed, as in those completed by a single master. Thus it is observable that the buildings which a single architect has planned and executed, are generally more elegant and commodious than those which several have attempted to improve, by making old walls serve for purposes for which they were not originally built. Thus also, those ancient cities which, from being at first only villages, have become, in course of time, large towns, are usually but ill laid out compared with the regularly constructed towns which a professional architect has freely planned on an open plain; so that although the several buildings of the former may often equal or surpass in beauty those of the latter, yet when one observes their indiscriminate juxtaposition, there a large one and here a small, and the consequent crookedness and irregularity of the streets, one is disposed to allege that chance rather than any human will guided by reason, must have led to such an arrangement. …
It is true … that it is not customary to pull down all the houses of a town with the single design of rebuilding them differently, and thereby rendering the streets more handsome; but it often happens that a private individual takes down his own with the view of erecting it anew, and that people are even sometimes constrained to this when their houses are in danger of falling from age, or when the foundations are insecure. With this before me by way of example, I was persuaded that it would indeed be preposterous for a private individual to think of reforming a state by fundamentally changing it throughout, and overturning it in order to set it up amended; and the same I thought was true of any similar project for reforming the body of the Sciences, or the order of teaching them established in the Schools [scholastic philosophy]: but as for the opinions which up to that time I had embraced, I thought that I could not do better than resolve at once to sweep them wholly away, that I might afterwards be in a position to admit either others more correct, or even perhaps the same when they had undergone the scrutiny of Reason. I firmly believed that in this way I should much better succeed in the conduct of my life, than if I built only upon old foundations, and leant upon principles which, in my youth, I had taken upon trust. …
Among the branches of Philosophy, I had, at an earlier period, given some attention to Logic, and among those of the Mathematics to Geometrical Analysis and Algebra,–three arts or Sciences which ought, as I conceived, to contribute something to my design. But, on examination, I found that, as for Logic, its syllogisms and the majority of its other precepts are of avail rather in the communication of what we already know … than in the investigation of the unknown; and although this Science contains indeed a number of correct and very excellent precepts, there are, nevertheless, so many others, and these either injurious or superfluous, mingled with the former, that it is almost quite as difficult to effect a severance of the true from the false as it is to extract a Diana or a Minerva from a rough block of marble. … By these considerations I was induced to seek some other Method which would comprise [their] advantages … and be exempt from their defects. And as a multitude of laws often only hampers justice, so that a state is best governed when, with few laws, these are rigidly administered; in like manner, instead of the great number of precepts of which Logic is composed, I believed that the four following would prove perfectly sufficient for me, provided I took the firm and unwavering resolution never in a single instance to fail in observing them.
The first was never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgment than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt.
The second,to divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution.
The third, to conduct my thoughts in such order that, by commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, I might ascend by little and little, and, as it were, step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex; assigning in thought a certain order even to those objects which in their own nature do not stand in a relation of antecedence and sequence.
And the last, in every case to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so general, that I might be assured that nothing was omitted.
The long chains of simple and easy reasonings by means of which geometers are accustomed to reach the conclusions of their most difficult demonstrations, had led me to imagine that all things, to the knowledge of which man is competent, are mutually connected in the same way, and that there is nothing so far removed from us as to be beyond our reach, or so hidden that we cannot discover it, provided only we abstain from accepting the false for the true, and always preserve in our thoughts the order necessary for the deduction of one truth from another. …
Pascal’s Famous Wager on God’s Existence
Blaise Pascal
(1670)
199. Let us imagine a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows, and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of men. …
205. When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me? Memoria hospitis unius diei praetereuntis.
206. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me. …
229. This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is not matter of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there which revealed a Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion; if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But, seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied; wherefore I have a hundred times wished that if a God maintains nature, she should testify to Him unequivocally, and that, if the signs she gives are deceptive, she should suppress them altogether; that she should say everything or nothing, that I might see which cause I ought to follow. Whereas in my present state, ignorant of what I am or of what I ought to do, I know neither my condition nor my duty. My heart inclines wholly to know where is the true good, in order to follow it; nothing would be too dear to me for eternity.
I envy those whom I see living in the faith with such carelessness, and who make such a bad use of a gift of which it seems to me I would make such a different use.
230. It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that He should not exist; that the soul should be joined to the body, and that we should have no soul; that the world should be created, and that it should not be created, etc.; that original sin should be, and that it should not be. …
346. Thought constitutes the greatness of man.
347. Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.
All our dignity consists, then, in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavour, then, to think well; this is the principle of morality.
348. A thinking reed.–It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.
… If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is. This being so, who will dare to undertake the decision of the question? Not we, who have no affinity to Him. …
… But you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.–”That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much.”–Let us see. Since there is equal risk of gain and loss, if you had only to gain two lives, instead of one, you might still wager. But if there were three lives to gain, you would have to play (since you are under the necessity of playing), and you would be imprudent, when you are forced to play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where there is an equal risk of loss and gain. But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain. But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance to gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. It is all divided; wherever the infinite is and there is not an infinity of chances of loss against that of gain, there is no time to hesitate, you must give all. And thus, when one is forced to play, he must renounce reason to preserve his life, rather than risk it for infinite gain, as likely to happen as the loss of nothingness.
For it is no use to say it is uncertain if we will gain, and it is certain that we risk, and that the infinite distance between the certainty of what is staked and the uncertainty of what will be gained, equals the finite good which is certainly staked against the uncertain infinite. It is not so, as every player stakes a certainty to gain an uncertainty, and yet he stakes a finite certainty to gain a finite uncertainty, without transgressing against reason. There is not an infinite distance between the certainty staked and the uncertainty of the gain; that is untrue. In truth, there is an infinity between the certainty of gain and the certainty of loss. But the uncertainty of the gain is proportioned to the certainty of the stake according to the proportion of the chances of gain and loss. Hence it comes that, if there are as many risks on one side as on the other, the course is to play even; and then the certainty of the stake is equal to the uncertainty of the gain, so far is it from fact that there is an infinite distance between them. And so our proposition is of infinite force, when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and loss, and the infinite to gain. This is demonstrable: and if men are capable of any truths, this is one.
Sir Isaac Newton Lays Down the Ground Rules for the Scientific Method
Isaac Newton
(1687)
Rule I
We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.
To this purpose the philosophers say that Nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.
Rule II
Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes.
As to respiration in a man and in a beast; the descent of stones in Europe and in America; the light of our culinary fire and of the sun; the reflection of light in the earth, and in the planets.
Rule III
The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intensification nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever.
For since the qualities of bodies are only known to us by experiments, we are to hold for universal all such as universally agree with experiments; and such as are not liable to diminution can never be quite taken away. We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple, and always consonant to itself. We no other way know the extension of bodies than by our senses, nor do these reach it in all bodies; but because we perceive extension in all that are sensible, therefore we ascribe it universally to all others also. That abundance of bodies are hard, we learn by experience; and because the hardness of the whole arises from the hardness of the parts, we therefore justly infer the hardness of the undivided particles not only of the bodies we feel but of all others. That all bodies are impenetrable, we gather not from reason, but from sensation. The bodies which we handle we find impenetrable, and thence conclude impenetrability to be an universal property of all bodies whatsoever. That all bodies are movable, and endowed with certain powers (which we call the inertia) of persevering in their motion, or in their rest, we only infer from the like properties observed in the bodies which we have seen. The extension, hardness, impenetrability, mobility, and inertia of the whole, result from the extension, hardness, impenetrability, mobility, and inertia of the parts; and hence we conclude the least particles of all bodies to be also all extended, and hard and impenetrable, and movable, and endowed with their proper inertia. And this is the foundation of all philosophy. Moreover, that the divided but contiguous particles of bodies may be separated from one another, is matter of observation; and, in the particles that remain undivided, our minds are able to distinguish yet lesser parts, as is mathematically demonstrated. But whether the parts so distinguished, and not yet divided, may, by the powers of Nature, be actually divided and separated from one another, we cannot certainly determine. Yet, had we the proof of but one experiment that any undivided particle, in breaking a hard and solid body, suffered a division, we might by virtue of this rule conclude that the undivided as well as the divided particles may be divided and actually separated to infinity.
Lastly, if it universally appears, by experiments and astronomical observations, that all bodies about the earth gravitate towards the earth, and that in proportion to the quantity of matter which they severally contain; that the moon likewise, according to the quantity of its matter, gravitates towards the earth; that, on the other hand, our sea gravitates towards the moon; and all the planets one towards another; and the comets in like manner towards the sun; we must, in consequence of this rule, universally allow that all bodies whatsoever are endowed with a principle of mutual gravitation. For the argument from the appearances concludes with more force for the universal gravitation of all bodies than for their impenetrability; of which, among those in the celestial regions, we have no experiments, nor any manner of observation. Not that I affirm gravity to be essential to bodies: by theirvis insita [force of inertia] I mean nothing but their inertia. This is immutable. Their gravity is diminished as they recede from the earth.
Rule IV
In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exceptions.
This rule we must follow, that the argument of induction may not be evaded by hypotheses.
An English Observer Describes the State of Serfdom in Eighteenth-Century Poland
William Coxe
(1783)
Peasants belonging to individuals are at the absolute disposal of their master, and have scarcely any positive security, either for their properties or their lives. Until 1768 the Statutes of Poland only exacted a fine from a lord who killed his slave; but in that year a decree passed, that the murder of a peasant was a capital crime; yet, as the law in question requires such an accumulation of evidence as is seldom to be obtained, it has more appearance of protection than thereality.
How deplorable must be the state of that country, when a law of that nature was thought requisite to be enacted, yet is found incapable of being enforced. The generality, indeed, of the Polish nobles are not inclined either to establish or give efficacy to any regulations in favour of the peasants, whom they scarcely consider as entitled to the common rights of humanity. A few nobles, however, of benevolent hearts and enlightened understandings, have acted upon different principles, and have ventured upon the expedient of giving liberty to their vassals. The event has showed this project to be no less judicious than humane, no less friendly to their own interests than to the happiness of their peasants: for it appears that in the districts, in which the new arrangement has been introduced, the population of their villages is considerably increased, and the revenues of their estates augmented in a triple proportion.
The first noble who granted freedom to his peasants was [Andrzej] Zamoiski, formerly great chancellor, who in 1760 enfranchised six villages in the palatinate of Masovia. These villages were, in 1777, visited by the author of the Patriotic Letters [advocating political reform], from whom I received the following information: on inspecting the parish-registers of births from 1750 to 1760, that is, during the ten years of slavery immediately preceding their enfranchisement, he found the number of births 434; in the first ten years of their freedom, from 1760 to 1770, 620; and from 1770 to the beginning of 1777, 585 births.
By these extracts it appeared that
During the first period there were only 43 births
second period 62 each year
third period 77
If we suppose an improvement of this sort to take place throughout the kingdom, how great would be the increase of national population!
The revenues of the six villages, since their enfranchisement, have been augmented in a much greater proportion than their population. In their state of vassalage Zamoiski was obliged, according to the custom of Poland, to build cottages and barns for his peasants, and to furnish them with feed, horses, ploughs, and every implement of agriculture; since their attainment of liberty they are become so easy in their circumstances, as to provide themselves with all these necessaries at their own expence; and they likewise cheerfully pay an annual rent, in lieu of the manual labour, which their master formerly exacted from them. By these means the receipts of this particular estate have been nearly tripled.
Voltaire on Religious Toleration
Voltaire
(1763)
One does not need great art and skilful eloquence to prove that Christians ought to tolerate each other–nay, even to regard all men as brothers. Why, you say, is the Turk, the Chinese, or the Jew my brother? Assuredly; are we not all children of the same father, creatures of the same God?
But these people despise us and treat us as idolaters. Very well; I will tell them that they are quite wrong. It seems to me that I might astonish, at least, the stubborn pride of a Mohammedan or a Buddhist priest if I spoke to them somewhat as follows:
This little globe, which is but a point, travels in space like many other globes; we are lost in the immensity. Man, about five feet high, is certainly a small thing in the universe. One of these imperceptible beings says to some of his neighbours, in Arabia or South Africa: “Listen to me, for the God of all these worlds has enlightened me. There are nine hundred million little ants like us on the earth, but my ant-hole alone is dear to God. All the others are eternally reprobated by him. Mine alone will be happy.”
They would then interrupt me, and ask who was the fool that talked all this nonsense. I should be obliged to tell them that it was themselves. I would then try to appease them, which would be difficult. …
D’Holbach’s System of Nature Offers a New View of the Human Soul
Baron Paul d’Holbach
(1770)
Man’s ignorance has endured so long, he has taken such slow, irresolute steps to ameliorate his condition, only because he has neglected to study nature, to scrutinize her laws, to search out her resources, to discover her properties. His sluggishness finds its account in permitting himself to be guided by precedent, rather than to follow experience which demands activity; to be led by routine, rather than by his reason which exacts reflection. Hence may be traced the aversion man betrays for everything that swerves from these rules to which he has been accustomed; hence his stupid, his scrupulous respect for antiquity, for the most silly, the most absurd institutions of his fathers; hence those fears that seize him, when the most advantageous changes are proposed to him, or the most probable attempts are made to better his condition. He dreads to examine, because he has been taught to hold it a profanation of something immediately connected with his welfare; he credulously believes the interested advice, and spurns at those who wish to show him the danger of the road he is traveling.
This is the reason why nations linger on in the most scandalous lethargy, groaning under abuses transmitted from century to century, trembling at the very idea of that which alone can remedy their misfortunes. …
The more man reflects, the more he will be convinced that the soul, very far from being distinguished from the body, is only the body itself considered relatively to some of its functions, or to some of the modes of existing or acting of which it is susceptible, whilst it enjoys life. Thus, the soul in man is considered relatively to the faculty he has of feeling, of thinking, and of acting in a mode resulting from his peculiar nature; that is to say, from his properties, from his particular organization, from the modifications, whether durable or transitory, which the beings who act upon him cause his machine to undergo. …
An organized being may be compared to a clock, which, once broken, is no longer suitable to the use for which it was designed. To say that the soul shall feel, shall think, shall enjoy, shall suffer after the death of the body, is to pretend that a clock, shivered into a thousand pieces, will continue to strike the hour and have the faculty of marking the progress of time. Those who say that the soul of man is able to subsist notwithstanding the destruction of the body, evidently support the position that the modification of a body will be enabled to conserve itself after the subject is destroyed; but this is completely absurd.
Rousseau on “Civil Religion”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1762)
Christianity is a purely spiritual religion, occupied solely with heavenly things; the country of a Christian is not of this world. He does his duty, it is true, but he does it with a profound indifference as to the good or ill success of his efforts. Provided he has nothing to reproach himself with, it matters little to him whether things go well or ill here below. If the state is flourishing, he scarcely dares enjoy the public felicity; he fears to become proud of the glory of his country. If the state degenerates, he blesses the hand of God which lies heavy upon his people. …
Should the depository of this [political] power abuse it, he regards this abuse as the rod with which God punishes his children. People would have scruples about driving out the usurper: it would be necessary to disturb the public repose, to use violence, to shed blood; all this accords ill with the gentleness of the Christian, and, after all, what matters it whether one is a slave or free in this vale of misery? The essential thing is to go to paradise, and resignation is but one more means to accomplish it.
Should some foreign war supervene, the citizens march to combat without difficulty. None among them think of flying; they do their duty, but without passion for victory; they know better how to die than to win. Whether they are victors or vanquished, what matters it? Does not Providence know better than they what they need? …
But I am in error in speaking of a Christian republic; each of these words excludes the other. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is too favorable to tyranny not to be taken advantage of by it. Christians are made to be slaves: they know it and do not care; this short life has too little value in their eyes. …
There is, however, a profession of faith purely civil, of which it is the sovereign’s [i.e., the people's] duty to decide upon the articles, not precisely as dogmas of religion, but as sentiments of sociality without which it is impossible to be a good citizen or a faithful subject. Without being able to oblige any one to believe them, the sovereign can banish from the state whoever does not believe them; the sovereign should banish him, not as impious, but as unsocial, as incapable of loving law and justice sincerely, and of sacrificing at need his life to his duty. If any one, having publicly acknowledged these dogmas, conducts himself as if he did not acknowledge them, he should be punished with death; he has committed the greatest of crimes,–he has lied before the law.
The dogmas of civil religion should be simple, few in number, announced with precision, without explanation or commentary. The existence of a powerful, intelligent, benevolent, prescient, and provident Divinity, the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sacredness of the social contract and the law,–these are the positive dogmas.
As to the negative dogmas, I limit them to one,–intolerance: it enters into the religions which we have excluded. Those who make a distinction between civil intolerance and theological intolerance deceive themselves, to my mind. These two intolerances are inseparable. It is impossible to live in peace with people whom one believes to be damned, to love them is to hate God, who punishes them; they must be redeemed or else tortured. Wherever theological intolerance is admitted, it must have some civil effects; and as soon as it has them the sovereign is no more a sovereign even in temporal matters. From that time priests are the true masters; kings are but their officers.
Montesquieu Identifies the Necessity for the Separation of Governmental Powers
Baron de Montesquieu
(1748)
In every government there are three sorts of power: the legislative; the executive in respect to things dependent on the law of nations; and the executive in regard to matters that depend on the civil law.
By virtue of the first, the prince or magistrate enacts temporary or perpetual laws, and amends or abrogates those that have been already enacted. By the second, he makes peace or war, sends or receives embassies, establishes the public security, and provides against invasions. By the third, he punishes criminals, or determines the disputes that arise between individuals. The latter we shall call the judiciary power, and the other simply the executive power of the state.
The political liberty of the subject is a tranquillity of mind arising from the opinion each person has of his safety. In order to have this liberty, it is requisite the government be so constituted as one man need not be afraid of another.
When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.
Again, there is no liberty, if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive. Were it joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control; for the judge would be then the legislator. Were it joined to the executive power, the judge might behave with violence and oppression.
There would be an end of everything, were the same man or the same body, whether of the nobles or of the people, to exercise those three powers, that of enacting laws, that of executing the public resolutions, and of trying the causes of individuals.
Most kingdoms in Europe enjoy a moderate government because the prince who is invested with the two first powers leaves the third to his subjects. In Turkey, where these three powers are united in the Sultan’s person, the subjects groan under the most dreadful oppression.
In the republics of Italy, where these three powers are united, there is less liberty than in our monarchies. Hence their government is obliged to have recourse to as violent methods for its support as even that of the Turks; witness the state inquisitors, and the lion’s mouth into which every informer may at all hours throw his written accusations.
Rousseau Espouses Popular Sovereignty and the General Will
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1762)
Since no man has any natural authority over his fellowmen, and since force is not the source of right, conventions remain as the basis of all lawful authority among men. [Book I, Chapter 4].
Now, as men cannot create any new forces, but only combine and direct those that exist, they have no other means of self-preservation than to form by aggregation a sum of forces which may overcome the resistance, to put them in action by a single motive power, and to make them work in concert.
This sum of forces can be produced only by the combination of many; but the strength and freedom of each man being the chief instruments of his preservation, how can he pledge them without injuring himself, and without neglecting the cares which he owes to himself? This difficulty, applied to my subject, may be expressed in these terms.
“To find a form of association which may defend and protect with the whole force of the community the person and property of every associate, and by means of which each, coalescing with all, may nevertheless obey only himself, and remain as free as before.” Such is the fundamental problem of which the social contract furnishes the solution. …
If then we set aside what is not of the essence of the social contract, we shall find that it is reducible to the following terms: “Each of us puts in common his person and his whole power under the supreme direction of the general will, and in return we receive every member as an indivisible part of the whole.” [Book I, Chapter 6].
But the body politic or sovereign, deriving its existence only from the contract, can never bind itself, even to others, in anything that derogates from the original act, such as alienation of some portion of itself, or submission to another sovereign. To violate the act by which it exists would be to annihilate itself, and what is nothing produces nothing. [Book I, Chapter 7].
It follows from what precedes, that the general will is always right and always tends to the public advantage; but it does not follow that the resolutions of the people have always the same rectitude. Men always desire their own good, but do not always discern it; the people are never corrupted, though often deceived, and it is only then that they seem to will what is evil. [Book II, Chapter 3].
The public force, then, requires a suitable agent to concentrate it and put it in action according to the directions of the general will, to serve as a means of communication between the state and the sovereign, to effect in some manner in the public person what the union of soul and body effects in a man. This is, in the State, the function of government, improperly confounded with the sovereign of which it is only the minister.
What, then, is the government? An intermediate body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual correspondence, charged with the execution of the laws and with the maintenance of liberty both civil and political. [Book III, Chapter 1].
It is not sufficient that the assembled people should have once fixed the constitution of the state by giving their sanction to a body of laws; it is not sufficient that they should have established a perpetual government, or that they should have once for all provided for the election of magistrates. Besides the extraordinary assemblies which unforeseen events may require, it is necessary that there should be fixed and periodical ones which nothing can abolish or prorogue; so that, on the appointed day, the people are rightfully convoked by the law, without needing for that purpose any formal summons. [Book III, Chapter 13].
So soon as the people are lawfully assembled as a sovereign body, the whole jurisdiction of the government ceases, the executive power is suspended, and the person of the meanest citizen is as sacred and inviolable as that of the first magistrate, because where the represented are, there is no longer any representative. [Book III, Chapter 14].
These assemblies, which have as their object the maintenance of the social treaty, ought always to be opened with two propositions, which no one should be able to suppress, and which should pass separately by vote. The first: “Whether it pleases the sovereign to maintain the present form of government.” The second: “Whether it pleases the people to leave the administration to those at present entrusted with it.”
I presuppose here what I believe I have proved, viz., that there is in the State no fundamental law which cannot be revoked, not even this social compact; for if all the citizens assembled in order to break the compact by a solemn agreement, no one can doubt that it could be quite legitimately broken. [Book III, Chapter 18].
An Early English Feminist Denounces the Inequality Inherent in the Institution of Marriage
Mary Astell
(1700)
Tis true, thro’ Want of Learning, and of that Superior Genius which Men as Men lay claim to, she was ignorant of the Natural Inferiority of our Sex, which our Masters lay down as a Self-Evident and Fundamental Truth. She saw nothing in the Reason of Things, to make this either a Principle or a Conclusion, but much to the contrary. …
That the Custom of the World has put Women, generally speaking, into a State of Subjection, is not deny’d; but the Right can no more be prov’d from the Fact, than the Predominancy of Vice can justifie it. …
The Domestic Sovereign [husband] is without Dispute Elected, and the Stipulations and Contract are mutual, is it not then partial in Men to the last degree, to contend for, and practise that Arbitrary Dominion in their Families, which they abhor and exclaim against in the State? For if Arbitrary Power is evil in itself, and an improper Method of Governing Rational and Free Agents, it ought not to be Practis’d any where; Nor is it less, but rather more mischievous in Families than in Kingdoms, by how much 100000 Tyrants are worse than one.
Joseph II, Religious Toleration, and the Austrian Jews
Joseph II
(1781)
In order to make the Jews more useful, the discrimination hitherto observed in relation to their clothing is abolished in its entirety. Consequently the obligation for the men to wear yellow armbands and the women to wear yellow ribbons is abolished. If they behave quietly and decently, then no one has the right to dictate to them on matters of dress.
Within two years the Jews must abandon their own language. … Consequently the Jews may use their own language only during religious services.
Those Jews who do not have the opportunity to send their children to Jewish schools are to be compelled to send them to Christian schools, to learn reading, writing, arithmetic and other subjects.
Jewish youth will also be allowed to attend the imperial universities.
To prevent the Jewish children and the Jews in general suffering as a result of the concessions granted to them, the authorities and the leaders of the local communities must instruct the subjects in a rational manner that the Jews are to be regarded like any other fellow human-beings and that there must be an end to the prejudice and contempt which some subjects, particularly the unintelligent, have shown towards the Jewish nation and which several times in the past have led to deplorable behaviour and even criminal excesses. On the other hand the Jews must be warned to behave like decent citizens and it must be emphasised in particular that they must not allow the beneficence of His Majesty to go to their heads and indulge in wanton and licentious excesses and swindling.
Catherine the Great’s Grand Instruction to the Legislative Commission
Catherine the Great
(1767)
6. Russia is a European state.
7. This is clearly demonstrated by the following observations: the alterations which Peter the Great undertook in Russia succeeded with greater ease because the manners which prevailed at that time, and had been introduced amongst us by a mixture of different nations and the conquest of foreign territories, were quite unsuitable to the climate. Peter the First, by introducing the manners and customs of Europe among theEuropeanpeople in his domains, found at that time such means [success] as even he himself did not expect. …
9. The Sovereign is absolute; for there is no other authority but that which centers in his single person that can act with a vigor proportionate to the extent of such a vast Dominion. …
13. What is the true end of Monarchy? Not to deprive people of their natural liberty but to correct their actions, in order to attain the Supreme Good. …
15. The intention and end of Monarchy is the glory of the Citizens, of the State, and of the Sovereign. …
66. All laws which aim at the extremity of rigor, may be evaded. It is moderation which rules a people, and not excess of severity.
67. Civil liberty flourishes when the laws deduce every punishment from the peculiar nature of every crime. The application of punishment ought not to proceed from the arbitrary will or mere caprice of the Legislator, but from the nature of the crime. …
68. Crimes are divisible into four classes: against religion, against manners [morality], against the peace, against the security of the citizens. …
74. I include under the first class of crimes [only] a direct and immediate attack upon religion, such as sacrilege, distinctly and clearly defined by law. … In order that the punishment for the crime of sacrilege might flow from the nature of the thing, it ought to consist in depriving the offender of those benefits to which we are entitled by religion; for instance, by expulsion from the churches, exclusion from the society of the faithful for a limited time, or for ever. …
76. In the second class of crimes are included those which are contrary to good manners.
77. Such [include] the corruption of the purity of morals in general, either publick or private; that is, every procedure contrary to the rules which show in what manner we ought to enjoy the external conveniences given to man by Nature for his necessities, interest, and satisfaction. The punishments of these crimes ought to flow also from the nature of the thing [offense]: deprivation of those advantages which Society has attached to purity of morals, [for example], monetary penalties, shame, or dishonor … expulsion from the city and the community; in a word, all the punishments which at judicial discretion are sufficient to repress the presumption and disorderly behavior of both sexes. In fact, these offenses do not spring so much from badness of heart as from a certain forgetfulness or mean opinion of one’s self. To this class belong only the crimes which are prejudicial to manners, and not those which at the same time violate publick security, such as carrying off by force and rape; for these are crimes of the fourth class.
78. The crimes of the third class are those which violate the peace and tranquillity of the citizens. The punishments for them ought also to flow from the very nature of the crime, as for instance, imprisonment, banishment, corrections, and the like which reclaim these turbulent people and bring them back to the established order. Crimes against the peace I confine to those things only which consist in a simple breach of the civil polity.
79. The penalties due to crimes of the fourth class are peculiarly and emphatically termed Capital Punishments. They are a kind of retaliation by which Society deprives that citizen of his security who has deprived, or would deprive, another of it. The punishment is taken from the nature of the thing, deduced from Reason, and the sources of Good and Evil. Acitizen deserves death when he has violated the publick security so far as to have taken away, or attempted to take away, the life of another. Capital punishment is the remedy for a distempered society. If publick security is violated with respect to property, reasons may be produced to prove that the offender ought not in such a case suffer capital punishment; but that it seems better and more conformable to Nature that crimes against the publick security with respect to property should be punished by deprivation of property. And this ought inevitably to have been done, if the wealth of everyone had been common, or equal. But as those who have no property are always most ready to invade the property of others, to remedy this defect corporal punishment was obliged to be substituted for pecuniary. What I have here mentioned is drawn from the nature of things, and conduces to the protection of the liberty of the citizens. …
348. The rules of Education are the fundamental institutes which train us up to be citizens. …
350. It is impossible to give a general education to a very numerous people and to bring up all the children in schools; for that reason, it will be proper to establish some general rules which may serve by way of advice to all parents.
351. Every parent is obliged to teach his children the fear of God as the beginning of all Wisdom, and to inculcate in them all those duties which God demands from us in the Ten Commandments and in the rules and traditions of our Orthodox Eastern Greek religion.
352. Also to inculcate in them the love of their Country, and to ensure they pay due respect to the established civil laws, and reverence the courts of judicature in their Country as those who, by the appointment of God, watch over their happiness in this world.
353. Every parent ought to refrain in the presence of his children not only from actions but even from words that tend to injustice and violence, as for instance, quarreling, swearing, fighting, every sort of cruelty, and such like behavior; and not to allow those who are around his children to set them such bad examples. …
511. A Monarchy is destroyed when a Sovereign imagines that he displays his power more by changing the order of things than by adhering to it, and when he is more fond of his own imaginations than of his will, from which the laws proceed and have proceeded.
512. It is true there are cases where Power ought and can exert its full influence without any danger to the State. But there are cases also where it ought to act according to the limits prescribed by itself.
513. The supreme art of governing a State consists in the precise knowledge of that degree of power, whether great or small, which ought to be exerted according to the different exigencies of affairs. For in a Monarchy the prosperity of the State depends, in part, on a mild and condescending government. …
522. Nothing more remains now for the Commission to do but to compare every part of the laws with the rules of this Instruction.
Primary Sources – Unit Eight – Expansion of Europe/Daily Life
The English Parliament Pursues Mercantilistic Trading Policies
Parliament (1700)
Whereas it is most evident, that the continuance of the trade to the East Indies, in the same manner and proportions as it hath been for two years last past, must inevitably be to the great detriment of this kingdom, by exhausting the treasure thereof, and melting down the coin, and taking away the labor of the people, whereby very many of the manufacturers of this nation are become excessively burdensome and chargeable to their respective parishes, and others are thereby compelled to seek for employment in foreign parts: for remedy whereof be it enacted … That from and after [September 29, 1701] all wrought silk, bengalls,[1] and stuffs mixed with silk or herba, of the manufacture of Persia, China, or East India, and all calicoes, painted, dyed, printed, or stained there, which are or shall be imported into this kingdom, shall not be worn, or otherwise used within this kingdom of England, dominion of Wales, or town of Berwick upon Tweed, but under such limitations as are herein after mentioned and expressed.
II. And for the better effecting the same, be it enacted … that all such … [goods] which are or shall be imported into this kingdom[2] shall, after entry thereof, be forthwith carried and put into such warehouse or warehouses, as shall be for that purpose approved of by the commissioners of his Majesty’s customs for the time being. …
III. And for preventing all clandestine importing or bringing into this kingdom … any of the aforesaid goods hereby prohibited, or intended to be prohibited, from being worn or used in England; be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That if any person or persons, or bodies corporate, from and after [September 29, 1701], shall import or bring into any port of or in this kingdom … other than the port of London, any of the aforesaid prohibited goods, or into the port of London, and shall not make due entries of such goods so imported, or brought in, the same shall be, and is hereby adjudged, deemed, accounted, and taken to be clandestine running thereof, and such person or persons, or bodies corporate so offending therein, and their abettors, shall not only forfeit and lose the said goods so clandestinely run, as aforesaid, but also the sum of fine hundred pounds. …
IV.And be it further enacted, That if any question or doubt shall arise where the said goods were manufactured, the proof shall lie upon the owner or owners thereof, and not upon the prosecutor; any law, usage, or custom to the contrary notwithstanding.
V.And be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That if any action, bill, plaint, suit, or information, shall be commenced, or prosecuted against any person or persons, for any seizure, or other thing to be made or done, in pursuance or in execution of any thing before in this act contained, such person or persons, so sued in any court whatsoever, may plead the general issue, and give this act and the special matter in evidence, for their excuse or justification. …
VI. And for preventing clandestinely carrying out of the said warehouses any of the said goods hereby prohibited, and by this act intended for exportation, as aforesaid; be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That the warehouse-keeper or warehouse-keepers shall keep one or more book or books, wherein he or they shall fairly enter or write down an exact, particular, and true account of all and every chest, bale, and number of pieces therein contained, of such of the aforesaid goods only, which shall be brought into, and carried out of, his or their said warehouse or warehouses, and the days and times when the same shall be so brought in and carried out; and shall every six months in the year transmit in writing an exact account thereof, upon oath, to the said commissioners, together with an exact account how much shall be remaining in his or their said warehouse or warehouses respectively; and the said commissioners are hereby impowered and injoined, within one month after the same shall be transmitted to them, as aforesaid, to appoint one or more person or persons to inspect the said book or books, warehouse or warehouses, and examine the said accounts, and to lay a true account of the same before the Parliament. …
VIII. Provided always, and be it further enacted, That it shall and may be lawful to and for the proprietor or proprietors of the said goods so lodged in any warehouse or warehouses, as aforesaid, to affix one lock to every such warehouse or warehouses, the key of which shall remain in the custody of the said proprietor or proprietors; and that he or they may view, sort, or deliver the said goods, in order for exportation, as aforesaid, in the presence of the said warehouse-keeper or warehouse-keepers, who is and are hereby obliged, at seasonable times, to give attendance for that purpose. …
[1] A type of cloth imported from Bengal, India
[2] Scotland and Ireland are excluded from the law.
An Eyewitness Describes the Slave Trade in Guinea
Captain Willem Bosman
(c. 1700)
Not a few in our country fondly imagine that parents here sell their children, men their wives, and one brother the other. But those who think so, do deceive themselves; for this never happens on any other account but that of necessity, or some great crime; but most of the slaves that are offered to us, are prisoners of war, which are sold by the victors as their booty.
When these slaves come to Fida, they are put in prison all together; and when we treat concerning buying them, they are all brought out together in a large plain; where, by our surgeons, whose province it is, they are thoroughly examined, even to the smallest member, and that naked both men and women, without the least distinction or modesty. …
The invalids and the maimed being thrown out, as I have told you, the remainder are numbered, and it is entered who delivered them. In the meanwhile, a burning iron, with the arms or name of the companies, lies in the fire, with which ours are marked on the breast. This is done that we may distinguish them from the slaves of the English, French, or others (which are also marked with their mark), and to prevent the Negroes exchanging them for worse, at which they have a good hand. I doubt not but this trade seems very barbarous to you, but since it is followed by mere necessity, it must go on; but we yet take all possible care that they are not burned too hard, especially the women, who are more tender than the men.
We are seldom long detained in the buying of these slaves, because their price is established, the women being one fourth or fifth part cheaper than the men. The disputes which we generally have with the owners of these slaves are, that we will not give them such goods as they ask for them, especially the boesies [cowry shells] (as I have told you, the money of this country) of which they are very fond, though we generally make a division on this head, in order to make one part of the goods help off another; because those slaves which are paid for inboesies, cost the company one half more than those bought with other goods. …
When we have agreed with the owners of the slaves, they are returned to their prison; where, from that time forwards, they are kept at our charge, cost us two pence a day a slave; which serves to subsist them, like our criminals, on bread and water: so that to save charges, we send them on board our ships with the very first opportunity, before which their masters strip them of all they have on their backs; so that they come to us starknaked, as well women as men: in which condition they are obliged to continue, if the master of the ship is not so charitable (which he commonly is) as to bestow something on them to cover their nakedness.
You would really wonder to see how these slaves live on board; for though their number sometimes amounts to six or seven hundred, yet by the careful management of our masters of ships, they are so [well] regulated, that it seems incredible. And in this particular our nation exceeds all other Europeans; for as the French, Portuguese, and English slave-ships are always foul and stinking; on the contrary, ours are for the most part clean and neat.
The slaves are fed three times a day with indifferent good victuals, and much better than they eat in their own country. Their lodging place is divided into two parts; one of which is appointed for the men, the other for the women, each sex being kept apart. Here they lie as close together as it is possible for them to be crowded. …
An Urban Crime Wave in Eighteenth-Century London
Henry Fielding
(1751)
The great increase of robberies within these few years is an evil which to me appears to deserve some attention; and the rather as it seems (though already become so flagrant) not yet to have arrived to that height of which it is capable, and which it is likely to attain; for diseases in the political, as in the natural body, seldom fail going on to their crisis, especially when nourished and encouraged by faults in the constitution. In fact, I make no doubt, but that the streets of this town, and the roads leading to it, will shortly be impassable without the utmost hazard; nor are we threatened with seeing less dangerous gangs of rogues among us, than those which the Italians call the banditti. …
I cannot help thinking it high time to put some stop to the farther progress of such impudent and audacious insults, not only on the properties of the subject, but on the national justice, and on the laws themselves. The means of accomplishing this (the best which suggest themselves to me) I shall submit to the public consideration after having first inquired into the causes of the present growth of this evil, and whence we have great reason to apprehend its farther increase. …
First then, I think, that the vast torrent of luxury, which of late years hath poured itself into this nation, hath greatly contributed to produce, among many others, the mischief I here complain of. I am not here to satirize the great, among whom luxury is probably rather a moral than a political evil. But vices no more than diseases will stop with them; for bad habits are as infectious by example, as the plague itself by contact. In free countries, at least, it is a branch of liberty claimed by the people to be as wicked and as profligate as their superiors. Thus while the nobleman will emulate the grandeur of a prince, and the gentleman will aspire to the proper state of the nobleman, the tradesman steps from behind his counter into the vacant place of the gentleman. Nor doth the confusion end here; it reaches the very dregs of the people, who aspiring still to a degree beyond that which belongs to them, and not being able by the fruits of honest labor to support the state which they affect, they disdain the wages to which their industry would entitle them; and abandoning themselves to idleness, the more simple and poor-spirited betake themselves to a state of starving and beggary, while those of more art and courage become thieves, sharpers [swindlers], and robbers. …
But the expense of money, and loss of time, with their certain consequences, are not the only evils which attend the luxury of the vulgar; drunkenness is almost inseparably annexed to the pleasures of such people. A vice by no means to be construed as a spiritual offense alone, since so many temporal mischiefs arise from it; amongst which are very frequently robbery, and murder itself. …
The drunkenness I here intend [refer to] is that acquired by the strongest intoxicating liquors, and particularly by that poison called Gin; which I have great reason to think is the principal sustenance (if it may be so called) of more than a hundred thousand people in this metropolis. Many of these wretches there are who swallow pints of this poison within the twenty-four hours; the dreadful effects of which I have the misfortune every day to see, and to smell too. But I have no need to insist on my own credit, or on that of my informers; the great revenue arising from the tax on this liquor (the consumption of which is almost wholly confined to the lowest order of people) will prove the quantity consumed better than any other evidence.
The Wealth of Nations: A Natural Law of Economy
Adam Smith
(1776)
To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture; but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of the pin-maker; a workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade), nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different operations.
In every other art and manufacture, the effects of the division of labour are similar to what they are in this very trifling one: though, in many of them, the labour can neither be so much subdivided, nor reduced to so great a simplicity of operation. The division of labour, however, so far as it can be introduced, occasions, in every art, a proportionable increase of the productive powers of labour. The separation of different trades and employments from one another, seems to have taken place, in consequence of this advantage. This separation too is generally carried furthest in those countries which enjoy the highest degree of industry and improvement; what is the work of one man in a rude state of society, being generally that of several in an improved one. …
… As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it. …
The natural advantages which one country has over another in producing particular commodities are sometimes so great, that it is acknowledged by all the world to be in vain to struggle with them. By means of glasses, hotbeds, and hotwalls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine too can be made of them at about thirty times the expence for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries. Would it be a reasonable law to prohibit the importation of all foreign wines, merely to encourage the making of claret and burgundy in Scotland? But if there would be a manifest absurdity in turning towards any employment, thirty times more of the capital and industry of the country, than would be necessary to purchase from foreign countries an equal quantity of the commodities wanted, there must be an absurdity, though not altogether so glaring, yet exactly of the same kind, in turning towards any such employment a thirtieth, or even a three hundredth part more of either. Whether the advantages which one country has over another, be natural or acquired, is in this respect of no consequence. As long as the one country has those advantages, and the other wants them, it will always be more advantageous for the latter, rather to buy of the former than to make. It is an acquired advantage only, which one artificer has over his neighbour, who exercises another trade; and yet they both find it more advantageous to buy of one another, than to make what does not belong to their particular trades. …
An African Slave Relates His First Impressions Upon Boarding a Slave Ship
Olaudah Equiano
(1793)
The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror, which I am yet at a loss to describe nor the then feelings of my mind. When I was carried on board I was immediately handled, and tossed up, to see if I were sound by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had got into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me. Their complexions too differing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke, which was very different from any I had ever heard, united to confirm me in this belief. Indeed, such were the horrors of my views and fears at the moment, that, if ten thousand worlds had been my own, I would have parted with them all to have exchanged my condition with that of the meanest slave in my own country. When I looked around the ship too, and saw a large furnace or copper boiling, and a multitude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate; and, quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted. When I recovered a little, I found some black people about me, who, I believed were some of those who brought me on board, and had been receiving their pay; they talked to me in order to cheer me, but all in vain. I asked them if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair? They told me I was not; and one of the crew brought me a small portion of spirituous liquor in a wine glass; but, being afraid of him, I would not take it out of his hand. One of the blacks therefore took it from him, and gave it to me, and I took a little down my palate, which, instead of reviving me, as they thought it would, threw me into the greatest consternation at the strange feeling it produced, having never tasted any such liquor before. Soon after this, the blacks who brought me on board went off, and left me abandoned to despair. I now saw myself deprived of any chance of returning to my native country, or even the least glimpse of hope of gaining the shore, which I now considered as friendly; and I even wished for my former slavery, in preference to my present situation, which was filled with horrors of every kind, still heightened by my ignorance of what I was to undergo. I was not long suffered to indulge my grief; I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life; so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste any thing. I now wished for the last friend, Death, to relieve me; but soon, to my grief, two of the white men offered me eatables; and, on my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands, and laid me across, I think, the windlass, and tied my feet, while the other flogged me severely. …
Wesley Lays Down the Ground Rules for Methodism
John Wesley
(1749)
1. About ten years ago my brother [Charles Wesley] and I were desired to preach in many parts of London. We had no view therein but, so far as we were able (and we knew God could work by whomsoever it pleased Him) to convince those who would hear, what true Christianity was, and to persuade them to embrace it.
2. The points we chiefly insisted upon were four: First, that orthodoxy or right opinions is, at best, but a very slender part of religion, if it can be allowed to be any part of it at all; that neither does religion consist in negatives, in bare harmlessness of any kind, nor merely in externals in doing good or using the means of grace, in works of piety (so called) or of charity: that it is nothing short of or different from the mind that was in Christ, the image of God stamped upon the heart, inward righteousness attended with the peace of God and joy in the Holy Ghost.
Secondly, that the only way under heaven to this religion is to repent and believe the gospel, of (as the apostle words it) repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.
Thirdly, that by this faith, he that worketh not, but believeth in Him that justifieth the ungodly, is justified freely by His grace, through the redemption which is in Jesus Christ.
And lastly, that being justified by faith we taste of the heaven to which we are going; we are holy and happy; we tread down sin and fear, and sit in heavenly places with Christ Jesus. …
4. Immediately … [those who accepted this new way] were surrounded with difficulties. All the world rose up against them; neighbors, strangers, acquaintances, relations, friends began to cry out amain, “Be not righteous overmuch: why shouldst thou destroy thyself? Let not much religion make thee mad.” …
You are supposed to have the faith that “overcometh the world.” To you, therefore, it is not grievous:
I. Carefully to abstain from doing evil; in particular:
1. Neither to buy nor sell anything at all on the Lord’s day.
2. To taste no spiritous liquor, no dram of any kind, unless prescribed by a physician.
3. To be at a word [to be honest] both in buying and selling.
4. To pawn nothing, no, not to save life.
5. Not to mention the fault of any behind his back, and to stop those short that do.
6. To wear no needless ornaments, such as rings, earrings, necklaces, lace, ruffles.
7. To use no needless self-indulgence, such as taking snuff or tobacco, unless prescribed by a physician.
II. Zealously to maintain good works; in particular:
1. To give alms of such things as you possess, and that to the uttermost of your power.
2. To reprove all that sin in your sight, and that in love and meekness of wisdom.
3. To be patterns of diligence and frugality, of self-denial, and taking up the cross daily.
III. Constantly to attend on all the ordinances of God; in particular:
1. To be at church and at the Lord’s table every week, and at every public meeting of the bands.
2. To attend the ministry of the word every morning unless distance, business or sickness prevent.
3. To use private prayer every day; and family prayer, if you are at the head of a family.
4. To read the scriptures, and meditate therein, at every vacant hour. And
5. To observe, as days of fasting or abstinence, all Fridays in the year. …
The English Parliament Pursues Mercantilistic Trading Policies
Parliament (1700)
Whereas it is most evident, that the continuance of the trade to the East Indies, in the same manner and proportions as it hath been for two years last past, must inevitably be to the great detriment of this kingdom, by exhausting the treasure thereof, and melting down the coin, and taking away the labor of the people, whereby very many of the manufacturers of this nation are become excessively burdensome and chargeable to their respective parishes, and others are thereby compelled to seek for employment in foreign parts: for remedy whereof be it enacted … That from and after [September 29, 1701] all wrought silk, bengalls,[1] and stuffs mixed with silk or herba, of the manufacture of Persia, China, or East India, and all calicoes, painted, dyed, printed, or stained there, which are or shall be imported into this kingdom, shall not be worn, or otherwise used within this kingdom of England, dominion of Wales, or town of Berwick upon Tweed, but under such limitations as are herein after mentioned and expressed.
II. And for the better effecting the same, be it enacted … that all such … [goods] which are or shall be imported into this kingdom[2] shall, after entry thereof, be forthwith carried and put into such warehouse or warehouses, as shall be for that purpose approved of by the commissioners of his Majesty’s customs for the time being. …
III. And for preventing all clandestine importing or bringing into this kingdom … any of the aforesaid goods hereby prohibited, or intended to be prohibited, from being worn or used in England; be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That if any person or persons, or bodies corporate, from and after [September 29, 1701], shall import or bring into any port of or in this kingdom … other than the port of London, any of the aforesaid prohibited goods, or into the port of London, and shall not make due entries of such goods so imported, or brought in, the same shall be, and is hereby adjudged, deemed, accounted, and taken to be clandestine running thereof, and such person or persons, or bodies corporate so offending therein, and their abettors, shall not only forfeit and lose the said goods so clandestinely run, as aforesaid, but also the sum of fine hundred pounds. …
IV.And be it further enacted, That if any question or doubt shall arise where the said goods were manufactured, the proof shall lie upon the owner or owners thereof, and not upon the prosecutor; any law, usage, or custom to the contrary notwithstanding.
V.And be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That if any action, bill, plaint, suit, or information, shall be commenced, or prosecuted against any person or persons, for any seizure, or other thing to be made or done, in pursuance or in execution of any thing before in this act contained, such person or persons, so sued in any court whatsoever, may plead the general issue, and give this act and the special matter in evidence, for their excuse or justification. …
VI. And for preventing clandestinely carrying out of the said warehouses any of the said goods hereby prohibited, and by this act intended for exportation, as aforesaid; be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That the warehouse-keeper or warehouse-keepers shall keep one or more book or books, wherein he or they shall fairly enter or write down an exact, particular, and true account of all and every chest, bale, and number of pieces therein contained, of such of the aforesaid goods only, which shall be brought into, and carried out of, his or their said warehouse or warehouses, and the days and times when the same shall be so brought in and carried out; and shall every six months in the year transmit in writing an exact account thereof, upon oath, to the said commissioners, together with an exact account how much shall be remaining in his or their said warehouse or warehouses respectively; and the said commissioners are hereby impowered and injoined, within one month after the same shall be transmitted to them, as aforesaid, to appoint one or more person or persons to inspect the said book or books, warehouse or warehouses, and examine the said accounts, and to lay a true account of the same before the Parliament. …
VIII. Provided always, and be it further enacted, That it shall and may be lawful to and for the proprietor or proprietors of the said goods so lodged in any warehouse or warehouses, as aforesaid, to affix one lock to every such warehouse or warehouses, the key of which shall remain in the custody of the said proprietor or proprietors; and that he or they may view, sort, or deliver the said goods, in order for exportation, as aforesaid, in the presence of the said warehouse-keeper or warehouse-keepers, who is and are hereby obliged, at seasonable times, to give attendance for that purpose. …
[1] A type of cloth imported from Bengal, India
[2] Scotland and Ireland are excluded from the law.
An Eyewitness Describes the Slave Trade in Guinea
Captain Willem Bosman
(c. 1700)
Not a few in our country fondly imagine that parents here sell their children, men their wives, and one brother the other. But those who think so, do deceive themselves; for this never happens on any other account but that of necessity, or some great crime; but most of the slaves that are offered to us, are prisoners of war, which are sold by the victors as their booty.
When these slaves come to Fida, they are put in prison all together; and when we treat concerning buying them, they are all brought out together in a large plain; where, by our surgeons, whose province it is, they are thoroughly examined, even to the smallest member, and that naked both men and women, without the least distinction or modesty. …
The invalids and the maimed being thrown out, as I have told you, the remainder are numbered, and it is entered who delivered them. In the meanwhile, a burning iron, with the arms or name of the companies, lies in the fire, with which ours are marked on the breast. This is done that we may distinguish them from the slaves of the English, French, or others (which are also marked with their mark), and to prevent the Negroes exchanging them for worse, at which they have a good hand. I doubt not but this trade seems very barbarous to you, but since it is followed by mere necessity, it must go on; but we yet take all possible care that they are not burned too hard, especially the women, who are more tender than the men.
We are seldom long detained in the buying of these slaves, because their price is established, the women being one fourth or fifth part cheaper than the men. The disputes which we generally have with the owners of these slaves are, that we will not give them such goods as they ask for them, especially the boesies [cowry shells] (as I have told you, the money of this country) of which they are very fond, though we generally make a division on this head, in order to make one part of the goods help off another; because those slaves which are paid for inboesies, cost the company one half more than those bought with other goods. …
When we have agreed with the owners of the slaves, they are returned to their prison; where, from that time forwards, they are kept at our charge, cost us two pence a day a slave; which serves to subsist them, like our criminals, on bread and water: so that to save charges, we send them on board our ships with the very first opportunity, before which their masters strip them of all they have on their backs; so that they come to us starknaked, as well women as men: in which condition they are obliged to continue, if the master of the ship is not so charitable (which he commonly is) as to bestow something on them to cover their nakedness.
You would really wonder to see how these slaves live on board; for though their number sometimes amounts to six or seven hundred, yet by the careful management of our masters of ships, they are so [well] regulated, that it seems incredible. And in this particular our nation exceeds all other Europeans; for as the French, Portuguese, and English slave-ships are always foul and stinking; on the contrary, ours are for the most part clean and neat.
The slaves are fed three times a day with indifferent good victuals, and much better than they eat in their own country. Their lodging place is divided into two parts; one of which is appointed for the men, the other for the women, each sex being kept apart. Here they lie as close together as it is possible for them to be crowded. …
An Urban Crime Wave in Eighteenth-Century London
Henry Fielding
(1751)
The great increase of robberies within these few years is an evil which to me appears to deserve some attention; and the rather as it seems (though already become so flagrant) not yet to have arrived to that height of which it is capable, and which it is likely to attain; for diseases in the political, as in the natural body, seldom fail going on to their crisis, especially when nourished and encouraged by faults in the constitution. In fact, I make no doubt, but that the streets of this town, and the roads leading to it, will shortly be impassable without the utmost hazard; nor are we threatened with seeing less dangerous gangs of rogues among us, than those which the Italians call the banditti. …
I cannot help thinking it high time to put some stop to the farther progress of such impudent and audacious insults, not only on the properties of the subject, but on the national justice, and on the laws themselves. The means of accomplishing this (the best which suggest themselves to me) I shall submit to the public consideration after having first inquired into the causes of the present growth of this evil, and whence we have great reason to apprehend its farther increase. …
First then, I think, that the vast torrent of luxury, which of late years hath poured itself into this nation, hath greatly contributed to produce, among many others, the mischief I here complain of. I am not here to satirize the great, among whom luxury is probably rather a moral than a political evil. But vices no more than diseases will stop with them; for bad habits are as infectious by example, as the plague itself by contact. In free countries, at least, it is a branch of liberty claimed by the people to be as wicked and as profligate as their superiors. Thus while the nobleman will emulate the grandeur of a prince, and the gentleman will aspire to the proper state of the nobleman, the tradesman steps from behind his counter into the vacant place of the gentleman. Nor doth the confusion end here; it reaches the very dregs of the people, who aspiring still to a degree beyond that which belongs to them, and not being able by the fruits of honest labor to support the state which they affect, they disdain the wages to which their industry would entitle them; and abandoning themselves to idleness, the more simple and poor-spirited betake themselves to a state of starving and beggary, while those of more art and courage become thieves, sharpers [swindlers], and robbers. …
But the expense of money, and loss of time, with their certain consequences, are not the only evils which attend the luxury of the vulgar; drunkenness is almost inseparably annexed to the pleasures of such people. A vice by no means to be construed as a spiritual offense alone, since so many temporal mischiefs arise from it; amongst which are very frequently robbery, and murder itself. …
The drunkenness I here intend [refer to] is that acquired by the strongest intoxicating liquors, and particularly by that poison called Gin; which I have great reason to think is the principal sustenance (if it may be so called) of more than a hundred thousand people in this metropolis. Many of these wretches there are who swallow pints of this poison within the twenty-four hours; the dreadful effects of which I have the misfortune every day to see, and to smell too. But I have no need to insist on my own credit, or on that of my informers; the great revenue arising from the tax on this liquor (the consumption of which is almost wholly confined to the lowest order of people) will prove the quantity consumed better than any other evidence.
The Wealth of Nations: A Natural Law of Economy
Adam Smith
(1776)
To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture; but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of the pin-maker; a workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade), nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different operations.
In every other art and manufacture, the effects of the division of labour are similar to what they are in this very trifling one: though, in many of them, the labour can neither be so much subdivided, nor reduced to so great a simplicity of operation. The division of labour, however, so far as it can be introduced, occasions, in every art, a proportionable increase of the productive powers of labour. The separation of different trades and employments from one another, seems to have taken place, in consequence of this advantage. This separation too is generally carried furthest in those countries which enjoy the highest degree of industry and improvement; what is the work of one man in a rude state of society, being generally that of several in an improved one. …
… As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it. …
The natural advantages which one country has over another in producing particular commodities are sometimes so great, that it is acknowledged by all the world to be in vain to struggle with them. By means of glasses, hotbeds, and hotwalls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine too can be made of them at about thirty times the expence for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries. Would it be a reasonable law to prohibit the importation of all foreign wines, merely to encourage the making of claret and burgundy in Scotland? But if there would be a manifest absurdity in turning towards any employment, thirty times more of the capital and industry of the country, than would be necessary to purchase from foreign countries an equal quantity of the commodities wanted, there must be an absurdity, though not altogether so glaring, yet exactly of the same kind, in turning towards any such employment a thirtieth, or even a three hundredth part more of either. Whether the advantages which one country has over another, be natural or acquired, is in this respect of no consequence. As long as the one country has those advantages, and the other wants them, it will always be more advantageous for the latter, rather to buy of the former than to make. It is an acquired advantage only, which one artificer has over his neighbour, who exercises another trade; and yet they both find it more advantageous to buy of one another, than to make what does not belong to their particular trades. …
An African Slave Relates His First Impressions Upon Boarding a Slave Ship
Olaudah Equiano
(1793)
The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror, which I am yet at a loss to describe nor the then feelings of my mind. When I was carried on board I was immediately handled, and tossed up, to see if I were sound by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had got into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me. Their complexions too differing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke, which was very different from any I had ever heard, united to confirm me in this belief. Indeed, such were the horrors of my views and fears at the moment, that, if ten thousand worlds had been my own, I would have parted with them all to have exchanged my condition with that of the meanest slave in my own country. When I looked around the ship too, and saw a large furnace or copper boiling, and a multitude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate; and, quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted. When I recovered a little, I found some black people about me, who, I believed were some of those who brought me on board, and had been receiving their pay; they talked to me in order to cheer me, but all in vain. I asked them if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair? They told me I was not; and one of the crew brought me a small portion of spirituous liquor in a wine glass; but, being afraid of him, I would not take it out of his hand. One of the blacks therefore took it from him, and gave it to me, and I took a little down my palate, which, instead of reviving me, as they thought it would, threw me into the greatest consternation at the strange feeling it produced, having never tasted any such liquor before. Soon after this, the blacks who brought me on board went off, and left me abandoned to despair. I now saw myself deprived of any chance of returning to my native country, or even the least glimpse of hope of gaining the shore, which I now considered as friendly; and I even wished for my former slavery, in preference to my present situation, which was filled with horrors of every kind, still heightened by my ignorance of what I was to undergo. I was not long suffered to indulge my grief; I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life; so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste any thing. I now wished for the last friend, Death, to relieve me; but soon, to my grief, two of the white men offered me eatables; and, on my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands, and laid me across, I think, the windlass, and tied my feet, while the other flogged me severely. …
Wesley Lays Down the Ground Rules for Methodism
John Wesley
(1749)
1. About ten years ago my brother [Charles Wesley] and I were desired to preach in many parts of London. We had no view therein but, so far as we were able (and we knew God could work by whomsoever it pleased Him) to convince those who would hear, what true Christianity was, and to persuade them to embrace it.
2. The points we chiefly insisted upon were four: First, that orthodoxy or right opinions is, at best, but a very slender part of religion, if it can be allowed to be any part of it at all; that neither does religion consist in negatives, in bare harmlessness of any kind, nor merely in externals in doing good or using the means of grace, in works of piety (so called) or of charity: that it is nothing short of or different from the mind that was in Christ, the image of God stamped upon the heart, inward righteousness attended with the peace of God and joy in the Holy Ghost.
Secondly, that the only way under heaven to this religion is to repent and believe the gospel, of (as the apostle words it) repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.
Thirdly, that by this faith, he that worketh not, but believeth in Him that justifieth the ungodly, is justified freely by His grace, through the redemption which is in Jesus Christ.
And lastly, that being justified by faith we taste of the heaven to which we are going; we are holy and happy; we tread down sin and fear, and sit in heavenly places with Christ Jesus. …
4. Immediately … [those who accepted this new way] were surrounded with difficulties. All the world rose up against them; neighbors, strangers, acquaintances, relations, friends began to cry out amain, “Be not righteous overmuch: why shouldst thou destroy thyself? Let not much religion make thee mad.” …
You are supposed to have the faith that “overcometh the world.” To you, therefore, it is not grievous:
I. Carefully to abstain from doing evil; in particular:
1. Neither to buy nor sell anything at all on the Lord’s day.
2. To taste no spiritous liquor, no dram of any kind, unless prescribed by a physician.
3. To be at a word [to be honest] both in buying and selling.
4. To pawn nothing, no, not to save life.
5. Not to mention the fault of any behind his back, and to stop those short that do.
6. To wear no needless ornaments, such as rings, earrings, necklaces, lace, ruffles.
7. To use no needless self-indulgence, such as taking snuff or tobacco, unless prescribed by a physician.
II. Zealously to maintain good works; in particular:
1. To give alms of such things as you possess, and that to the uttermost of your power.
2. To reprove all that sin in your sight, and that in love and meekness of wisdom.
3. To be patterns of diligence and frugality, of self-denial, and taking up the cross daily.
III. Constantly to attend on all the ordinances of God; in particular:
1. To be at church and at the Lord’s table every week, and at every public meeting of the bands.
2. To attend the ministry of the word every morning unless distance, business or sickness prevent.
3. To use private prayer every day; and family prayer, if you are at the head of a family.
4. To read the scriptures, and meditate therein, at every vacant hour. And
5. To observe, as days of fasting or abstinence, all Fridays in the year. …
Primary Sources – Unit Nine – The Revolution in Politics, 1775-1815
Turgot Prepares Louis XVI for the Resistance to Fiscal Reform and Budgetary Retrenchment
Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot
(1774)
Compiegne, August 24, 1774.
Sire:
Having just come from the private interview with which your Majesty has honored me, still full of the anxiety produced by the immensity of the duties now imposed upon me, agitated by all the feelings excited by the touching kindness with which you have encouraged me, I hasten to convey to you my respectful gratitude and the devotion of my whole life.
Your Majesty has been good enough to permit me to place on record the engagement you have taken upon you to sustain me in the execution of those plans of economy which are at all times, and to-day more than ever, an indispensable necessity. … At this moment, sire, I confine myself to recalling to you these three items:
No bankruptcy.
No increase of taxes.
No loans.
No bankruptcy, either avowed or disguised by illegal reductions.
No increase of taxes; the reason for this lying in the condition of your people, and, still more, in that of your Majesty’s own generous heart.
No loans; because every loan always diminishes the free revenue and necessitates, at the end of a certain time, either bankruptcy or the increase of taxes. In times of peace it is permissible to borrow only in order to liquidate old debts, or in order to redeem other loans contracted on less advantageous terms.
To meet these three points there is but one means. It is to reduce expenditure below the revenue, and sufficiently below it to insure each year a saving of twenty millions, to be applied to redemption of the old debts. Without that, the first gunshot will force the state into bankruptcy.
The question will be asked incredulously, “On what can we retrench?” and each one, speaking for his own department, will maintain that nearly every particular item of expense is indispensable. They will be able to allege very good reasons, but these must all yield to the absolute necessity of economy. …
These are the matters which I have been permitted to recall to your Majesty. You will not forget that in accepting the place of comptroller general I have felt the full value of the confidence with which you honor me; I have felt that you intrust to me the happiness of your people, and, if it be permitted to me to say so, the care of promoting among your people the love of your person and of your authority.
At the same time I feel all the danger to which I expose myself. I foresee that I shall be alone in fighting against abuses of every kind, against the power of those who profit by these abuses, against the crowd of prejudiced people who oppose themselves to all reform, and who are such powerful instruments in the hands of interested parties for perpetuating the disorder. I shall have to struggle even against the natural goodness and generosity of your Majesty, and of the persons who are most dear to you. I shall be feared, hated even, by nearly all the court, by all who solicit favors. They will impute to me all the refusals; they will describe me as a hard man because I shall have advised your Majesty that you ought not to enrich even those that you love at the expense of your people’s subsistence.
And this people, for whom I shall sacrifice myself, are so easily deceived that perhaps I shall encounter their hatred by the very measures I take to defend them against exactions. I shall be calumniated (having, perhaps, appearances against me) in order to deprive me of your Majesty’s confidence. I shall not regret losing a place which I never solicited. I am ready to resign it to your Majesty as soon as I can no longer hope to be useful in it. …
Your Majesty will remember that it is upon the faith of your promises made to me that I charge myself with a burden perhaps beyond my strength, and it is to yourself personally, to the upright man, the just and good man, rather than to the king, that I give myself.
I venture to repeat here what you have already been kind enough to hear and approve of. The affecting kindness with which you condescended to press my hands within your own, as if sealing my devotion, will never be effaced from my memory. It will sustain my courage. It has forever united my personal happiness with the interest, the glory, and the happiness of your Majesty. It is with these sentiments that I am, sire, etc.
Turgot Abolishes the French Guilds
Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot
(1774)
In almost all the towns the exercise of the different arts and trades is concentrated in the hands of a small number of masters, united in corporations, who alone can, to the exclusion of all other citizens, make or sell the articles belonging to their particular industry. Any person who, by inclination or necessity, intends following an art or trade can only do so by acquiring the mastership [i.e., freedom of the corporation] after a probation as long and vexatious as it is superfluous. By having to satisfy repeated exactions, the money he had so much need of in order to start his trade or open his workshop has been consumed in mere waste. …
Citizens of all classes are deprived both of the right to choose the workmen they would employ, and of the advantages they would enjoy from competition operating toward improvements in manufacture and reduction in price. Often one cannot get the simplest work done without its having to go through the hands of several workmen of different corporations, and without enduring the delays, tricks, and exaction which the pretensions of the different corporations, and the caprices of their arbitrary and mercenary directors, demand and encourage. …
Among the infinite number of unreasonable regulations, we find in some corporations that all are excluded from them except the sons of masters, or those who marry the widows of masters. Others reject all those whom they call “strangers,”–that is, those born in another town. In many of them for a young man to be married is enough to exclude him from the apprenticeship, and consequently from the mastership. The spirit of monopoly which has dictated the making of these statutes has been carried out to the excluding of women even from the trades the most suitable to their sex, such as embroidery, which they are forbidden to exercise on their own account. …
God, by giving to man wants, and making his recourse to work necessary to supply them, has made the right to work the property of every man, and this property is the first, the most sacred, the most imprescriptible of all. …
It shall be free to all persons, of whatever quality or condition they may be, even to all foreigners, to undertake and to exercise in all our kingdom, and particularly in our good city of Paris, whatever kind of trade and whatever profession of art or industry may seem good to them; for which purpose we now extinguish and suppress all corporations and communities of merchants and artisans, as well as all masterships and guild directories. We abrogate all privileges, statutes, and regulations of the said corporations, so that none of our subjects shall be troubled in the exercise of his trade or profession by any cause or under any pretext whatever.
William Pitt Gives a Whiggish Defense of American Resistance to Taxation
William Pitt
(1775)
This resistance to your arbitrary system of taxation might have been foreseen; it was obvious from the nature of things and of mankind, and, above all, from the Whiggish spirit flourishing in that country. The spirit which now resists your taxation in America is the same which formerly opposed loans, benevolences, and ship money in England; the same spirit which called all England on its legs, and by the Bill of Rights vindicated the English constitution; the same spirit which established the great, fundamental, essential maxim of your liberties, that no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent.
This glorious spirit of Whiggism animates three millions in America, who prefer poverty with liberty to gilded chains and sordid affluence, and who will die in the defense of their rights as men, as free men. What shall oppose this spirit, aided by the congenial flame glowing in the breast of every Whig in England, to the amount, I hope, of double the American numbers? Ireland they have to a man. In that country, joined as it is with the cause of the colonies, and placed at their head, the distinction I contend for is and must be observed. This country superintends and controls their trade and navigation, but they tax themselves. And this distinction between external and internal control is sacred and insurmountable; it is involved in the abstract nature of things. Property is private, individual, absolute. Trade is an extended and complicated consideration; it reaches as far as ships can sail or winds can blow; it is a great and various machine. To regulate the numberless movements of the several parts and combine them into effect for the good of the whole, requires the superintending wisdom and energy of the supreme power in the empire. But this supreme power has no effect towards internal taxation, for it does not exist in that relation; there is no such thing, no such idea in this constitution, as a supreme power operating upon property. Let this distinction then remain forever ascertained: taxation is theirs, commercial regulation is ours. As an American, I would recognize to England her supreme right of regulating commerce and navigation; as an Englishman by birth and principle, I recognize to the Americans their supreme unalienable right in their property,–a right which they are justified in the defense of to the last extremity. To maintain this principle is the common cause of the Whigs on the other side of the Atlantic and on this. “‘Tis liberty to liberty engaged,” that they will defend themselves, their families, and their country. In this great cause they are immovably allied: it is the alliance of God and nature,–immovable, eternal, fixed as the firmament of heaven.
Arthur Young’s Travels in France on the Eve of the Revolution
Arthur Young
(1787)
October 17, 1787 . … Dined to-day with a party whose conversation was entirely political. Monsieur de Calonne’s Requete au Roi is come over, and all the world are reading and disputing on it. It seems, however, generally agreed that, without exonerating himself from the charge of the agiotage, he has thrown no inconsiderable load on the shoulders of the Archbishop of Toulouse, the present premier, who will be puzzled to get rid of the attack. But both these ministers were condemned on all hands in the lump as being absolutely unequal to the difficulties of so arduous a period. One opinion pervaded the whole company, that they are on the eve of some great revolution in the government: that everything points to it: the confusion in the finances great; with a deficit impossible to provide for without the estates-general of the kingdom, yet no ideas formed of what would be the consequence of their meeting: no minister existing, or to be looked to in or out of power, with such decisive talents as to promise any other remedy than palliative ones: a prince on the throne, with excellent dispositions, but without the resources of a mind that could govern in such a moment without ministers: a court buried in pleasure and dissipation; and adding to the distress instead of endeavouring to be placed in a more independent situation: a great ferment amongst all ranks of men, who are eager for some change, without knowing what to look to or to hope for: and a strong leaven of liberty, increasing every hour since the American revolution–altogether form a combination of circumstances that promise e’er long to ferment into motion if some master hand of very superior talents and inflexible courage is not found at the helm to guide events, instead of being driven by them. It is very remarkable that such conversation never occurs but a bankruptcy is a topic: the curious question on which is, would a bankruptcy occasion a civil war and a total overthrow of the government? The answers that I have received to this question appear to be just: such a measure conducted by a man of abilities, vigour, and firmness would certainly not occasion either one or the other. But the same measure, attempted by a man of a different character, might possibly do both. All agree that the states of the kingdom cannot assemble without more liberty being the consequence; but I meet with so few men that have any just ideas of freedom that I question much the species of this new liberty that is to arise. They know not how to value the privileges of THE PEOPLE: as to the nobility and the clergy, if a revolution added anything to their scale I think it would do more mischief than good. …
October 25, 1787. This great city [Paris] appears to be in many respects the most ineligible and inconvenient for the residence of a person of small fortune of any that I have seen; and vastly inferior to London. The streets are very narrow, and many of them crowded, ninetenths dirty, and all without foot-pavements. Walking, which in London is so pleasant and so clean that ladies do it every day, is here a toil and a fatigue to a man and an impossibility to a well-dressed woman. The coaches are numerous, and, what are much worse, there are an infinity of one-horse cabriolets which are driven by young men of fashion and their imitators, alike fools, with such rapidity as to be real nuisances, and render the streets exceedingly dangerous without an incessant caution. I saw a poor child run over and probably killed, and have been myself many times blackened with the mud of the kennels. This beggarly practice of driving a one-horse booby hutch about the streets of a great capital flows either from poverty or wretched and despicable economy; nor is it possible to speak of it with too much severity. If young noblemen at London were to drive their chaises in streets without foot-ways, as their brethren do at Paris, they would speedily and justly get very well thrashed or rolled in the kennel. This circumstance renders Paris an ineligible residence for persons, particularly families, that cannot afford to keep a coach; a convenience which is as dear as at London. The fiacres, hackney-coaches, are much worse than at that city; and chairs there are none, for they would be driven down in the streets. To this circumstance also it is owing that all persons of small or moderate fortune are forced to dress in black, with black stockings; the dusky hue of this in company is not so disagreeable a circumstance as being too great a distinction; too clear a line drawn in company between a man that has a good fortune and another that has not. With the pride, arrogance, and ill-temper of English wealth this could not be borne; but the prevailing good humour of the French eases all such untoward circumstances. Lodgings are not half so good as at London, yet considerably dearer. If you do not hire a whole suite of rooms at a hotel, you must probably mount three, four, or five pair of stairs, and in general have nothing but a bed-chamber. After the horrid fatigue of the streets, such an elevation is a delectable circumstance. You must search with trouble before you will be lodged in a private family as gentlemen usually are at London, and pay a higher price. Servants’ wages are about the same as at that city. It is to be regretted that Paris should have these disadvantages, for in other respects I take it to be a most eligible residence for such as prefer a great city. The society for a man of letters, or who has any scientific pursuit, cannot be exceeded. The intercourse between such men and the great, which, if it is not upon an equal footing, ought never to exist at all, is reflict. As you read, bear in mind the differing interpretations and how each section supports or detracts from the two interpretations. spectable. Persons of the highest rank pay an attention to science and literature, and emulate the character they confer. I should pity the man who expected, without other advantages of a very different nature, to be well received in a brilliant circle at London because he was a fellow of the Royal Society. But this would not be the case with a member of the Academy of Sciences at Paris; he is sure of a good reception everywhere. Perhaps this contrast depends in a great measure on the difference of the governments of the two countries. Politics are too much attended to in England to allow a due respect to be paid to anything else; and should the French establish a freer government, academicians will not be held in such estimation when rivalled in the public esteem by the orators who hold forth liberty and property in a free parliament.
Condorcet Affirms the Inevitability of Progress
Antoine Nicolas de Condorcet
(1794)
The aim of the book that I have undertaken to write, and what it will prove, is that man by using reason and facts will attain perfection. Nature has set no limits to the perfection of the human faculties. The perfectibility of mankind is truly indefinite; and the progress of this perfectibility, henceforth to be free of all hindrances, will last as long as the globe on which nature has placed us. Doubtless this progress will be more or less rapid, but it will never retrograde, at least as long as the globe occupies its present place in the system of the universe; and unless the general laws that govern this system bring to pass a universal cataclysm, or such changes as will prevent man from maintaining his existence, from using his faculties, and from finding his needed resources. …
Since the period when alphabetical writing flourished in Greece the history of mankind has been linked to the condition of man of our time in the most enlightened countries of Europe by an unbroken chain of facts and observations. The picture of the march and progress of the human mind is now revealed as being truly historical. Philosophy no longer has to guess, no longer has to advance hypothetical theories. It now suffices to assemble and to arrange the facts, and to show the truths that arise from their connection and from their totality. …
If man can predict with almost complete certainty those phenomena whose laws he knows; and if, when he does not know these laws, he can, on the basis of his experience in the past, predict future events with assurance why then should it be regarded as chimerical to trace with a fair degree of accuracy the picture of man’s future on the basis of his history? The sole foundation for belief in the natural sciences is the principle that universal laws, known or unknown, which regulate the universe are necessary and constant. Why then should this principle be less true for the development of the intellectual and moral faculties of man than it is for the other operations of nature? Finally, since beliefs, based on past experience under like conditions, constitute the only rule according to which the wisest men act, why then forbid the philosopher to support his beliefs on the same foundations, as long as he does not attribute to them a certainty not warranted by the number, the constancy, and the accuracy of his observations. …
A Russian Serf Explains the Facts of Life to an Enlightened Russian Nobleman
Alexander Radishchev
(1790)
A few steps from the road I saw a peasant ploughing a field. The weather was hot. I looked at my watch. It was twenty minutes before one. I had set out on Saturday. It was now Sunday. The ploughing peasant, of course, belonged to a landed proprietor, who would not let him pay [dues in money or kind (obrok)]. The peasant was ploughing very carefully. The field, of course, was not part of his master’s land. He turned the plough with astonishing ease.
“God help you,” I said, walking up to the ploughman, who, without stopping, was finishing the furrow he had started. “God help you,” I repeated.
“Thank you, sir,” the ploughman said to me, shaking the earth off the ploughshare and transferring it to a new furrow.
“You must be a Dissenter [Old Believer], since you plough on a Sunday.”
“No, sir, I make the true sign of the cross,” he said, showing me the three fingers together. “And God is merciful and does not bid us starve to death, so long as we have strength and a family.”
“Have you no time to work during the week, then, and can you not have any rest on Sundays, in the hottest part of the day, at that?”
“In a week, sir, there are six days, and we go six times a week to work on the master’s fields; in the evening, if the weather is good, we haul to the master’s house the hay that is left in the woods; and on holidays the women and girls go walking in the woods, looking for mushrooms and berries. God grant,” he continued, making the sign of the cross, “that it rains this evening. If you have peasants of your own, sir, they are praying to God for the same thing.”
“My friend, I have no peasants, and so nobody curses me. Do you have a large family?”
“Three sons and three daughters. The eldest is nine years old.”
“But how do you manage to get food enough, if you have only the holidays free?”
“Not only the holidays: the nights are ours, too. If a fellow isn’t lazy, he won’t starve to death. You see, one horse is resting; and when this one gets tired, I’ll take the other; so the work gets done.”
“Do you work the same way for your master?”
“No, sir, it would be a sin to work the same way. On his fields there are a hundred hands for one mouth, while I have two for seven mouths: you can figure it out for yourself. No matter how hard you work for the master, no one will thank you for it. The master will not pay our head [soul] tax; but, though he doesn’t pay it, he doesn’t demand one sheep, one hen, or any linen or butter the less. The peasants are much better off where the landlord lets them pay a commutation tax [obrok] without the interference of the steward. It is true that sometimes even good masters take more than three rubles a man; but even that’s better than having to work on the master’s fields. Nowadays it’s getting to be the custom to let [lease] villages to [noble] tenants, as they call it. But we call it putting our heads in a noose. A landless tenant skins us peasants alive; even the best ones don’t leave us any time for ourselves. In the winter he won’t let us do any carting of goods and won’t let us go into town to work; all our work has to be for him, because he pays our head tax. It is an invention of the Devil to turn your peasants over to work for a stranger. You can make a complaint against a bad steward, but to whom can you complain against a bad tenant?”
“My friend, you are mistaken; the laws forbid them to torture people.”
“Torture? That’s true; but all the same, sir, you would not want to be in my hide.” Meanwhile the ploughman hitched up the other horse to the plough and bade me good-bye as he began a new furrow.
The words of this peasant awakened in me a multitude of thoughts. I thought especially of the inequality of treatment within the peasant class. I compared the [state] peasants with the [proprietary] peasants. They both live in villages; but the former pay a fixed sum, while the latter must be prepared to pay whatever their master demands. The former are judged by their equals; the latter are dead to the law, except, perhaps, in criminal cases. A member of society becomes known to the government protecting him, only when he breaks the social bonds, when he becomes a criminal! This thought made my blood boil.
The Federalist Explains the Necessity for the Separation of Government Power
James Madison
(1788)
To what expedient then shall we finally resort for maintaining in practice the necessary partition of power among the several departments, as laid down in the constitution? The only answer that can be given is, that as all these exterior provisions are found to be inadequate, the defect must be supplied, by so contriving the interior structure of the government, as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places. …
… [T]he great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department, the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional right of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
This policy of supplying by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power; where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other; that the private interest of every individual, may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the state.
The Third Estate Speaks: The Cahier de Doleances of the Carcassonne
Commissioners of Third Estate of the Carcassonne Elect Oral District to the Estates General
(1789)
The third estate of the electoral district of Carcassonne, desiring to give to a beloved monarch, and one so worthy of our affection, the most unmistakable proof of its love and respect, of its gratitude and fidelity, desiring to cooperate with the whole nation in repairing the successive misfortunes which have overwhelmed it, and with the hope of reviving once more its ancient glory, declares that the happiness of the nation must, in their opinion, depend upon that of its king, upon the stability of the monarchy, and upon the preservation of the orders which compose it and of the fundamental laws which govern it.
Considering, too, that a holy respect for religion, morality, civil liberty, and the rights of property, a speedy return to true principles, a careful selection and due measure in the matter of the taxes, a strict proportionality in their assessment, a persistent economy in government expenditures, and indispensable reforms in all branches of the administration, are the best and perhaps the only means of perpetuating the existence of the monarchy;
The third estate of the electoral district of Carcassonne very humbly petitions his Majesty to take into consideration these several matters, weigh them in his wisdom, and permit his people to enjoy, as soon as may be, fresh proofs of that benevolence which he has never ceased to exhibit toward them and which is dictated by his affection for them.
In view of the obligation imposed by his Majesty’s command that the third estate of this district should confide to his paternal ear the causes of the ills which afflict them and the means by which they may be remedied or moderated, they believe that they are fulfilling the duties of faithful subjects and zealous citizens in submitting to the consideration of the nation, and to the sentiments of justice and affection which his Majesty entertains for his subjects, the following:
1. Public worship should be confined to the Roman Catholic apostolic religion, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship; its extension should be promoted and the most efficient measures taken to reestablish the discipline of the Church and increase its prestige.
2. Nevertheless the civil rights of those of the king’s subjects who are not Catholics should be confirmed, and they should be admitted to positions and offices in the public administration, without however extending this privilege–which reason and humanity alike demand for them–to judicial or police functions or to those of public instruction.
3. The nation should consider some means of abolishing the annates and all other dues paid to the holy see, to the prejudice and against the protests of the whole French people. …
[The holding of multiple church positions should be prohibited, monasteries reduced in numbers, and holidays suppressed or decreased.]
7. The rights which have just been restored to the nation should be consecrated as fundamental principles of the monarchy, and their perpetual and unalterable enjoyment should be assured by a solemn law, which should so define the rights both of the monarch and of the people that their violation shall hereafter be impossible.
8. Among these rights the following should be especially noted: the nation should hereafter be subject only to such laws and taxes as it shall itself freely ratify.
9. The meetings of the Estates General of the kingdom should be fixed for definite periods, and the subsidies judged necessary for the support of the state and the public service should be voted for no longer a period than to the close of the year in which the next meeting of the Estates General is to occur.
10. In order to assure to the third estate the influence to which it is entitled in view of the number of its members, the amount of its contributions to the public treasury, and the manifold interests which it has to defend or promote in the national assemblies, its votes in the assembly should be taken and counted by head.
11. No order, corporation, or individual citizen may lay claim to any pecuniary exemptions. … All taxes should be assessed on the same system throughout the nation.
12. The due exacted from commoners holding fiefs should be abolished, and also the general or particular regulations which exclude members of the third estate from certain positions, offices, and ranks which have hitherto been bestowed on nobles either for life or hereditarily. A law should be passed declaring members of the third estate qualified to fill all such offices for which they are judged to be personally fitted.
13. Since individual liberty is intimately associated with national liberty, his Majesty is hereby petitioned not to permit that it be hereafter interfered with by arbitrary orders for imprisonment. …
14. Freedom should be granted also to the press, which should however be subjected, by means of strict regulations, to the principles of religion, morality, and public decency. …
60. The third estate of the district of Carcassonne places its trust, for the rest, in the zeal, patriotism, honor, and probity of its deputies in the National Assembly in all matters which may accord with the beneficent views of his Majesty, the welfare of the kingdom, the union of the three estates, and the public peace.
A Royalist Perspective on The Opening of the Estates General
Madame Jeanne Louis Genet de Campan
(1789)
The Estates General opened May 4 [1789]. For the last time the queen appeared in royal magnificence. … The first session of the Estates was held next day. The king delivered his address with assurance and dignity. The queen told me that he gave the matter much attention, and rehearsed his speech frequently in order to be quite master of the intonations of his voice. His Majesty gave public indications of his attachment and deference for the queen, who was applauded; but it was easy to see that the applause was really meant for the king alone.
From the very early sessions it was clear that Mirabeau would prove very dangerous to the government. It is alleged that he revealed at this time to the king, and more particularly to the queen, a part of the plans he had in mind, and the conditions upon which he would abandon them. He had already exhibited the weapons with which his eloquence and audacity furnished him, in order that he might open negotiations with the party he proposed to attack. This man played at revolution in order to gain a fortune. The queen told me at this time that he asked for an embassy,–Constantinople, if I remember rightly. He was refused with that proper contempt which vice inspires, but which policy would doubtless best have disguised, if the future could have been foreseen.
The general enthusiasm which prevailed during the early sessions of the Assembly, the discussions among the deputies of the third estate and nobility, and even of the clergy, filled their Majesties and those attached to the cause of monarchy with increasing alarm. … The deputies of the third estate arrived at Versailles with the deepest prejudices against the court. The wicked sayings of Paris never fail to spread throughout the provinces. The deputies believed that the king indulged in the pleasures of the table to a shameful excess. They were persuaded that the queen exhausted the treasury of the state to gratify the most unreasonable luxury.
Almost all wished to visit the Little Trianon.[1] The extreme simplicity of this pleasure house did not correspond with their ideas. Some insisted that they be shown even the smallest closets, on the ground that some richly furnished apartments were being concealed from them. At last they designated one which they declared was said to be decorated throughout with diamonds and twisted columns set with sapphires and rubies. The queen could not get these silly ideas out of her head and told the king about them. He thought from the description of the room furnished to the guards in the Trianon, that the deputies had in mind the decoration of imitation diamonds in the theater at Fontainebleau constructed in Louis XV’s reign.
[1] A simple little pleasure house in a secluded part of the gardens at Versailles, much beloved by the queen.
An English Commentator Reports on the Opening of the Estates General
Arthur Young
(1789)
The king, court, nobility, clergy, army, and parliament [parlements] are nearly in the same situation. All these consider with equal dread the ideas of liberty now afloat, except the first, who, for reasons obvious to those who know his character, troubles himself little, even with circumstances that concern his power the most intimately. …
The business going forward at present in the pamphlet shops of Paris is incredible. I went to the Palais Royal to see what new things were published, and to procure a catalogue of all. Every hour produces something new. Thirteen came out to-day, sixteen yesterday, and ninety-two last week.
Nineteen-twentieths of these productions are in favor of liberty, and commonly violent against the clergy and the nobility. I have to-day bespoke many of this description that have reputation; but inquiring for such as had appeared on the other side of the question, to my astonishment I find there are but two or three that have merit enough to be known.
But the coffee-houses in the Palais Royal present yet more singular and astonishing spectacles: they are not only crowded within, but other expectant crowds are at the doors and windows, listening a gorge deploye [with gaping mouths] to certain orators, who from chairs or tables harangue each his little audience. The eagerness with which they are heard, and the thunder of applause they receive for every sentiment of more than common hardiness or violence against the present government, cannot easily be imagined. I am all amazement at the ministry permitting such nests and hotbeds of sedition and revolt, which disseminate amongst the people every hour principles that by and by must be opposed with vigor; and therefore it seems little short of madness to allow the propagation at present.
Everything conspires to render the present period in France critical. The want of bread is terrible; accounts arrive every moment from the provinces of riots and disturbances, and calling in the military to preserve the peace of the markets. …
June 15. This has been a rich day, and such a one as ten years ago none could believe would ever arrive in France; a very important debate being expected on what, in our House of Commons, would be termed the state of the nation. My friend, Monsieur Lazowski, and myself were at Versailles at eight in the morning. We went immediately to the hall of the states to secure good seats in the gallery; we found some deputies already there, and a pretty numerous audience collected. The room is too large; none but stentorian lungs or the finest, clearest voices can be heard. However, the very size of the apartment, which admits two thousand people, gave a dignity to the scene. It was indeed an interesting one. The spectacle of the representatives of twenty-five millions of people, just emerging from the evils of two hundred years of arbitrary power, and rising to the blessings of a freer constitution, assembled with open doors under the eye of the public, was framed to call into animated feelings every latent spark, every emotion of a liberal bosom; to banish whatever ideas might intrude of their being a people too often hostile to my own country, and to dwell with pleasure on the glorious idea of happiness to a great nation.
Monsieur l’Abbe Sieyes opened the debate. He is one of the most zealous sticklers for the popular cause; carries his ideas not to a regulation of the present government, which he thinks too bad to be regulated at all, but wishes to see it absolutely overturned,–being in fact a violent republican: this is the character he commonly bears, and in his pamphlets he seems pretty much to justify such an idea. He speaks ungracefully and uneloquently, but logically,–or rather reads so, for he read his speech, which was prepared. His motion, or rather string of motions, was to declare themselves the representatives known and verified of the French nation, admitting the right of all absent deputies [the nobility and clergy] to be received among them on the verification of their powers.
Monsieur de Mirabeau spoke without notes for near an hour, with a warmth, animation, and eloquence that entitles him to the reputation of an undoubted orator. He opposed the words “known” and “verified,” in the proposition of Abbe Sieyes, with great force of reasoning, and proposed in lieu that they should declare themselves simply Representatives du peuple Francais [Representatives of the French People]; that no veto should exist against their resolves in any other assembly; that all [existing] taxes are illegal, but should be granted during the present sessions of the states, and no longer; that the debt of the king should become the debt of the nation, and be secured on funds accordingly. Monsieur de Mirabeau was well heard, and his proposition much applauded.
In regard to their general method of proceeding, there are two circumstances in which they are very deficient. The spectators in the galleries are allowed to interfere in the debates by clapping their hands, and other noisy expressions of approbation: this is grossly indecent; it is also dangerous; for, if they are permitted to express approbation, they are, by parity of reason, allowed expressions of dissent, and they may hiss as well as clap; which it is said they have sometimes done: this would be to overrule the debate and influence the deliberations.
Another circumstance is the want of order among themselves. More than once to-day there were a hundred members on their legs at a time, and Monsieur Bailly* absolutely without power to keep order.
[1] The presiding officer
“What Is the Third Estate?”
Abbe Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes
(1789)
What is necessary that a nation should subsist and prosper? Individual effort and public functions.
All individual efforts may be included in four classes: 1. Since the earth and the waters furnish crude products for the needs of man, the first class, in logical sequence, will be that of all families which devote themselves to agricultural labor. 2. Between the first sale of products and their consumption or use, a new manipulation, more or less repeated, adds to these products a second value more or less composite. In this manner human industry succeeds in perfecting the gifts of nature, and the crude product increases two-fold, ten-fold, one hundred-fold in value. Such are the efforts of the second class. 3. Between production and consumption, as well as between the various stages of production, a group of intermediary agents establish themselves, useful both to producers and consumers; these are the merchants and brokers: the brokers who, comparing incessantly the demands of time and place, speculate upon the profit of retention and transportation; merchants who are charged with distribution, in the last analysis, either at wholesale or at retail. This species of utility characterizes the third class. 4. Outside of these three classes of productive and useful citizens, who are occupied with real objects of consumption and use, there is also need in a society of a series of efforts and pains, whose objects are directly useful or agreeable to the individual. This fourth class embraces all those who stand between the most distinguished and liberal professions and the less esteemed services of domestics.
Such are the efforts which sustain society. Who puts them forth? The Third Estate.
Public functions may be classified equally well, in the present state of affairs, under four recognized heads; the sword, the robe, the church and the administration. It would be superfluous to take them up one by one, for the purpose of showing that everywhere the Third Estate attends to nineteen-twentieths of them, with this distinction; that it is laden with all that which is really painful, with all the burdens which the privileged classes refuse to carry. Do we give the Third Estate credit for this? That this might come about, it would be necessary that the Third Estate should refuse to fill these places, or that it should be less ready to exercise their functions. The facts are well known. Meanwhile they have dared to impose a prohibition upon the order of the Third Estate. They have said to it: “Whatever may be your services, whatever may be your abilities, you shall go thus far; you may not pass beyond!” Certain rare exceptions, properly regarded, are but a mockery, and the terms which are indulged in on such occasions, one insult the more.
If this exclusion is a social crime against the Third Estate; if it is a veritable act of hostility, could it perhaps be said that it is useful to the public weal? Alas! who is ignorant of the effects of monopoly? If it discourages those whom it rejects, is it not well known that it tends to render less able those whom it favors? Is it not understood that every employment from which free competition is removed, becomes dearer and less effective?
In setting aside any function whatsoever to serve as an appanage for a distinct class among citizens, is it not to be observed that it is no longer the man alone who does the work that it is necessary to reward, but all the unemployed members of that same caste, and also the entire families of those who are employed as well as those who are not? Is it not to be remarked that since the government has become the patrimony of a particular class, it has been distended beyond all measure; places have been created, not on account of the necessities of the governed, but in the interests of the governing, etc., etc.? Has not attention been called to the fact that this order of things, which is basely and–I even presume to say–beastly respectable with us, when we find it in reading the History of Ancient Egypt or the accounts of Voyages to the Indies,[1] is despicable, monstrous, destructive of all industry, the enemy of social progress; above all degrading to the human race in general, and particularly intolerable to Europeans, etc., etc.? But I must leave these considerations, which, if they increase the importance of the subject and throw light upon it, perhaps, along with the new light, slacken our progress.
It suffices here to have made it clear that the pretended utility of a privileged order for the public service is nothing more than a chimera; that with it all that which is burdensome in this service is performed by the Third Estate; that without it the superior places would be infinitely better filled; that they naturally ought to be the lot and the recompense of ability and recognized services, and that if privileged persons have come to usurp all the lucrative and honorable posts, it is a hateful injustice to the rank and file of citizens and at the same time a treason to the public weal.
Who then shall dare to say that the Third Estate has not within itself all that is necessary for the information of a complete nation? It is the strong and robust man who has one arm still shackled. If the privileged order should be abolished, the nation would be nothing less, but something more. Therefore, what is the Third Estate? Everything; but an everything shackled and oppressed. What would it be without the privileged order? Everything, but an everything free and flourishing. Nothing can succeed without it, everything would be infinitely better without the others.
It is not sufficient to show that privileged persons, far from being useful to the nation, cannot but enfeeble and injure it; it is necessary to prove further that the noble order does not enter at all into the social organization; that it may indeed be a burden upon the nation, but that it cannot of itself constitute a nation.
In the first place, it is not possible in the number of all the elementary parts of a nation to find a place for thecaste of nobles. I know that there are individuals in great number whom infirmities, incapacity, incurable laziness, or the weight of bad habits render strangers to the labors of society. The exception and the abuse are everywhere found beside the rule. But it will be admitted that the less there are of these abuses, the better it will be for the State. The worst possible arrangement of all would be where not alone isolated individuals, but a whole class of citizens should take pride in remaining motionless in the midst of the general movement, and should consume the best part of the product without bearing any part in its production. Such a class is surely estranged to the nation by its indolence.
The noble order is not less estranged from the generality of us by its civil and political prerogatives.
What is a nation? A body of associates, living under a common law, and represented by the same legislature, etc.
Is it not evident that the noble order has privileges and expenditures which it dares to call its rights, but which are apart from the rights of the great body of citizens? It departs there from the common order, from the common law. So its civil rights make of it an isolated people in the midst of the great nation. This is trulyimperium in imperio [a state within the state].
In regard to its political rights, these also it exercises apart. It has its special representatives, which are not charged with securing the interests of the people. The body of its deputies sit apart; and when it is assembled in the same hall with the deputies of simple citizens, it is nonetheless true that its representation is essentially distinct and separate: it is a stranger to the nation, in the first place, by its origin, since its commission is not derived from the people; then by its object, which consists of defending not the general, but the particular interest.
The Third Estate embraces then all that which belongs to the nation; and all that which is not the Third Estate, cannot be regarded as being of the nation. What is the Third Estate? It is the whole.
[1] The reference here is to a widely read book of the time describing the caste system in India.
The Taking of the Bastille and Its Aftermath: An English Perspective
Edward Rigby
(1789)
July 14. A Canadian Frenchman, whom we found in the crowd and who spoke good English, was the first who intimated to us that it had been resolved to attack the Bastille. We smiled at the gentleman, and suggested the improbability of undisciplined citizens taking a citadel which had held out against the most experienced troops in Europe; little thinking it would be actually in the hands of the people before night. From the commencement of the struggle on Sunday evening there had been scarcely any time in which the firing of guns had not been heard in all quarters of the city, and, as this was principally produced by exercising the citizens in the use of the musket, in trying cannon, etc., it excited, except at first, but little alarm. Another sound equally incessant was produced by the ringing of bells to call together the inhabitants in different parts of the city. These joint sounds being constantly iterated, the additional noise produced by the attack on the Bastille was so little distinguished that I doubt not it had begun a considerable time, and even been completed, before it was known to many thousands of the inhabitants as well as to ourselves.
We ran to the end of the Rue St. Honore. We here soon perceived an immense crowd proceeding towards the Palais Royal with acceleration of an extraordinary kind, but which sufficiently indicated a joyful event, and, as it approached we saw a flag, some large keys, and a paper elevated on a pole above the crowd, in which was inscribed “La Bastille est prise et les portes sont ouvertes.” ["The Bastille is taken and the gates are open."] The intelligence of this extraordinary event thus communicated, produced an impression upon the crowd really indescribable. Asudden burst of the most frantic joy instantaneously took place; every possible mode in which the most rapturous feelings of joy could be expressed, were everywhere exhibited. Shouts and shrieks, leaping and embracing, laughter and tears, every sound and every gesture, including even what approached to nervous and hysterical affection, manifested, among the promiscuous crowd, such an instantaneous and unanimous emotion of extreme gladness as I should suppose was never before experienced by human beings. …
The crowd passed on to the Palais Royal, and in a few minutes another succeeded. Its approach was also announced by loud and triumphant acclamations, but, as it came nearer, we soon perceived a different character, as though bearing additional testimony to the fact reported by the first crowd, the impression by it on the people was of a very different kind. Adeep and hollow murmur at once pervaded them, their countenances expressing amazement mingled with alarm. We could not at first explain these circumstances; but as we pressed more to the centre of the crowd we suddenly partook of the general sensation, for we then, and not till then, perceived two bloody heads raised on pikes, which were said to be the heads of the Marquis de Launay, Governor of the Bastille, and of Monsieur Flesselles, Prevot des Marchands. It was a chilling and a horrid sight! An idea of savageness and ferocity was impressed on the spectators, and instantly checked those emotions of joy which had before prevailed. Many others, as well as ourselves, shocked and disgusted at this scene, retired immediately from the streets. …
The night approached; the crowd without continued agitated. Reports of a meditated attack upon the city that night by a formidable army under the command of the Count d’Artois and the Marechal Broglie were in circulation, and gained such credit as to induce the inhabitants to take measures for opposing them. Trees were cut down and thrown across the principal approaches to the city; the streets were impaved, and the stones carried to the tops of houses which fronted the streets through which the troops might pass (for the fate of Pyrrhus was not unknown to the French) and the windows in most parts of the city were illuminated. The night passed with various indications of alarm; guns were firing continually; the tocsin sounded unceasingly; groups of agitated citizens passed hastily along, and parties of the Milice Bourgeoise[citizens' militia] (for such was the name already assumed by those who had taken arms the day before) paraded the streets. …
I went (July 15) and was led by the sound of an approaching crowd towards the end of the Rue St. Honore, and there I witnessed a most affecting spectacle. The Bastille had been scarcely entered and the opposition subdued, when an eager search began to find out and liberate every unhappy captive immured within its walls. Two wretched victims of the detestable tyranny of the old Government had just been discovered and taken from some of the most obscure dungeons of this horrid castle, and were at this time conducted by the crowd to the Palais Royal. One of these was a little feeble old man, I could not learn his history; he exhibited an appearance of childishness and fatuity; he tottered as he walked, and his countenance exhibited little more than the smile of an idiot. … The other was a tall and rather robust old man; his countenance and whole figure interesting in the highest degree; he walked upright, with a firm and steady gait; his hands were folded and turned upwards, he looked but little at the crowd; the character of his face seemed a mixture of surprise and alarm, for he knew not whither they were leading him, he knew not what fate awaited him; his face was directed towards the sky, but his eyes were but little open. … He had a remarkably high forehead, which, with the crown of his head, was completely bald; but he had a very long beard, and on the back of his head the hair was unusually abundant. … His dress was an old greasy reddish tunic; the colour and the form of the garb were probably some indication of what his rank had been; for we afterwards learned that he was a Count d’Auche, that he had been a major of cavalry, and a young man of some talent, and that the offence for which he had sustained this long imprisonment had been his having written a pamphlet against the Jesuits. Every one who witnessed this scene probably felt as I did, an emotion which partook of horror and detestation of the Government which could so obdurately as well as unjustly expose human beings to such sufferings; and of pity for the miserable individuals before us. …
It had been reported that the King was to come to Paris on the Thursday (July 16), and great crowds filled the streets through which it was expected he would pass: but his coming did not take place till the Friday (July 17). We were very desirous of witnessing the spectacle of the monarch thus, I might almost say, led captive. The spectacle was very interesting, though not from the artificial circumstances which have usually given distinction to royal processions. The impression made on the spectator was not the effect of any adventitious splendour of costly robes or glittering ornaments–the appearance of the King was simple, if not humble; the man was no longer concealed in the dazzling radiance of the sovereign. … The streets were lined with the armed bourgeois, three deep–forming a line, as we were assured, of several miles extent. The procession began to pass the place where we were at a quarter past three. The first who appeared were the city officers and the police guards; some women followed them, carrying green branches of trees which were fancifully decorated; then more officers; then the Prevot des Marchands and different members of the city magistracy. Many of the armed bourgeois followed on horseback; then some of the King’s officers, some on horseback and some on foot; then followed the whole body of the Etats Generaux [Estates General] on foot, the noblesse, clergy, and Tiers-Etats [Third Estate], each in their peculiar dresses. That of the noblesse was very beautiful; they wore a peculiar kind of hat with large white feathers, and many of them were tall, elegant young men. The clergy, especially the bishops and some of the higher orders, were most superbly dressed; many of them in lawn dresses, with pink scarfs and massive crosses of gold hanging before them. The dress of the Tiers-Etats was very ordinary, even worse than that of the inferior order of gownsmen at the English universities. More of the King’s officers followed; then the King in a large plain coach with eight horses. After this more bourgeois; then another coach and eight horses with other officers of state; than an immense number of the bourgeois, there having been, it was said, two hundred thousand of them in arms. The countenance of the King was little marked with sensibility, and his general appearance by no means indicated alarm. He was accustomed to throw his head very much back on his shoulders, which, by obliging him to look upwards, gave a kind of stupid character to his countenance by increasing the apparent breadth of his face, by preventing that variation of expression which is produced by looking about. He received neither marks of applause nor insult from the populace, unless their silence could be construed into a negative sort of disrespect. Nor were any insults shown to the noblesse or clergy, except in the instance of the Archbishop of Paris, a very tall thin man. He was very much hissed, the popular clamour having been excited against him by a story circulated of his having encouraged the King to use strong measures against the people, and of his attempting to make an impression on the people by a superstitious exposure of a crucifix. He looked a good deal agitated, and whether he had a leaden eye or not I know not, but it certainly loved the ground. The warm and enthusiastic applause of the people was reserved for the Tiers-Etat. … Vivent les Tiers-Etats! Vive la Liberte! ["Long live the Third Estate! Long live liberty!] were loudly iterated as they passed. …
On the Saturday (July 18) we visited more of the public places, but the most interesting object, and which attracted the greatest number of spectators, was the Bastille. We found two hundred workmen busily employed in the destruction of this castle of despotism. We saw the battlements tumble down amidst the applauding shouts of the people. I observed a number of artists taking drawings of what from this time was to have no existence but on paper. …
And this reminds me of our having a second time seen the other prisoner, the feeble old man. He was placed conspicuously at a window opposite the house where we saw the King pass, and at that time he was brought forward and made to wave his hat, having a three coloured cockade on it.
Popular Revolution: The Women of Paris March on Versailles
Joseph Weber et al.
(1789)
The March to Versailles
(a) On Sunday, October 4, the people resorted to acts of violence in the public promenades against officers of the army and other individuals who were pointed out to them as aristocrats. There was in Paris an extreme agitation. The symptoms of a violent insurrection were alarmingly manifest in the evening. Monday, the fifth, as early as morning, one saw women, a species of furies, running the streets, crying out that there was no bread at the baker’s. They were soon joined by a considerable number of men in the Place de l’Hotel de Ville. Their first operation was to hang on a lamp-post a baker accused of having sold bread under weight. This man was saved by M. De Gouvion, a major of the national guard. These maniacs wanted to get into the town hall; there they turned the papers in some of the offices topsy-turvy, threatening to set fire to them; but they were prevented from executing their project. They loaded the most atrocious insults on MM. Bailly, de La Fayette, and the members of the commune; and this circumstance proves better than any amount of reasoning that the authorities who then governed Paris had no connection with the insurgents who directed this disorder.
(b) [Maillard] was occupied with a crowd of women … he took away their torches, and nearly lost his life in thus opposing their project. He told them that they could go in a deputation to the commune to demand justice and present their situation, which was that all demanded bread. But they replied that the commune was made up of bad citizens, all deserving to be hanged to the lamp-post, MM. Bailly and La Fayette first of all … these women would not listen to reason, and after having put in ruin the Hotel de Ville, they wanted to go to the National Assembly to find out what had been decreed previous to this day of the fifth of October. … [Maillard secured] a drum at the door of the Hotel de Ville, where the women had already assembled in great numbers. Detachments of them departed for various districts to recruit other women, to whom they gave rendezvous at the Place Louis XV. Maillard saw several men place themselves at their head, and make to them harangues calculated to excite sedition … they took the route to Versailles, having before them eight or ten drummers. The women at that time might have numbered six or seven thousand.
At Versailles
(c) They [the mob of women] consented to do what he [Maillard] wished. In consequence the cannons were placed behind them and the said women were invited to sing Vive Henri IV! while entering Versailles and to cry “Long live the King!” This they ceaselessly did in the midst of the people of the city, who awaited them, crying, “Long live our Parisiennes!” They arrived at the door of the National Assembly. …
After some debating among these women, fifteen were found to enter with him to the bar of the National Assembly. … He asked the president, M. Mounier, for permission to speak. This being accorded him, he said that two or three persons whom they had encountered on the way, and who were riding in a carriage from the court, had told him that an abbe attached to the Assembly had given a miller two hundred livres to stop making flour, and had promised him a like sum every week. The National Assembly vigorously demanded his name, but Maillard was unable to give it. … The Assembly still persisting in its desire to know the name of the man denounced, M. de Robespierre, deputy from Artois, took the floor and said that … the Abbe Gregoire could throw some light on the subject. … Maillard then asked for the floor and said it was also essential that they end the disorder and uncertainty which had spread through the capital upon the arrival of the regiment of Flanders in Versailles. This regiment should be sent away because the citizens feared that they would start a revolution. M. Mounier replied that they would inform the king of this in the evening when he returned from the hunt, which was where he was said to be.
(d) Maillard and the women who accompanied him appeared to be drunk. “Where is our Comte de Mirabeau?” these women asked repeatedly. “We want to see our Comte de Mirabeau!” Some of them showed a piece of black and moldy bread and added, “We will make the Austrian [Marie Antoinette] swallow it and we will cut her throat.” The number of women gradually increased. They entered pell-mell into the seats of the deputies and carried on loud conversations with those in the tribunes. Some surrounded the desk of the secretaries, others the chair of the president. They obliged the president and several of the deputies to receive their grimy and unpleasant kisses.
(e) After the return of the king to the palace, several gardes du corps [members of the palace guard] and other persons in service at the court, who had been searching for the king in all directions, found themselves in the grand avenue in the midst of these brigands of both sexes, and were assailed with insults and musket shots. Several balls fired at them struck the walls of the hall of the National Assembly.
The insults and indignities, together with the musket shots fired by the first column of brigands, had given just cause for uneasiness at the court. The king’s guard, the regiment of Flanders, and the national guard of Versailles were ordered to take to arms. The guards at the gate closed the grills, and the king’s guards, stationed outside, received orders not to touch their sabers or pistols, and to avoid everything that might irritate the people. The gardes du corps conformed to this order with such resignation that they could have been peaceably massacred one after the other if only their enemies had dared to attempt it.
(f) A deputation of eight women was introduced into the palace. They were conducted to M. de Saint-Priest, the minister of Paris, of whom they demanded bread. “When you had only one king,” dryly replied Saint-Priest, “you did not lack for bread; now that you have twelve hundred, go ask them for it.” The women were then admitted to the council room; they repeated to the king the request they had proffered to M. de Saint-Priest. “You should know my benevolence,” replied the king. “I am going to order that all the bread in Versailles be brought and given to you.” This response appeared to satisfy these women. Most of them were there in good faith, knowing nothing of the projects of the conspirators. Forcibly dragged to Versailles, they had had it dinned into their ears that the people were dying of hunger and that the only means of ending the famine was to address themselves to the king and the National Assembly. They believed they were fulfilling the purpose of their expedition in obtaining a decree on sustenance from the Assembly, and having it sanctioned by the king. These women, enchanted with the way they had been received, left the council room, crying, “Long live the King! Long live the gardes du corps! “
(g) The people, who had given quarter to the gardes du corps, did not, for all that, lose sight of the principal object of their enterprise. They demanded, with shrieks, that the king come to Paris; they said that if the royal family would come to Paris to live there would be no lack of provisions. M. de La Fayette seconded this desire with all his might in the council which was then held in the presence of Their Majesties. Finally, the king, fatigued, solicited, and pressed by all, gave his word that he would depart at midday. This promise flew from mouth to mouth; the acclamations of the people and a fusillade of musketry were the results.
His Majesty appeared then for the second time on the balcony to confirm to the people the promise he had just given to M. de La Fayette. At this second appearance, the joy of the populace was unrestrained. Avoice demanded “the queen on the balcony.” This princess, who was never greater nor more magnanimous than at moments when danger was most imminent, unhesitatingly presented herself on the balcony, holding M. le Dauphin by one hand and Madame Royale by the other. At that a voice cried out, “No children!” The queen, by a backward movement of her arms, pushed the children back into the room, and remained alone on the balcony, folding her hands on her breast, with a countenance showing calmness, nobility, and dignity impossible to describe, and seemed thus to wait for death. This act of resignation astonished the assassins so much and inspired so much admiration in the coarse people that a general clapping of hands and cries of “Bravo! Long live the queen!” repeated on all sides, disconcerted the malevolent. I saw, however, one of these madmen aim at the queen, and his neighbor knock down the barrel of the musket with a blow of his hand, nearly massacring this brigand who was doubtless one of those who had made the irruption of the morning.
The Return to Paris
(h) One saw first the mass of the Parisian troops file by. Each soldier carried a loaf on the end of his bayonet. Then came the fishwives, drunk with fury, joy and wine, holding branches of trees ornamented with ribbons, sitting astride the cannon, mounted on the horses of the gardes du corps, and wearing their hats. Some disported cuirasses before and behind, and others were armed with sabers and muskets. They were accompanied by the multitude of brigands and Paris laborers. … They halted from time to time to fire new salvos, while the fishwives descended from their horses and cannon to march around the carriage of the king. They embraced the soldiers and roared out songs to the refrain of “Here is the baker, the baker’s wife, and the baker’s little boy!” The horror of a cold, somber, rainy day; the infamous militia splattering through the mud; the harpies, monsters with human faces; the captive monarch and his family ignominiously dragged along surrounded by guards; all formed such a frightful spectacle, such a mixture of shame and anguish, that to this very day I cannot think of it without my senses being completely overwhelmed.
At times the queen was in a state of passive endurance difficult to describe. Her son was on her knees; he suffered hunger and asked for food. Unable to fulfill his desires, Marie Antoinette pressed him to her heart, weeping. She exhorted him to suffer in silence. The young prince became resigned. …
(i) As soon as the royal family entered the Hotel de Ville, the king had to listen to two harangues by M. Bailly, and to denunciations against his ministers. Then an official report of the sitting was drawn up and publicly read by M. Bailly. But as it cited some words of the king’s discourse inexactly, the queen interrupted him with the presence of mind which was one of the fine traits of her character. He had forgotten one of the most touching parts of the discourse of the king. The queen recalled to him gracefully that His Majesty had said, “I have relied upon the attachment and fidelity of my people, and have placed myself in the midst of my subjects with complete confidence.” …
After this the family re-entered the carriage in the midst of acclamations and betook themselves, with a part of the national guard, to the palace of the Tuileries. Monsieur and Madame went to the Luxembourg.
(j) The Comte de Mirabeau announced [to the Assembly] that the king was about to depart for Paris. In eagerness to hold their sessions in the midst of the tumult of the capital, they declared themselves inseparable from the monarch, and carried to him this declaration as a proof of their zeal for his interests. In reality, it was an express approbation of the violation of his liberty.
The Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen
National Assembly of France
(1789)
The representatives of the French people, organized as a National Assembly, believing that the ignorance, neglect, or contempt of the rights of man are the sole cause of public calamities and of the corruption of governments, have determined to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of man, in order that this declaration, being constantly before all the members of the social body, shall remind them continually of their rights and duties; in order that the acts of the legislative power, as well as those of the executive power, may be compared at any moment with the objects and purposes of all political institutions and may thus be more respected; and, lastly, in order that the grievances of the citizens, based hereafter upon simple and incontestable principles, shall tend to the maintenance of the constitution and redound to the happiness of all. Therefore the National Assembly recognizes and proclaims, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man and of the citizen:
ARTICLE 1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.
2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.
3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.
4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.
5. Law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society. Nothing may be prevented which is not forbidden by law, and no one may be forced to do anything not provided for by law.
6. Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its formation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations, according to their abilities, and without distinction except that of their virtues and talents.
7. No person shall be accused, arrested, or imprisoned except in the cases and according to the forms prescribed by law. Any one soliciting, transmitting, executing, or causing to be executed, any arbitrary order, shall be punished. But any citizen summoned or arrested in virtue of the law shall submit without delay, as resistance constitutes an offense.
8. The law shall provide for such punishments only as are strictly and obviously necessary, and no one shall suffer punishment except it be legally inflicted in virtue of a law passed and promulgated before the commission of the offense.
9. As all persons are held innocent until they shall have been declared guilty, if arrest shall be deemed indispensable, all harshness not essential to the securing of the prisoner’s person shall be severely repressed by law.
10. No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.
11. The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.
12. The security of the rights of man and of the citizen requires public military forces. These forces are, therefore, established for the good of all and not for the personal advantage of those to whom they shall be intrusted.
13. A common contribution is essential for the maintenance of the public forces and for the cost of administration. This should be equitably distributed among all the citizens in proportion to their means.
14. All the citizens have a right to decide, either personally or by their representatives, as to the necessity of the public contribution; to grant this freely; to know to what uses it is put; and to fix the proportion, the mode of assessment and of collection and the duration of the taxes.
15. Society has the right to require of every public agent an account of his administration.
16. A society in which the observance of the law is not assured, nor the separation of powers defined, has no constitution at all.
17. Since property is an inviolable and sacred right, no one shall be deprived thereof except where public necessity, legally determined, shall clearly demand it, and then only on condition that the owner shall have been previously and equitably indemnified.
Revolutionary Paris One Year After 1789
William Wellesley-Pole, Third Earl of Mornington
(1790)
You are well able to judge how strange the contrast must be between Paris governed, and Paris governing; but it is so strange in so many ways, that I own I find great difficulty in attempting to answer your question of what strikes me most, for I am quite perplexed by the number and variety of ridiculous and absurd things, which I hear and see everywhere, and every day. The common people appear to me to be exactly as gay as I remember them, though it is undoubtedly true that the greater part of them is starving for want of employment, especially the tradesmen; and notwithstanding they all talk the highest language in favour of the Revolution, they laugh at the National Assembly without scruple, and say they had rather have Aristocratical Louis, than Democratical Assignats. The streets are crowded with newsmen and hawkers, crying about libels of all sorts from morning till night, exactly in the manner you must have observed in Dublin; nothing is too indecent or abusive. There being an end of the police, it is not possible to imagine any kind of bawdy print that is not publicly stuck up in the Palais Royal, and on the Boulevards: the Attorney General’s blood would boil at the sight of such audacious bawdery. The object seems to be everywhere to mark a contempt for all former regulations. At the spectacle, they have introduced monks and nuns and crucifixes on the stage; and the actors are violently applauded, merely for wearing these forbidden garments. The parterre is more riotous than twenty English upper galleries put together; a few nights ago Richard Coeur de Lion was acted, and a woman of fashion was absolutely forced to leave the house, because she clapped with too much violence while the famous song of O Richard, O mon roi! was singing; a hundred fellows started up together roaring a bas la femme en eventail blanc ["down with the woman with the white fan": Marie Antoinette], and would not suffer the actors to proceed till this Aristocrate left the house. … Nothing can be more tiresome than all their new plays and operas; they are a heap of hackneyed public sentiments on general topics of the rights of men and duties of Kings, just like Sheridan’s grand paragraphs in the Morning Post [a London newspaper]: these are applauded to the skies. I do not know whether you have heard that many of the Petits Maitres [young gentlemen], in order to show their attachment to the Democracy, have sacrificed their curls, toupees, and queues: [i.e., their powdered wigs]; some of them go about with cropped locks like English farmers without any powder, and others wear little black scratch wigs, both these fashions are called Tetes a la Romaine ["Roman heads"], which is a comical name for such folly. I must not forget that I have seen several wear gold earrings with their black scratches. … I understand from everybody whom I have seen that nothing can be more changed than the whole of their manners. The Democrates out of the Assembly are very few indeed among the people of any distinction, and theAristocrates are melancholy and miserable to the last degree; this makes the society at Paris very gloomy; the number of deserted houses is immense, and if it were not for the Deputies, the Ambassadors, and some refugees from Brussels, there would be scarcely a gentleman’s coach to be seen in the streets. You have certainly been informed of the principles of the two clubs, the Enragees, whose name is easily understood, and the Quatre Vingt Neuf, the latter is something like our armed neutrality … ; for this club acting together, can give a majority either to the cote gauche or droite[1] in the Assembly. … I have never been at this club of 1789, although they admit English members of Parliament, because I understand nothing is done publicly excepting the recital of speeches and motions intended for the Assembly; and with these I have been sufficiently tired at the Assembly itself. I have been there several times, and it is not possible to imagine so strange a scene; the confusion at times surpasses all that ever has been known since government appeared in the world. … They have no regular forms of debate on ordinary business; some speak from their seats, some from the floor, some from the table, and some from the tribunes or desks; … they speak without preparation, and I thought many of them acquitted themselves well enough in that way, where only a few sentences were to be delivered; but on these occasions the riot is so great that it is very difficult to collect what is said. I am certain that I have seen above a hundred in the act of addressing the Assembly together, all persisting to speak, and as many more replying in different parts of the House, sentence by sentence; then the President claps his hands on both ears and roars order, as if he was calling a coach; sometimes he is quite driven to despair; he beats his table, his breast; … wringing his hands is quite a common action, and I really believe he swears. … At last he seizes a favourable moment of quiet, either to put the question or to name who ought to speak; then five hundred reclamations all at once renew the confusion, which seldom ends till the performers are completely hoarse, and obliged to give way to a fresh set. On great occasions the speakers deliver their speeches from the tribune, and these are always written speeches, or so generally, that I believe Mirabeau and Maury and Barnave are the only exceptions; and even these often read their speeches. Nothing can be more fatiguing than these readings, which entirely destroy all the spirit and interest of debate. … I heard Mirabeau and Maury both speak a few sentences in the midst of one of the riots I have mentioned, and I preferred Maury, whose manner is bold and unaffected, and his voice very fine; Mirabeau appeared to me to be full of affectation, and he has a bad voice, but he is the most admired speaker. There are four galleries which contain above twice the number admitted into the gallery in England, and here a most extraordinary scene is exhibited; for the galleries approve and disapprove by groaning and clapping, exactly as if the whole was a spectacle. … While the orators are reading their speeches, the Assembly frequently shows a most singular degree of patience such as I am certain the English House of Commons is not capable of. … Dulness and monotony are borne in perfect silence; and during such speeches, the President generally amuses himself with reading some pamphlets or newspapers. … I forgot to mention one circumstance that had a most comical effect. The Huissiers ["sergeants at arms"] of the Assembly walk up and down the room during times of great tumult, bellowing silence as loud as they can hollow, and endeavouring to persuade the disorderly orators to sit down.
I went to Court this morning at the Tuilleries, and a most gloomy Court it was; many of the young people of the first fashion and rank wear mourning always for economy. … The King seemed well, but I thought his manner evidently humbled since I was introduced to him before; he now bows to everybody, which was not a Bourbon fashion before the Revolution. The Queen looked very ill; the Dauphin was with her, and she appeared anxious to shew him. They say here that he is her shield; she never stirs out without him.
[1] The left or the right. The custom of grouping the more liberal or radical members on the left and the more conservative ones on the right, from which comes the designation of “left wing” or “right wing” in modern politics, dates from the French Revolution.
The Political Situation in Paris
George Hammond
(1791)
There is one point upon which all parties seem to be agreed–that the restoration of the ancient form of government is become totally impracticable, from any quarter or by any means whatsoever. The three descriptions of persons in the Kingdom, the most interested in the event, are the Sovereign, the Nobility, and the Clergy; but it is evident that their exertions alone, unaided by foreign Powers, are absolutely inadequate to the accomplishment of it. That loyalty and attachment to their Sovereign, which were formerly the characteristics of this nation, exist no longer. The mental imbecility of the present King, and the profligacy of some branches of the royal family, have implanted contempt and aversion so deeply in the bulk of the people that his present melancholy state of captivity and humiliation, so far from creating a spirit of indignation against those who have usurped his authority, has afforded a subject of ridicule and triumph to a great majority of the nation. In regard to the nobility, their dispersion, their want of concert, of pecuniary resources and of a leader, but chiefly the circumstances of their estates being at the mercy of their enemies, all concur to prevent them from forming or carrying into execution any enterprize of much magnitude and moment. The respect that used to be paid to the character and functions of the clergy has long been dwindling away, and the influence which that body derived from their great territorial possessions, now act[s] as an instrument against them. Not only inasmuch as their estates have been wrested from them, but also as the individuals who have purchased those estates under the national faith are now materially interested in protecting them, by every means, against any invasion of their newly acquired rights, and the possibility of their ever reverting to their original possessors. With respect to the prospect of any external interference, you, Sir, are better able to judge of that than I can be. I am, however, firmly persuaded that no serious apprehensions on that head are entertained here. The ruling party, indeed, do not rely on the three millions of men (now trained to arms) alone–they assert they have a more effectual pledge for the non-intervention of foreign Powers, in possessing the persons of the King, and of such of the Aristocratical party as have not chosen to expatriate themselves, both of whom they would not scruple to deliver up to the fury of an exasperated populace on the first appearance of a foreign invasion. …
There is no assertion of Mr. [Edmund] Burke’s more true than this–that the French have shown themselves much more skilful in destroying than in erecting. As I am convinced that no man in this country, even at this moment, has any clear notion of the new order of things that is to arise in the place of the old, it is therefore needless to enter into any discussion of the numerous speculative theories that now swarm in the nation, which have no other foundation than the heated imaginations of their fabricators.
No party in the National Assembly seems to be actuated by an adherence to a regular well-defined system, which is, I think, pretty clearly proved by the contradictory decrees that are every day issuing out to answer the emergency of the moment. And even if there was a system, there does not appear to be any man of abilities so transcendent, or of patriotism so unsuspected, as to be capable of giving direction and energy to the movements of any compact concentrated body of individuals. This is a circumstance which separates the French Revolution from every preceding one in any other country, and renders it impossible to discern a clue to the present and future operations of that body, in whom all authority is at present centered. …
In the meantime they avoid rendering themselves obnoxious and unpopular, by throwing the execution of everything that is either odious or absurd in their own numerous decrees on the King and his ministers. They have stripped royalty of everything that could make it either respectable or amiable, and by perpetually separating the function from the person of the monarch, they insensibly confound him in the general mass of citizens. Indeed their affectation is carried to so ridiculous a pitch, that I am rather surprised that we do not hear of the pouvoir executif’s [executive power] looking out of the window, or going to bed to its wife.
In the midst of all this wretched scene of political confusion, it is strongly suspected that several members of the National Assembly have enriched themselves by stock-jobbing and other arts, and Mirabeau in particular. That arch-patriot is now living in great magnificence, and indulges his ruling passion for buying up valuable books with unexampled profusion.
As you may have been perhaps surprised that the late discussion of the question of Regency should have appeared to be a matter of such urgency, I think it necessary to remark that the King’s health, not from extreme sensibility, but from want of exercise, and from indulging too freely in the pleasures of the table, has suffered so much that it is not expected his Majesty can survive many years.
I must not omit to mention two circumstances that have struck me greatly in my present residence in this capital–the tranquillity which now appears to subsist in it, and the little interruption that the newly-created paper money has had to encounter in its circulation. Excepting a greater number of men in military uniforms parading the streets, all the common occupations of life proceed as smoothly and regularly as if no event of consequence had occurred, and the public amusements are followed with as much avidity as in the most quiet and flourishing periods of the monarchy. In regard to the Assignats, although they are now at a discount of 7 per cent and are expected to fall lower, no person seems to murmur at taking them in payment, or to express any doubts of their validity.
A French Woman Broadens the Revolution: Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen
Olympe de Gouges
(1791)
The mothers, daughters, and sisters, representatives of the nation, demand to be constituted a national assembly. Considering that ignorance, disregard of or contempt for the rights of women are the only causes of public misfortune and of governmental corruption, they have resolved to set forth in a solemn declaration, the natural, inalienable and sacred rights of woman. …
1. Woman is born free and remains equal in rights to man. …
3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation, which is none other than the union of Woman and Man. …
4. Liberty and Justice consist of rendering to persons those things that belong to them; thus, the exercise of woman’s natural rights is limited only by the perpetual tyranny with which man opposes her; these limits must be changed according to the laws of nature and reason. …
10. No one should be punished for their opinions. Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she should likewise have the right to speak in public, provided that her demonstrations do not disrupt public order as established by law.
Newspaper Reportage on Parisian Reaction to the King’s Flight to Varennes
Louis-Marie Prudhomme
(1791)
It was not until ten o’clock in the morning that the municipal government announced, by firing a cannon thrice, the unexpected event of the day. But for three hours the news had already been passing from mouth to mouth and was circulating in all quarters of the city. During these three hours many outrages might have been committed. The king had gone. This news produced a moment of anxiety, and everybody ran in a crowd to the palace of the Tuileries to see if it were true; but every one turned almost immediately to the hall where the National Assembly met, declaring that their king was in there and that Louis XVI might go where he pleased.
Then the people became curious to visit the apartments vacated by the royal family; they traversed them all, and we questioned the sentinels we found there, “Where, and how, could he have escaped? How could this fat royal person, who complained of the meanness of his lodging, manage to make himself invisible to the sentries,–he whose girth would stop up any passage?” The soldiers of the guard had nothing to say to this. We insisted: “This flight is not natural; your commanders must have been in the plot … for while you were at your post Louis XVI left his without your knowing it and yet passing close to you.” These reflections, which naturally suggested themselves, account for the reception which made Lafayette pale when he appeared in the Place de Greve and passed along the quays. He took refuge in the National Assembly, where he made some confessions that did little to restore him to popular favor.
Far from being “famished for a glimpse of the king,” the people proved, by the way in which they took the escape of Louis XVI, that they were sick of the throne and tired of paying for it. If they had known, moreover, that Louis XVI, in his message, which was just then being read in the National Assembly, complained “that he had not been able to find in the palace of the Tuileries the most simple conveniences of life,” the people might have been roused to some excess; but they knew their own strength and did not permit themselves any of those little exhibitions of vengeance which are natural to irritated weakness.
They contented themselves with making sport, in their own way, of royalty and of the man who was invested with it. The portrait of the king was taken down from its place of honor and hung on the door. A fruit woman took possession of Antoinette’s bed and used it to display her cherries, saying, “It’s the nation’s turn now to be comfortable.” A young girl refused to let them put the queen’s bonnet on her head and trampled on it with indignation and contempt. They had more respect for the dauphin’s study,–but we should blush to report the titles of the books which his mother had selected.
The streets and public squares offered a spectacle of another kind. The national force deployed itself everywhere in an imposing manner. The brave Santerre alone enrolled two thousand pikemen in this faubourg.These were not the “active” citizens and the royal bluecoats, that were enjoying the honors of the celebration. The woolen caps reappeared and eclipsed the bearskins. The women contested with the men the duty of guarding the city gates, saying, “It was the women who brought the king to Paris and the men who let him escape.” But do not boast too loudly, ladies; it was not much of a present, after all.
The prevailing spirit was apathy in regard to kings in general and contempt for Louis XVI in particular. This showed itself in the least details. On the Place de Greve the people broke up a bust of Louis XVI, which was illuminated by that celebrated lantern which had been a source of terror to the enemies of the Revolution. When will the people execute justice upon all these bronze kings, monuments of our idolatry? In the Rue St. Honore they forced a dealer to sacrifice a plaster head which somewhat resembled Louis XVI. In another shop they contented themselves with putting a paper band over his eyes. The words “king,” “queen,” “royal,” “Bourbon,” “Louis,” “court,” “Monsieur,” “the king’s brother,” were effaced wherever they were found on pictures or on the signs over shops and stores.
L’Ami du peuple (Friend of the People) denounces the Moderate Royalists
Jean-Paul Marat
(1791)
O credulous Parisians! can you be duped by these shameful deceits and cowardly impostures? See if their aim in massacring the patriots was not to annihilate your clubs! Even while the massacre was going on, the emissaries of Mottier [Lafayette] were running about the streets mixing with the groups of people and loudly accusing the fraternal societies and the club of the Cordeliers of causing the misfortunes. The same evening the club of the Cordeliers, wishing to come together, found the doors of their place of meeting nailed up. Two pieces of artillery barred the entrance to the Fraternal Society, and only those conscript fathers who were sold to the court were permitted to enter the Jacobin Club, by means of their deputy’s cards.
Not satisfied with annihilating the patriotic associations, these scoundrels violate the liberty of the press, annihilate the Declaration of Rights–the rights of nature. Cowardly citizens, can you hear this without trembling? They declare the oppressed, who, in order to escape their tyranny, would make a weapon of his despair and counsel the massacre of his oppressors, a disturber of the public peace. They declare every citizen a disturber of the public peace who cries, in an uprising, to the ferocious satellites to lower or lay down their arms, thus metamorphosing into crimes the very humanity of peaceful citizens, the cries of terror and natural self-defense.
Infamous legislators, vile scoundrels, monsters satiated with gold and blood, privileged brigands who traffic with the monarch, with our fortunes, our rights, our liberty, and our lives! You thought to strike terror into the hearts of patriotic writers and paralyze them with fright at the sight of the punishments you inflict. I flatter myself that they will not soften. As for The Friend of the People, you know that for a long time your decrees directed against the Declaration of Rights have been waste paper to him. Could he but rally at his call two thousand determined men to save the country, he would proceed at their head to tear out the heart of the infernal Mottier in the midst of his battalions of slaves. He would burn the monarch and his minions in his palace, and impale you on your seats and bury you in the burning ruins of your lair.
Royal Ambivalence: Louis XVI’s Secret Appeal to the Prussian King
Louis XVI
(1791)
Paris, December 3, 1791
My Brother:
I have learned through M. du Moustier of the interest which your Majesty has expressed not only in my person but also in the welfare of my kingdom. In giving me these proofs, the attitude of your Majesty has, in all cases where your interest might prove advantageous to my people, excited my lively appreciation. I confidently take advantage of it at this time when, in spite of the fact that I have accepted the new constitution, seditious leaders are openly exhibiting their purpose of entirely destroying the remnants of the monarchy. I have just addressed myself to the emperor, the empress of Russia, and to the kings of Spain and Sweden; I am suggesting to them the idea of a congress of the chief powers of Europe, supported by an armed force, as the best means of checking seditious parties, of establishing a more desirable order of things, and of preventing the evil which afflicts us from reaching the other states of Europe.
I trust that your Majesty will approve my ideas, and that you will maintain the most absolute secrecy about the proposition I am making to you. You will easily understand that the circumstances in which I find myself force me to observe the greatest caution. That is why no one but the baron of Breteuil is informed of my plans, and your Majesty may therefore communicate to him anything you wish. …
Your good brother,
Louis
An English Traveler Describes a New Paris in the Summer of 1792
Richard Twiss
(1792)
In every one of the towns between Calais and Paris a full-grown tree (generally a poplar) has been planted in the market place, with many of its boughs and leaves; these last being withered, it makes but a dismal appearance; on the top of this tree or pole is a red woollen or cotton night-cap, which is called the Cap of Liberty, with streamers about the pole, or red, blue and white ribbands. I saw several statues of saints, both within and without the churches (and in Paris likewise) with similar caps, and several crucifixes with the national cockade of ribbands tied to the left arm of the image on the cross, but not one with the cockade in its proper place; the reason of which I know not. …
The churches in Paris are not much frequented on the week-days, at present; I found a few old women on their knees in some of them, hearing mass; and, at the same time, at the other end of one of these churches commissaries were sitting and entering the names of volunteers for the army. The iron rails in the churches which part the choir from the nave, and also those which encompass chapels and tombs, are all ordered to be converted into heads for pikes. …
Hitherto cockades of silk had been worn, the aristocrats wore such as were of a paler blue and red than those worn by the democrats, and the former were even distinguished by their carriages, on which a cloud was painted upon the arms, which entirely obliterated them (of these I saw above thirty in the evening promenade in the Bois de Boulogne ), but on the 30th of July, every person was compelled by the people to wear a linen cockade, without any distinction in the red and blue colours. …
I went once to Versailles; there is hardly anything in the palace but the bare walls, a very few of the lookingglasses, tapestry, and large pictures remaining, as it has now been near two years uninhabited. I crossed the great canal on foot; there was not a drop of water in it….
I went several times to the National Assembly; the Tribunes, or Galleries (of which there are three) entered warmly, by applauses and by murmurs and hisses, into the affairs which were treated of. …
All the coats of arms which formerly decorated the gates of Hotels are taken away, and even seals are at present engraven with cyphers only. The Chevaliers de St. Louis still continue to wear the cross, or the ribband, at the buttonhole; all other orders of knighthood are abolished. No liveries are worn by servants, that badge of slavery is likewise abolished; and also all corporation companies, as well as every other monopolizing society, and there are no longer any Royal tobacco or salt shops. …
Books of all sorts are printed without any approbation or privilege. Many are exposed on stalls, which are very improper for the public eye. One of them was called the Private Life of the Queen, in two volumes, with obscene prints. The book itself is contemptible and disgusting, and might as well have been called, the Woman of Pleasure. Of books of this sort I saw above thirty, with plates. Another was a subject not fit even to be mentioned. I read a small pamphlet, entitled ” Le Christ-Roi, or a Parallel of the Sufferings of Louis XVI etc.” I can say nothing in favor of it. …
The common people are in general much better clothed than they were before the Revolution, which may be ascribed to their not being so grievously taxed as they were. … All those ornaments, which three years ago were worn of silver, are now of gold. All the women of lower class, even those who sit behind green-stalls, etc., wear gold earrings, with large drops, some of which cost two or three louis, and necklaces of the same. Many of the men wear plain gold earrings: those worn by officers and other gentlemen are usually as large as a half-crown piece. Even children of two years old have small gold drops in their ears. The general dress of the women is white linen and muslin gowns, large caps which cover all their hair, excepting just a small triangular piece over the forehead, pomatumed, or rather plaistered and powdered, without any hats; neither do they wear any stays, but only corsets (waistcoats or jumps). Tight lacing is not known here, nor yet high and narrow heeled shoes. Because many of the ladies cidevant of quality[1] have emigrated or ran away, and those which remain in Paris keep within doors, I saw no face that was painted, excepting on the stage. Most of the men wear coats made like great-coats, or in other words, long great-coats without any coat; this in fine weather and in the middle of summer made them appear to me like invalides. There is hardly any possibility of distinguishing the rank of either man or woman by their dress at present, or rather, there are no ranks to distinguish. The nation in general is much improved in cleanliness, and even in politeness. The French no longer look on every Englishman as a lord, but as their equal. There are no beggars to be seen about the streets in Paris, and when the chaise stopped for fresh horses, only two or three old and infirm people surrounded it and solicited charity, whereas formerly the beggars used to assemble in hundreds. I did not see a single pair of sabots(wooden-shoes) in France this time. The table of the peasants is also better supplied than it was before the revolution. …
Before the 10th [of August] I saw several dancing parties of the Poissardes and sansculottes in the beer-houses, on the Quai des Ormes and the Quai St.Paul, and have played the favourite and animating air of ca ira,on the fiddle, to eight couple of dancers: the ceiling of these rooms (which open into the street) is not above ten feet high, and on this ceiling (which is generally white washed) are the numbers 1, 2, to 8, in black, and the same in red, which mark the places where the ladies and gentlemen are to stand. When the dance was concluded, I requested the ladies to salute me (m’embrasser) which they did, by gently touching my cheek with their lips. …
I saw many thousands of these men [National Guard] from my windows, on the way to the Tuileries, early onthe Friday morning [August 10th]; their march was at the rate of perhaps five miles an hour, without running or looking aside; and this was the pace they used when they carried heads upon pikes, and when they were in pursuit of important business, rushing along the streets like a torrent, and attending wholly and solely to the object they had in view. On such occasions, when I saw them approaching, I turned into some cross street till they were passed, not that I had anything to apprehend, but the being swept along with the crowd, and perhaps trampled upon. I cannot express what I felt on seeing such immense bodies of men so vigorously actuated by the same principle. I also saw many thousands of volunteers going to join the armies at the frontiers, marching along the Boulevards, almost at the same pace, accompanied as far as Barriersby their women, who were carrying their muskets for them; some with large sausages, pieces of cold meat, and loaves of bread, stuck on the bayonets, and all laughing, or singing ca ira [a famous revolutionary song].
[1] That is, aristocratic women
A National Guardsman Recounts the Revolutionary Journee of August 10, 1792
Anonymous
(1792)
Paris–11 August 1792–Year 4 of Liberty
We are all tired out, doubtless less from spending two nights under arms than from heartache. Men’s spirits were stirred after the unfortunate decree which whitewashed Lafayette. Nevertheless, we had a quiet enough evening; a group of federes from Marseille gaily chanted patriotic songs in the Beaucaire cafe, the refreshment room of the National Assembly. It was rumoured “Tonight the tocsin will ring, the alarm drum will be beaten. All the faubourgs will burst into insurrection, supported by 6,000 federes.” At 11 o’clock we go home, at the same instant as the drums call us back to arms. We speed from our quarters and our battalion, headed by two pieces of artillery, marches to the palace. Hardly have we reached the garden of the Tuileries than we hear the alarm cannon. The alarm drum resounds through all the streets of Paris. People run for arms from all over the place. Soon the public squares, the new bridge, the main thoroughfares, are covered with troops. The National Assembly, which had finished its debate early, was recalled to its duties. It only knew of some of the preparations which had been made for the journee [uprising] of 10 August. First the commandant of the palace wishes to hold the mayor a hostage there, then he sends him to the mayor’s office. The people fear a display of his talents! In the general council of the Commune it is decreed that, according to the wishes of the forty-eight sections, it is no longer necessary to recognise the constituted authorities if dethronement is not immediately announced and new municipal bodies, keeping Petion and Manuel [2] at their head, entrusted with popular authority. However, the faubourgs [subdivisions of the city] organised themselves into an army and placed in their centre Bretons, Marseillais and Bordelais, and all the other federes. More than 20,000 men march across Paris, bristling with pikes and bayonets. Santerre had been obliged to take command of them. The National Assembly are told that the army has broken into the palace. All hearts are frozen. Discussion is provoked again by the question of the safety of the king, when it is learned that Louis XVI seeks refuge in the bosom of the Assembly.
Forty-eight members are sent to the palace. The royal family places itself in the middle of the deputation. The people fling bitter reproaches at the king and accuse him of being the author of his troubles. Hardly was the king safe than the noise of cannon-fire increased. The Breton federes beat a tattoo. Some officers suggested retreat to the commander of the Swiss guards. But he seemed prepared and soon, by a clever tactic, captured the artillery which the National Guard held in the courtyard. These guns, now turned on the people, fire and strike them down. But soon the conflict is intensified everywhere. The Swiss, surrounded, overpowered, stricken, then run out of ammunition. They plea for mercy, but it is impossible to calm the people, furious at Helvetian treachery.
The Swiss were cut to pieces. Some were killed in the state-rooms, others in the garden. Many died on the Champs-Elysees. Heavens! That Liberty should cost Frenchmen blood and tears! How many victims there were among both the People and the National Guard! The total number of dead could run to 2,000. All the Swiss who had been taken prisoner were escorted to the Place de Greve. There they had their brains blown out. They were traitors sacrificed to vengeance. What vengeance! I shivered to the roots of my being. At least 47 heads were cut off. The Greve was littered with corpses, and heads were paraded on the ends of several pikes. The first heads to be severed were those of seven chevaliers du poignard [noblemen], slain at eight o’clock in the morning on the Place Vendome. Many Marseillais perished in the journee of 10 August. Their second-in-command was killed; so was the commander of the Bretons.
The bronze statues in the Place Royale, Place Vendome, Place Louis XIV, Place Louis XV, are thrown to the ground. The Swiss are pursued everywhere. The National Assembly, the department and the municipality are in permanent session. … People are still far from calm and it will be difficult to reestablish order. However, we see peace starting to reappear. The king and his family have passed the night in the porter’s lodging of the National Assembly.
Tonight the National Assembly has decreed [the creation of] the National Convention. The electors are gathered in primary assemblies to select deputies. They only need to be twenty-five years old and have a residence qualification. It appears that the coup of 10 August has forestalled one by the aristocracy. One realizes now that the Swiss are the victims of their credulity, that they hoped for support, but that the rich men who should have fought with them dared not put in an appearance. We have been told that there are 8,000 royalist grenadiers in Paris. These 8,000 citizens seem to have stayed at home. Only one equestrian statue has been preserved in the capital: that of Henri IV.[2]
[1] The incumbent municipal authorities
[2] Henry IV was regarded as the “people’s king,” and his statues and tomb were spared from the destruction visited upon public monuments to other French kings during the Revolution.
Witness to a Slaughter: An English Witness Recounts the September Massacres in Paris
George Munro
(1792)
About one o’clock on Sunday fore-noon [September 4] three signal guns were fired, the Tocsin was rung, and one of the Municipality on horseback proclaimed in different parts of the city, that the enemy was at the gates, Verdun was besieged, and could only hold out a few days. The inhabitants were therefore ordered to assemble in their respective sections, and from thence to march to the Champ de Mars, where they were to select an army of sixty thousand men.
The first part of this proclamation was put in execution, but the second was totally neglected; for I went to the Champ de Mars myself where I only saw M. Pethion, who on finding no one there returned home. During the time the officer of the Municipality was making the proclamation, two others attended at the bar of the National Assembly to acquaint them with the steps that had been taken by the direction of the Conseil de la Commune. The Assembly applauded their conduct, and immediately passed a decree, directing that those who refused their arms to those that wished to serve, or objected serving themselves, should be deemed traitors and worthy of death, that all horses of luxury should be seized for the use of the army, and that those who refused to obey the orders of the present executive power should be punished with death. It concluded by decreeing that twelve members of the National Assembly should be added to the other six that at present compose the executive power. As soon as these decrees were passed, the carriages and horses of gentlemen were seized in the streets (agreeable to the spirit of the decree). Their owners were obliged to walk home, and the horses in general were sent to the Ecole Militaire, and the carriages were put under the care of different guards. The proceedings with the beating of drums, firing of cannon, and the marching up and down of armed men of course created no little agitation in the minds of the people. That however was nothing to the scene of horror that ensued soon after. A party at the instigation of some one or other declared they would not quit Paris, as long as the prisons were filled with Traitors (for they called those so, that were confined in the different Prisons and Churches), who might in the absence of such a number of Citizens rise and not only effect the release of His Majesty, but make an entire counter-revolution. To prevent this, a large body of sans-culottes attended by a number of Marseillais and Brestois, the hired assassins of a Party, proceeded to the Church de Carmes, rue de Vaugirard, where amidst the acclamations of a savage mob they massacred a number of refractory Priests, all the Vicaires de Saint Sulpice, the directors of the Seminaries, and the Doctors of the Sorbonne, with the ci-devant [former] Archbishop of Arles, and a number of others, exceeding in all one hundred and seventy, including those that had been confined there since the tenth. After this they proceeded to the Abbaye, where they massacred a vast number of prisoners, amongst whom were also many respectable characters. These executioners increasing in number, different detachments were sent to the Chatelet, the prison de la Force, de Ste Pelagie, and the prisons of the Conciergerie. At all these places a most horrid massacre took place; none were exempted but debtors and many of these fell victims to the fury of the people. During this sad scene, the more humane, which were but few in number, hurried to the National Assembly to obtain their interference for stopping such melancholy outrages. They immediately decreed that six of their members should go and see if it was possible to prevent such cruelties. With difficulty these members arrived at the Abbaye; when there one of them got upon a chair to harangue the people, but neither he nor the others could make themselves heard, and with some risk, they made their escape. Many of the Municipality attended at the different prisons, and endeavoured to quell the fury of the people, but all in vain; they therefore pro-posed to the mob a plan of establishing a kind of Court of justice in the prisons, for the immediate trial of the remaining offenders. They caught at this, and two of the Municipality with a detachment of the mob, about two on Monday morning, began this strange Court of justice. The gaoler’s list was called for, those that were conpal government, and National Guard took no action to repress the actions of the fined for forging assignats, or theft, with the unhappy people that were any way suspected to be concerned in the affair of the 10th, were in general massacred; this form took place in nearly all the prisons in Paris. But early on Monday morning a detachment with seven pieces of cannon went to attack Bicetre. It is reported that these wretches charged their cannon with small stones and such other things, and fired promiscuously among the prisoners. I cannot however vouch for this; they have however not finished their cruelties there yet, and it is now past six o’clock Tuesday evening. To be convinced of what I could not believe, I made a visit to the prison of the Abbaye about seven o’clock on Monday evening, for the slaughter had not ceased. This prison, which takes its name from an adjoining Abbaye, stands in a narrow street, which was at this time from a variety of lights, as light as day: a single file of men armed with swords, or piques, formed a line of some length, commencing from the prison door. This body might consist of about fifty; these people were either Marseillais, Brestois, or the National Guards of Paris, and when I saw them seemed much fatigued with their horrid work. For besides the irregular massacre that continued till two o’clock on Monday morning, many of them delighted with their strange office continued their services when I left them, which was about nine on Monday evening.
Two of the Municipality were then in the prison with some of the mob distributing their justice. Those they found guilty were seemingly released, but only to be precipitated by the door on a number of piques, and then among the savage cries of vive la nation ["long live the nation!"], to be hacked to pieces by those that had swords and were ready to receive them. After this their dead bodies were dragged by the arms or legs to the Abbaye, which is distant from the prison about two hundred yards; here they were laid up in heaps till carts could carry them away. The kennel was swimming with blood, and a bloody track was traced from the prison to the Abbaye door where they had dragged these unfortunate people.
I was fortunate enough to be present when five men were acquitted. Such a circumstance, a bystander told me, had not happened in the operations of this horrid tribunal; and these inconsistent murderers seemed nearly as much pleased at the acquittal of a prisoner as they were at his condemnation. The Governor of the Invalides happened to be one of those I saw acquitted, the street rung with acclamations of joy, but the old man was so feeble with fear, and suspense, and so overcome with the caresses of his daughter, who was attending to know his fate, that they both sunk lifeless into the arms of some of the spectators, who carried them to the Hospital des Invalides. The same congratulations attended the others that were acquitted and the same those that were condemned. Nothing can exceed the inconsistency of these people. After the general massacre of Sunday night many of the dead bodies were laid on the Pont-neuf to be claimed, a person in the action of stealing a handkerchief from one of the corpses was hacked to pieces on the spot, by the same people who had been guilty of so much cruelty and injustice.
One of the Municipality was fortunate enough for that night to save some of the women, but many of these underwent the same mock trial next day; and the Princess Lamballe, after having been butchered in the most shocking manner, had her head severed from her body, which these monsters carried about, while others dragged her body through many of the streets. It is even said they attempted to carry it to the Queen, but the Guards would not permit that. Mademoiselle de Tourzelles was also reported to have been murdered, but I understand that she and Madame de Ste Brice were saved from the fury of the people, and carried a la section des droits de l’homme. Many other women of family were killed and others escaped. Major Bauchman of the Swiss Guards was beheaded on the Place de Carouzel early on Monday morning. Mr Montmorin, Governor of Fontainebleau and nephew of Mr Montmorin late Minister, who was killed at the Abbaye, had been regularly tried and acquitted on Friday, but not being released was also massacred at the Conciergerie. Monsieur d’Affry was acquitted by the people and escaped. In all it is supposed they have murdered four thousand, some say seven, but I think that exaggerated.
By what I can understand it was late on Sunday evening before Mr Pethion took any steps to prevent the progress of this unexampled outrage, and the National Guards of course made no opposition to such irregularities. The Mayor however at last sent to the Temple the Commandant General of the National Guards, and I am happy to inform you that in the midst of all this confusion, though there was a crowd in the street, yet the court of the Temple was quiet. The Section du Marais has sworn not to permit any violence to be exercised against the prisoners in that place, and the National Assembly have also appointed six of their members as a safe-guard to the sacred persons of Their Majesties, and a number of the Municipality also attend. A motion was made last week to confine Their Majesties in separate apartments; that right was however found to rest with the Municipality, and I have the pleasure of saying that Their Most Christian Majesties still enjoy the comfort of being together, and were, not an hour ago, in perfect good health.
I ask pardon for giving such a detailed account of such uncommon barbarity, which I am sure must be as disagreeable for you to read as it is for me to commit such acts to paper, but they ought to be particularized to the eternal disgrace of a people who pretend to be the most civilized among the nations of Europe.
The French Revolution Becomes a Universal Political Crusade
National Convention
(1792)
The French people to the people of ; brothers and friends:
We have conquered our liberty and we shall maintain it. We offer to bring this inestimable blessing to you, for it has always been rightly ours, and only by a crime have our oppressors robbed us of it. We have driven out your tyrants. Show yourselves free men and we will protect you from their vengeance, their machinations, or their return.
From this moment the French nation proclaims the sovereignty of the people, the suppression of all civil and military authorities which have hitherto governed you and of all that taxes which you bear, under whatever form, the abolition of the tithe, of feudalism, of seigniorial rights and monopolies of every kind, of serfdom, whether real or personal, of hunting and fishing privileges, of the corvee, the salt tax, the tolls and local imposts, and, in general, of all the various kinds of taxes with which you have been loaded by your usurpers; it also proclaims the abolition among you of all noble and ecclesiastical corporations and of all prerogatives and privileges opposed to equality. You are, from this moment, brothers and friends; all are citizens, equal in rights, and all are alike called to govern, to serve, and to defend your country.
The King is Dead, “Vive la Republic!”
Henry Essex Edgeworth de Firmont
(1793)
The unfortunate Louis XVI, foreseeing to what lengths the malice of his enemies was likely to go, and resolved to be prepared at all events, cast his eyes upon me, to assist him in his last moments, if condemned to die. He would not make any application to the ruling party, nor even mention my name without my consent. The message he sent me was touching beyond expression, and worded in a manner which I shall never forget. A King, though in chains, had a right to command, but he commanded not. My attendance was requested merely as a pledge of my attachment for him, and as a favour, which he hoped I would not refuse. But as the service was likely to be attended with some danger for me, he dared not to insist, and only prayed (in case I deemed the danger to be too great) to point out to him a clergyman worthy of his confidence, but less known than I was myself, leaving the person absolutely to my choice. … Being obliged to take my party upon the spot, I resolved to comply with what appeared to be at that moment the call of Almighty God; and committing to His providence all the rest, I made answer to the most unfortunate of Kings, that whether he lived or died, I would be his friend to the last. …
The King finding himself seated in the carriage, where he could neither speak to me nor be spoken to without witness, kept a profound silence. I presented him with my breviary, the only book I had with me, and he seemed to accept it with pleasure: he appeared anxious that I should point out to him the psalms that were most suited to his situation, and he recited them attentively with me. The gend’armes, without speaking, seemed astonished and confounded at the tranquil piety of their monarch, to whom they doubtless never had before approached so near.
The procession lasted almost two hours; the streets were lined with citizens, all armed, some with pikes and some with guns, and the carriage was surrounded by a body of troops, formed of the most desperate people of Paris. As another precaution, they had placed before the horses a number of drums, intended to drown any noise or murmur in favour of the King; but how could they be heard? Nobody appeared either at the doors or windows, and in the street nothing was to be seen, but armed citizens–citizens, all rushing towards the commission of a crime, which perhaps they detested in their hearts.
The carriage proceeded thus in silence to the Place de Louis XV, and stopped in the middle of a large space that had been left round the scaffold: this space was surrounded with cannon, and beyond, an armed multitude extended as far as the eye could reach. As soon as the King perceived that the carriage stopped, he turned and whispered to me, “We are arrived, if I mistake not.” My silence answered that we were. One of the guards came to open the carriage door, and the gend’armes would have jumped out, but the King stopped them, and leaning his arm on my knee, “Gentlemen,” said he, with the tone of majesty, “I recommend to you this good man; take care that after my death no insult be offered to him–I charge you to prevent it.” … As soon as the King had left the carriage, three guards surrounded him, and would have taken off his clothes, but he repulsed them with haughtiness: he undressed himself, untied his neckcloth, opened his shirt, and arranged it himself. The guards, whom the determined countenance of the King had for a moment disconcerted, seemed to recover their audacity. They surrounded him again, and would have seized his hands. “What are you attempting?” said the King, drawing back his hands. “To bind you,” answered the wretches. “To bind me,” said the King, with an indignant air. “No! I shall never consent to that: do what you have been ordered, but you shall never bind me … “
The path leading to the scaffold was extremely rough and difficult to pass; the King was obliged to lean on my arm, and from the slowness with which he proceeded, I feared for a moment that his courage might fail; but what was my astonishment, when arrived at the last step, I felt that he suddenly let go my arm, and I saw him cross with a firm foot the breadth of the whole scaffold; silence, by his look alone, fifteen or twenty drums that were placed opposite to me; and in a voice so loud, that it must have been heard at the Pont Tournant, I heard him pronounce distinctly these memorable words: I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge; I pardon those who have occasioned my death; and I pray to God that the blood you are going to shed may never be visited on France.
He was proceeding, when a man on horseback, in the national uniform, and with a ferocious cry, ordered the drums to beat. Many voices were at the same time heard encouraging the executioners. They seemed reanimated themselves, in seizing with violence the most virtuous of Kings, they dragged him under the axe of the guillotine, which with one stroke severed his head from his body. All this passed in a moment. The youngest of the guards, who seemed about eighteen, immediately seized the head, and shewed it to the people as he walked round the scaffold; he accompanied this monstrous ceremony with the most atrocious and indecent gestures. At first an awful silence prevailed; at length some cries of “Vive la Republique!” were heard. By degrees the voices multiplied, and in less than ten minutes this cry, a thousand times repeated, became the universal shout of the multitude, and every hat was in the air.
Robespierre on Republican Virtue
Maxililien Robespierre
(1794)
We desire an order of things where all base and cruel passions are enchained by the laws, all beneficent and generous feelings awakened by them; where ambition is the desire to deserve glory and to be useful to one’s country; where distinctions arise only from equality itself; where the citizen is sub ject to the magistrate, the magistrate to the people, the people to justice; where the country secures the welfare of each individual, and each individual proudly enjoys the prosperity and glory of his country; where all minds are enlarged by the constant interchange of republican sentiments and by the need of earning the respect of a great people; where industry is an adornment to the liberty that ennobles it, and commerce is the source of public wealth, not simply of monstrous riches for a few families.
We wish to substitute in our country morality for egotism, probity for a mere sense of honour, principle for habit, duty for etiquette, the rule of reason for the tyranny of custom, contempt for vice for contempt for misfortune, pride for insolence, large-mindedness for vanity, the love of glory for the love of money, good men for good company, merit for intrigue, talent for conceit, truth for show, the charm of happiness for the tedium of pleasure, the grandeur of man for the triviality of grand society, a people magnanimous, powerful and happy for a people lovable, frivolous and wretched–that is to say, all the virtues and miracles of the Republic for all the vices and puerilities of the monarchy.
We wish in a word to fulfil the course of nature, to accomplish the destiny of mankind, to make good the promises of philosophy, to absolve Providence from the long reign of tyranny and crime. May France, once illustrious among peoples of slaves, eclipse the glory of all free peoples that have existed, become the model to the nations, the terror of oppressors, the consolation of the oppressed, the ornament of the universe; and in sealing our work with our blood, may we ourselves see at last the dawn of universal felicity gleam before us! That is our ambition. That is our aim.
The Reign of Terror in the Provinces: Lyon Temporary Committee of Republican Surveillance (1793)
The goal of the Revolution is the happiness of the people.
Paragraph I: Concerning the Revolutionary Spirit
The Revolution is made for the people; the happiness of the people is its goal; love of the people is the touchstone of the revolutionary spirit.
It is easy to understand that by “the people” we do not mean that class privileged by its riches which has usurped all the pleasures of life and all its assets from society. “The people” is the universality of French citizens; “the people” is above all the immense class of the poor, that class which gives men to the Patrie,defenders to our frontiers, which maintains society by its labors, embellishes it by its talents, which adorns it and honors it by its virtues. The Revolution would be a political and moral monstrosity if its end was to assure the happiness of a few hundred individuals and to consolidate the misery of twenty-four million citizens. …
Republicans, to be worthy of that name, begin by feeling your dignity. Hold high your head with pride and let men read in your eyes that you know who you are and what the Republic is. Do not be mistaken, to be truly republican each citizen must experience within himself a revolution equal to that which has changed the face of France. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in common between the slave of a tyrant and the inhabitant of a free state: the customs of the latter, his principles, his sentiments, his actions must all be new. You were oppressed; you must crush your oppressors. You were the slaves of superstition; you must no longer worship anything except liberty; you must have no other morality than that of nature. You were strangers to military offices; henceforth all Frenchmen are soldiers. You lived in ignorance; to assure the conquest of your rights, you must be instructed. You knew no Patrie [Fatherland], never had its sweet voice echoed in your hearts; today, you must know nothing apart from it; you must see it, hear it, and adore it in everything. The magistrate is vigilant, the farmer sows his fields, the soldier fights, the citizen breathes only for the Patrie! Its sacred image mingles in all his actions, adds to his pleasures, rewards him for his pains. Long live the Republic! Long live the people! There is his rallying cry, the expression of his joy, the solace of his sorrows. Any man to whom this enthusiasm is foreign, who knows other pleasures, other cares than the happiness of the people … any man who doesn’t feel his blood boil at the very name of tyranny, slavery, or opulence; any man who has tears to shed for the enemies of the people, who doesn’t reserve all his compassion for the victims of despotism, and for the martyrs of liberty, all such men who dare to call themselves Republicans have lied against nature and in their hearts. Let them flee the soil of liberty: they will soon be recognized and will water it with their impure blood. The Republic wants only free men within its bosom; it is determined to exterminate all others and to recognize as its children only those who know how to live, fight and die for it. …
Paragraph III: The Revolutionary Tax on the Rich
The expenses of the war must be defrayed, and the costs of the Revolution met. Who will come to the help of the Patrie in its need if it is not the rich? If they are aristocrats, it is just that they should pay for a war to which they and their supporters alone have given rise; if they are patriots, you will be anticipating their desires by asking them to put their riches to the only use fit for Republicans; that is to say, a purpose useful to the Republic. Thus, nothing can excuse you from establishing this tax promptly. No exemptions are necessary; any man who has more than he needs must participate in this extraordinary assistance. This tax must be proportioned to the great needs of the Patrie, so you must begin by deciding in a grand and truly revolutionary manner the sum that each individual must put in common for the public welfare. This isn’t a case for mathematical exactitude nor for the timid scruple which must be employed to apportion the public taxes; it is an extraordinary measure which must exhibit the character of the times which compel it. Operate, then, on a large scale; take all that a citizen has that is unnecessary; for superfluity is an evident and gratuitous violation of the rights of the people. Any man who has more than his needs cannot use it, he can only abuse it; thus, if he is left what is strictly necessary, all the rest belongs to the Republic and to its unfortunate members. …
Paragraph V : The Eradication of Fanaticism
Priests are the sole cause of the misfortunes of France; it is they who for thirteen hundred years have raised, by degrees, the edifice of our slavery and have adorned it with all the sacred baubles which could conceal flaws from the eye of reason. …
First of all, Citizens, relations between God and man are a purely private matter and, to be sincere, have no need of display in worship and the visible monuments of superstition. You will begin by sending to the treasury of the Republic all the vases, all the gold and silver ornaments which may flatter the vanity of priests but which are nothing to the truly religious man and to the Being whom he claims to honour. …
… The Republican has no other divinity than his Patrie, no other idol than liberty. The Republican is essentially religious because he is good, just, and courageous; the patriot honors virtue, respects age, consoles misfortune, comforts indigence and punishes treachery. What better homage for the Divinity! The patriot isn’t foolish enough to claim to worship him by practices useless to humanity and bad for himself; he does not condemn himself to an apparent celibacy in order to give himself up the more freely to debauchery. Worthy son of nature and useful member of society, he gives happiness to a virtuous wife and raises his numerous children according to the severe principles of morality and republicanism. …
Republicans … be on guard, you have great wrongs to expiate; the crimes of the rebellious Lyonnais are yours. … Regain then, and promptly, in liberty’s way, all the ground that you have lost, and win again by your virtues and patriotic efforts the esteem and confidence of France. The National Convention, the representatives of the people, are watching you and your magistrates; the account that they demand of you will be all the stricter because you have faults to be pardoned. And we, who are intermediaries between them and you, we whom they have charged to watch over you and instruct you, we swear that our glance will not leave you for an instant and that we will use with severity all the authority committed to us and that we will punish as treachery what in other circumstances you might have called dilatoriness, weakness or negligence. The time for half-measures and for beating about the bush is past. Help us to strike great blows or you will be the first to feel them. Liberty or death: reflect and choose.
[Signed by the Commission and approved by the deputies on mission, Collot d'Herbois and Fouche, members of the Committee of Public Safety.]
A Sans-CulotteDescribes the Typical Sans-Culotte
Anonymous
(1793)
A sans culotte, you rogues? He is someone who always goes about on foot, who has not got the millions you would all live to have, who has no castles, no valets to wait on him, and who lives simply with his wife and children, if he has any, on the fourth or fifth story. He is useful because he knows how to till a field, to forge iron, to use a saw, to roof a house, to make shoes, and to spill his blood to the last drop for the safety of the Republic. …
In the evening he goes to the assembly of his Section, not powdered and perfumed and nattily booted, in the hope of being noticed by the citizenesses in the galleries, but ready to support sound proposals with all his might and ready to pulverize those which come from the despised faction of politicians.
Finally, a sans culotte always has his sabre well-sharpened, ready to cut off the ears of all opponents of the Revolution.
Economic Realities in Revolutionary Paris: Prices and Wages
George Rude
(1789-1793)
Percentage of Income Spent on Bread by Parisian Workers, 1789(in sous)
Effective Expenditure on Bread as Percentage Daily Daily of Income
Occupation Wage Earnings1 At 9 s. At 14-1/2 s. At 13-1/2 s. At 12 s.
Laborer in Reveillon’s factory 25 s. 15 s. 60 97 90-1/2 80
Builder’s laborer 30 s. 18 s. 50 80 75-1/2 67
Journeyman mason 40 s. 24 s. 37 60 56-1/2 50
Journeyman locksmith, carpenter, etc. 50 s. 30 s. 30 48 45-1/2 40
Sculptor, goldsmith 100 s. 60 s. 15 24 22-1/2 20
1 In computing ‘effective’ earnings, allowance has been made for the numerous unpaid Feast Days of the ancien regime. Here these are assumed to number 111 per year (G. M. Jaffe, Le Mouvement ouvrier a Paris pendant la Revolution francaise , pp. 26-27). Further allowance should also be made for sickness.
Hypothetical Budgets of Parisian Workers, June 1789 and June 1791
(in sous)
Budget of a Builder’s Laborer Budget of a Journeyman Carpenter, or Locksmith ÷ ÷
(wage, 30 s.; effective income, 18 s.) (wage, 50 s.; effective income, 30 s.) ÷ ÷÷÷ June 1789 June 1791 June 1789 June 1791 ÷÷÷ 4 lb. bread 14-1/2 s. 4 lb. bread 8 s. 4 lb. bread 14-1/2 s. 4 lb. bread 8 s. ÷÷÷
Rent 3 s. Rent 3 s. Rent 3 s. Rent 3 s. ÷÷÷
1/2 liter wine 4 s. 1/2 liter wine 5 s. 1 liter wine 8 s. ÷÷÷ ÷÷÷ 1-1/4 lb. meat 2-1/2 s. 1/2 lb. meat 5 s. 1/2 lb. meat 5 s. ÷÷÷ Balance for oil, ÷÷÷ vegetables, ÷÷÷
clothing, etc. 1/2 s. Balance 1/2 s. Balance 2-1/2 s. Balance 6 s. ÷÷÷
÷÷÷
÷÷÷ ÷÷÷
÷÷÷
Total 18 s. 18 s. 30 s. 30 s.
Hypothetical Budgets of Parisian Workers, June 1790 and June 1793 (in sous)
Budget of a Journeyman Carpenter Budget of a Journeyman Locksmith ÷ ÷ ÷÷÷ June 1790 June 1793 June 1790 June 1793 ÷÷÷ (wage, 50 s.; effective (wage, 80 s.; effective (wage, 50 s.; effective (wage, 110 s.; effective ÷÷÷
income, 30 s.) income, 57 s.) income, 30 s.) income, 78 s.) ÷÷÷ ÷÷÷ 4 lb. bread 11 s. 4 lb. bread 12 s. 4 lb. bread 11 s. 4 lb. bread 12 s. ÷÷÷
Rent 3 s. Rent 6 s. Rent 3 s. Rent 6 s. ÷÷÷
1 liter wine 10 s. 1-1/2 liters wine 24 s. 1 liter wine 10 s. 1-1/2 liters wine 24 s. ÷÷÷ ÷÷÷ 1/2 lb. meat 5 s. 1/2 lb. meat 9 s. 1/2 lb. meat 5 s. 1 lb. meat 18 s. ÷÷÷ Balance for vegetables ÷÷÷
oil, clothing, etc. 1 s. Balance 6 s. Balance 1 s. Balance 18 s. ÷÷÷
÷÷÷
÷÷÷ ÷÷÷
÷÷÷
Total 30 s. 57 s. 30 s. 78 s.
The Law of the General Maximum
French National Convention
(1793)
The National Convention, having heard the report of its Commission on the drafting of a law fixing amaximum for essential goods and merchandise, decrees as follows:
Article 1. The articles which the National Convention has judged to be essential, and of which it has believed it should fix the maximum or highest price are: fresh meat, salt meat and bacon, butter, sweet oil, cattle, salt fish, wine, brandy, vinegar, cider, beer, firewood, charcoal, coal, candles, lamp oil, salt, soda, soap, potash, sugar, honey, white paper, hides, iron, cast iron, lead, steel, copper, hemp, flax, wools, fabrics, linen cloth, the raw materials used for manufacture, clogs, shoes, colza and rape, tobacco.
2. Among the articles listed above, the maximum price of first quality firewood, charcoal and coal is the same as in 1790, plus one-twentieth. The law of 19 August on the fixing by departments of the price of firewood, coal and peat is revoked.
The maximum or the highest price of twist tobacco is 20 sous per livre … that of smoking tobacco is 10 sous;that of a livre of salt is two sous; that of soap is 25 sous.
3. The maximum price of all other goods and merchandise listed in article 1 shall be, over the whole extent of the Republic, until September next, their price in 1790 as stated by the market price lists or the current prices in each department, plus one-third, deduction being made for fiscal and other fees to which they were then subject, under whatever name they may have existed.
4. The tables of the maximum or highest price of each of the goods, listed in article 1 shall be drafted by each district administration, posted within a week of the receipt of this law, and sent to the department.
5. The procureur-general-syndic shall, within the following fortnight, forward copies to both the Provisional Executive Council and the National Convention.
6. The Commissaries of the National Convention are charged with dismissing procureurs of communes,procureurs-syndics, and procureurs-generaux-syndics who shall not have fulfilled the arrangements detailed in the foregoing articles within the time prescribed, each so far as his responsibility extends.
7. Everyone who sells or buys the merchandise listed in article 1 above the maximum determined and posted in each department shall pay, jointly and severally, through the municipal police, a fine of double the value of the object sold, payable to the informant. Their names shall be inscribed on the list of suspect persons and they shall be treated as such. The buyer shall not be subject to the above penalty if he denounces the seller’s breach, and each merchant shall be required to have a list bearing the maximum or highest price of his goods conspicuous in his shop.
8. The maximumor highest rate with respect to salaries, wages, manual labour and day-labour in each place shall be fixed, beginning from the publication of this law, until September next, by general and communal councils, at the 1790 rate plus one-half.
9. Municipalities may requisition and punish, with three days detention, as the circumstances require, workmen, manufacturers and various kinds of labourers who refuse their ordinary work without legitimate cause. …
[Articles 10-16 deal with technical, administrative matters.]
17. For the duration of the war, all exportation of essential merchandise or goods is prohibited over every frontier under any name or commission whatever, salt excepted.
18. The above listed articles destined for export and intercepted in contravention [of the law] within two leagues of the frontier on this side, and without a permit from the municipality of the driver’s place [of residence], shall be confiscated with the conveyances, beasts of burden, or vessels transporting them, for the benefit of those who stop them. There shall be a penalty of ten years imprisonment for the contraveners, owners and drivers.
19. So that the crews of neutral or Frenchified ships may not abuse the favour of hospitality by taking away from maritime cities and places victuals and provisions beyond their needs, they shall appear before the municipality which shall cause all that they need to be purchased for them.
20. The present decree shall be despatched by special messenger.
The Last “Political Testament” of a Feminist During the French Revolution
Olympe de Gouges
(1793)
My son, the wealth of the whole world, the universe in servitude at my feet, the daggers of assassins raised at me, nothing can extinguish the love of country that burns in my soul; nothing could make me betray my conscience. Men deranged by passions, what have you done and what incalculable evils are you perpetrating on Paris and on the whole of France? You are risking everything; you flatter yourselves into thinking that it is only a question of a great purge to save the public; let the departments, infused with terror, blindly adopt your horrible measures.
If, by a last effort, I can save the public welfare, I want even my persecutors, as they destroy me by their furor, to be jealous of my kind of death. And if one day French women are pointed out to future generations perhaps my memory will equal that of the Romans. I have predicted it all; I know that my death is inevitable; but it is glorious for a well-intentioned soul, when an ignominious death threatens all good citizens, to die for a dying country!
I will my heart to the nation, my integrity to men (they have need of it). To women, I will my soul; my creative spirit to dramatic artists; my disinterestedness to the ambitious; my philosophy to those who are persecuted; my intelligence to all fanatics; my religion to atheists; my gaiety to women on the decline; and all the poor remains of an honest fortune to my son, if he survives me.
Frenchmen, those are my last words, listen to what I am saying and reach down into the bottom of your hearts: do you recognize the austere virtues and the unselfishness of a republican? Answer me: who has loved and served the nation more–you or I? People, your reign is over if you fail to stop yourselves at the edge of this abyss. You have never been grander or more sublime than in the majestic calm you have kept during this bloody storm. If you can preserve this calm and this august kind of supervision, you will save Paris, the whole of France, and republican government.
The Women of Revolutionary Paris Demand Action from the Convention
Anonymous
(1793)
Citizen legislators: Justly indignant at the endless jobbery which has occurred in the Ministry … we come to demand of you the execution of constitutional laws. We did not accept the principles of the Constitution so that anarchy and the rule of schemers might be prolonged indefinitely. The premeditated war has lasted long enough. It is time for the children of liberty to sacrifice themselves for the Patrie and not for the ambition and pride of a heap of rogues at the head of our armies. Let us see by the dismissal of all nobles that you are not among their defenders. Hurry, and convince all France by your actions that we have not brought the representatives of a great people from all corners of the Republic, with great show, simply to put on a moving performance in the Champ de Mars. Prove that this Constitution, which we have seen accepted, is a reality and will indeed bring about our happiness. It is not sufficient to tell the people that its happiness is drawing near; it must feel its effects. Four years’ experience of misfortune has taught it to mistrust the fine promises made to it endlessly. …
Believe us, legislators, four years of misfortune have taught us enough to be able to discern ambition under the very mask of patriotism; we no longer believe in the virtue of those men who are reduced to praising themselves. More than words is now necessary to convince us that ambition does not reign in your committees. Organize the government along the lines required by the Constitution. In vain do you tell us that this step will bring about the fall of France … we shall see only the fall of the schemers. In a Paris where the laws are strictly observed, do you expect us to believe that the enemies of the Patrie have no official defenders among you? Dismiss all nobles without exception; if there are some men of good faith among them, they will prove it by making a voluntary sacrifice for the happiness of their Patrie.
Don’t be afraid of disorganizing the army; the more talented a general is, the more urgent it is to replace him if he is ill-intentioned. Don’t do patriots the injustice of saying that there aren’t men among them able to command our armies. Let us have some of these fine soldiers whose talents and deserts have been sacrificed to the ambition and pride of that formerly privileged caste. If, under the reign of despotism, their crime won preference, under that of liberty, virtue must sweep it away. You have made a decree according to which all suspects must be arrested; but we ask you, isn’t this law derisory while these very suspects must execute it?
Legislators! Thus is the people mocked! There is the equality which was to be the basis of its happiness; there is its thanks for the countless evils it has suffered so patiently! It will not be said that this people, reduced to despair, was obliged to seek justice for itself; you will render justice by dismissing all guilty administrators, and by creating extraordinary tribunals in a sufficient number so that the people, before leaving for the frontiers, may say: “I am easy about the fate of my wife and children, for I have seen all domestic conspirators perish under the sword of the law.”
Decree these measures, legislators, and the levee en masse, and you will have saved the Patrie!
A Black Revolutionary Leader in Haiti: Toussaint L’Ouverture
Francois Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture
(1797)
The impolitic and incendiary discourse of Vaublanc has not affected the blacks nearly so much as their certainty of the projects which the proprietors of San Domingo are planning: insidious declarations should not have any effect in the eyes of wise legislators who have decreed liberty for the nations. But the attempts on that liberty which the colonists propose are all the more to be feared because it is with the veil of patriotism that they cover their detestable plans. We know that they seek to impose some of them on you by illusory and specious promises, in order to see renewed in this colony its former scenes of horror. Already perfidious emissaries have stepped in among us to ferment the destructive leaven prepared by the hands of liberticides. But they will not succeed. I swear it by all that liberty holds most sacred. My attachment to France, my knowledge of the blacks, make it my duty not to leave you ignorant either of the crimes which they meditate or the oath that we renew, to bury ourselves under the ruins of a country revived by liberty rather than suffer the return of slavery.
It is for you, Citizens Directors, to turn from over our heads the storm which the eternal enemies of our liberty are preparing in the shades of silence. It is for you to enlighten the legislature, it is for you to prevent the enemies of the present system from spreading themselves on our unfortunate shores to sully it with new crimes. Do not allow our brothers, our friends, to be sacrificed to men who wish to reign over the ruins of the human species. But no, your wisdom will enable you to avoid the dangerous snares which our common enemies hold out for you. …
I send you with this letter a declaration which will acquaint you with the unity that exists between the proprietors of San Domingo who are in France, those in the United States, and those who serve under the English banner. You will see there a resolution, unequivocal and carefully constructed, for the restoration of slavery; you will see there that their determination to succeed has led them to envelop themselves in the mantle of liberty in order to strike it more deadly blows. You will see that they are counting heavily on my complacency in lending myself to their perfidious views by my fear for my children. It is not astonishing that these men who sacrifice their country to their interests are unable to conceive how many sacrifices a true love of country can support in a better father than they, since I unhesitatingly base the happiness of my children on that of my country, which they and they alone wish to destroy.
I shall never hesitate between the safety of San Domingo and my personal happiness; but I have nothing to fear. It is to the solicitude of the French Government that I have confided my children. … I would tremble with horror if it was into the hands of the colonists that I had sent them as hostages; but even if it were so, let them know that in punishing them for the fidelity of their father, they would only add one degree more to their barbarism, without any hope of ever making me fail in my duty. … Blind as they are! They cannot see how this odious conduct on their part can become the signal of new disasters and irreparable misfortunes, and that far from making them regain what in their eyes liberty for all has made them lose, they expose themselves to a total ruin and the colony to its inevitable destruction. Do they think that men who have been able to enjoy the blessing of liberty will calmly see it snatched away? They supported their chains only so long as they did not know any condition of life more happy than that of slavery. But to-day when they have left it, if they had a thousand lives they would sacrifice them all rather than be forced into slavery again. But no, the same hand which has broken our chains will not enslave us anew. France will not revoke her principles, she will not withdraw from us the greatest of her benefits. She will protect us against all our enemies; she will not permit her sublime morality to be perverted, those principles which do her most honour to be destroyed, her most beautiful achievement to be degraded, and her Decree of 16 Pluviose which so honors humanity to be revoked. But if, to re-establish slavery in San Domingo, this was done, then I declare to you it would be to attempt the impossible: we have known how to face dangers to obtain our liberty, we shall know how to brave death to maintain it.
This, Citizens Directors, is the morale of the people of San Domingo, those are the principles that they transmit to you by me.
My own you know. It is sufficient to renew, my hand in yours, the oath that I have made, to cease to live before gratitude dies in my heart, before I cease to be faithful to France and to my duty, before the god of liberty is profaned and sullied by the liberticides, before they can snatch from my hands that sword, those arms, which France confided to me for the defence of its rights and those of humanity, for the triumph of liberty and equality.
A Natural Rights Defense of the French Revolution: The Rights of Man
Thomas Paine
(1791)
To George Washington,
President of the United States of America
Sir,
I present you a small treatise in defense of those principles of freedom which your exemplary virtue hath so eminently contributed to establish. That the Rights of Man may become as universal as your benevolence can wish, and that you may enjoy the happiness of seeing the New World regenerate the Old, is the prayer of
Sir,
Your much obliged, and
Obedient humble servant,
Thomas Paine
From the part Mr. Burke took in the American Revolution, it was natural that I should consider him a friend to mankind; and as our acquaintance commenced on that ground, it would have been more agreeable to me to have had cause to continue in that opinion, than to change it.
At the time Mr. Burke made his violent speech last winter in the English Parliament against the French Revolution and the National Assembly, I was in Paris, and had written to him but a short time before, to inform him how prosperously matters were going on. Soon after this, I saw his advertisement of the pamphlet he intended to publish. …
Among the incivilities by which nations or individuals provoke and irritate each other, Mr. Burke’s pamphlet on the French Revolution is an extraordinary instance. Neither the people of France, nor the National Assembly, were troubling themselves about the affairs of England, or the English Parliament; and that Mr. Burke should commence an unprovoked attack upon them, both in Parliament and in public, is a conduct that cannot be pardoned on the score of manners, nor justified on that of policy. …
Not sufficiently content with abusing the National Assembly, a great part of his work is taken up with abusing Dr. Price (one of the best-hearted men that lives), and the two societies in England known by the name of the Revolution Society, and the Society for Constitutional Information.
Dr. Price had preached a sermon on the 4th of November, 1789, being the anniversary of what is called in England the Revolution, which took place in 1688. Mr. Burke, speaking of this sermon, says, “The political divine proceeds dogmatically to assert that, by the principles of the Revolution, the people of England have acquired three fundamental rights:
1. To choose our own governors.
2. To cashier them for misconduct.
3. To frame a government for ourselves.”
Dr. Price does not say that the right to do these things exists in this or in that person, or in this or in that description of persons, but that it exists in the whole;that it is a right resident in the nation. Mr. Burke, on the contrary, denies that such a right exists in the nation, either in whole or in part, or that it exists any where; and, what is still more strange and marvelous, he says, “that the people of England utterly disclaim such a right, and that they will resist the practical assertion of it with their lives and fortunes.”
That men should take up arms, and spend their lives and fortunes, not to maintain their rights, but to maintain they have not rights, is an entirely new species of discovery, and suited to the paradoxical genius of Mr. Burke.
The English Parliament of 1688 did a certain thing, which, for themselves and their constituents, they had a right to do, and which it appeared right should be done: But, in addition to this right, which they possessed by delegation, they set up another right by assumption, that of binding and controlling posterity to the end of time. …
There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the “end of time,” or of commanding forever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore, all such clauses, acts or declarations, by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void.
Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generation which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. …
It was not against Louis XVI, but against the despotic principles of the government, that the nation revolted. These principles had not their origin in him, but in the original establishment, many centuries back; and they were become too deeply rooted to be removed, and the Augean stable of parasites and plunderers too abominably filthy to be cleansed, by anything short of a complete and universal revolution. … There were, if I may so express it, a thousand despotisms to be reformed in France, which had grown up under the hereditary despotism of the monarchy, and became so rooted as to be in a great measure independent of it. …
Not one glance of compassion, not one commiserating reflection, that I can find throughout his book, has he [Burke] bestowed on those who lingered out the most wretched of lives, a life without hope, in the most miserable of prisons.
It is painful to behold a man employing his talents to corrupt himself. Nature has been kinder to Mr. Burke than he is to her. He is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblage of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird. …
More of the citizens fell in this struggle than of their opponents; but four or five persons were seized by the populace, and instantly put to death; the governor of the Bastille, and the mayor of Paris, who was detected in the act of betraying them; and afterwards Foulon, one of the new ministry, and Berthier, his son-in-law, who had accepted the office of intendant of Paris. Their heads were struck upon spikes, and carried about the city; and it is upon this mode of punishment that Mr. Burke builds a great part of his tragic scenes. …
These outrages are not the effect of the principles of the revolution, but of the degraded mind that existed before the revolution, and which the revolution is calculated to reform. Place them then to their proper cause, and take the reproach of them to your own side. …
Mr. Burke, with his usual outrage, abuses the Declaration of the Rights of Man, published by the National Assembly of France, as the basis on which the constitution of France is built. This he calls “paltry and blurred sheets of paper about the rights of man.”
Does Mr. Burke mean to deny that man has any rights? If he does, then he must mean that there are no such things as rights any where, and that he has none himself; for who is there in the world but man? But if Mr. Burke means to admit that man has rights, the question then will be, what are those rights, and how came man by them originally? …
The duty of man is not a wilderness of turnpike gates, through which he is to pass by tickets from one to the other. It is plain and simple, and consists but of two points. His duty to God, which every man must feel, and with respect to his neighbor, to do as he would be done by….
Hitherto we have spoken only (and that but in part) of the natural rights of man. We have now to consider the civil rights of man, and to show how the one originates from the other. Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured. His natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights. …
In casting our eyes over the world, it is extremely easy to distinguish the governments which have arisen out of society, or out of the social compact, from those which have not: but to place this in a clearer light than what a single glance may afford, it will be proper to take a review of the several sources from which the governments have arisen, and on which they have been founded.
They may be all comprehended under three heads. First, superstition. Secondly, power. Thirdly, the common interests of society, and the common rights of man.
The first was a government of priestcraft, the second of conquerors, and the third of reason. …
We have now to review the governments which arise out of society, in contradistinction to those which arose out of superstition and conquest.
It has been thought a considerable advance toward establishing the principles of freedom, to say, that government is a compact between those who govern and those who are governed: but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause, for as a man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governments to form such a compact with.
The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist. … The constitution of a country is not the act of its government, but of the people constituting a government. …
The authority of the present [National] Assembly [of France] is different to what the authority of future assemblies will be. The authority of the present one is to form a constitution; the authority of future assemblies will be to legislate according to the principles and forms prescribed in that constitution; and if experience should hereafter show that alterations, amendments, or additions are necessary, the constitution will point out the mode by which such things shall be done, and not leave it to the discretionary power of the future government. …
The Constitution of France says, that every man who pays a tax of sixty sous per annum (2s. and 6d. English) is an elector. What article will Mr. Burke place against this? Can anything be more limited, and at the same time more capricious, than what the qualifications are in England? …
The French Constitution says, that the number of representatives for any place shall be in a ratio to the number of taxable inhabitants or electors. What article will Mr. Burke place against this? The county of Yorkshire, which contains near a million souls, sends two county members; and so does the county of Rutland, which contains not a hundredth part of that number. …
The French Constitution says, there shall be no game laws; that the farmer on whose land wild game shall be found (for it is by the produce of those lands they are fed) shall have a right to what he can take. That there shall be no monopolies of any kind, that all trades shall be free, and every man free to follow any occupation by which he can procure an honest livelihood, and in any place, town, or city, throughout the nation. What will Mr. Burke say to this? …
The French Constitution says, there shall be no titles; and of consequence, all that class of equivocal generation, which in some countries is called “aristocracy,” and in others “nobility,” is done away, and the peer is exalted intoman.
Titles are but nicknames, and every nickname is a title. The thing is perfectly harmless in itself, but it marks a sort of foppery in the human character which degrades it. …
The French Constitution has reformed the condition of the clergy. It has raised the income of the lower and middle classes, and taken from the higher. None is now less than twelve hundred livres (fifty pounds sterling), nor any higher than about two or three thousand pounds. What will Mr. Burke place against this? …
The French Constitution has abolished tithes, that source of perpetual discontent between the tithe-holder and the parishioner. …
The French Constitution hath abolished or renounced toleration, and intolerance also, and hath established UNIVERSAL RIGHT OF CONSCIENCE. …
Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all law-religions, or religions established by law. Take away the law-establishment, and every religion reassumes its original benignity. In America, a Catholic priest is a good citizen, a good character, and a good neighbor; an Episcopal minister is of the same description: and this proceeds, independently of the men, from there being no law-establishment in America. …
By the French Constitution, the nation is always named before the king. The third article of the Declaration of Rights says, “ The nation is essentially the source (or fountain) of all sovereignty.” Mr. Burke argues, that, in England, a king is the fountain–that he is the fountain of all honor. … In contemplating the French Constitution, we see in it a rational order of things. …
One of the first works of the National Assembly, instead of vindictive proclamations, as has been the case with other governments, published a Declaration of the Rights of Man, as the basis on which the new Constitution was to be built. …
… We see the solemn and majestic spectacle of a nation opening its commission, under the auspices of its Creator, to establish a government; a scene so new, and so transcendently unequalled by any thing in the European world, that the name of a revolution is diminutive of its character, and it rises into a regeneration of man.
What are the present governments of Europe, but a scene of iniquity and oppression? What is that of England? Do not its own inhabitants say? It is a market where every man has his price, and where corruption is common traffic, at the expense of a deluded people? No wonder, then, that the French Revolution is traduced. …
Notwithstanding the nonsense, for it deserves not better name, that Mr. Burke has asserted about hereditary rights, and hereditary succession, and that a nation has not a right to form a government for itself; it happened to fall in his way to give some account of what government is. “Government,” say[s] he, “is a contrivance of human wisdom. ” …
Admitting that government is a contrivance of human wisdomm, it must necessarily follow, that hereditary succession, and hereditary rights (as they are called), can make no part of it, because it is impossible to make wisdom hereditary; and on the other hand, that cannot be a wise contrivance, which in its operation may commit the government of a nation to the wisdom of an idiot. The ground which Mr. Burke now takes, is fatal to every part of his cause. …
What were formerly called revolutions, were little more than a change of persons, or an alteration of local circumstances. … But what we now see in the world, from the revolutions of America and France, is a renovation of the natural order of things, a system of principles as universal as truth and the existence of man, and combining moral with political happiness and national prosperity. …
Government on the old system is an assumption of power for the aggrandizement of itself; on the new, a delegation of power, for the common benefit of society. The former supports itself by keeping up a system of war; the latter promotes a system of peace, as the true means of enriching a nation. The one encourages national prejudices; the other promotes universal society, as the means of universal commerce. The one measures its prosperity, by the quantity of revenue it extorts; the other proves its excellence, by the small quantity of taxes it requires. … The representative system takes society and civilization for its basis; nature, reason, and experience for its guide. …
Never did so great an opportunity offer itself to England, and to all Europe, as is produced by the two revolutions of America and France. By the former, freedom has a national champion in the western world; and by the latter, in Europe. When another nation shall join France, despotism and bad government will scarcely dare to appear. To use a trite expression, the iron is becoming hot all over Europe. The insulted German and the enslaved Spaniard, the Russ and the Pole are beginning to think. The present age will hereafter merit to be called the Age of Reason, and the present generation will appear to the future as the Adam of a new world.
A Feminist Analysis of Natural Law and the Rights of Women
Mary Wollstonecraft
(1792)
My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinatinggraces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists–I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity will soon become objects of contempt.
Dismissing those soft pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind, exquisite sensibility, and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, I wish to shew that elegance is inferior to virtue, that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex.
Youth is the season for love in both sexes; but in those days of thoughtless enjoyment provision should be made for the more important years of life, when reflection takes place of sensation. The woman who has only been taught to please will soon find that her charms are oblique sunbeams and that they cannot have much effect on her husband’s heart when they are seen every day, when the summer is passed and gone. Will she then have sufficient native energy to look into herself for comfort, and cultivate her dormant faculties? or, is it not more rational to expect that she will try to please other men?
Why must the female mind be tainted by coquettish arts to gratify the sensualist and prevent love from subsiding into friendship, or compassionate tenderness, when there are not qualities on which friendship can be built? Let the honest heart shew itself, and reason teach passion to submit to necessity; or, let the dignified pursuit of virtue and knowledge raise the mind above those emotions. …
If then women are not a swarm of ephemeron triflers, why should they be kept in ignorance under the specious name of innocence? … As to the argument respecting the subjection in which the sex has ever been held, it retorts on man. The many have always been enthralled by the few; and monsters, who scarcely have shown any discernment of human excellence, have tyrannized over thousands of their fellow-creatures. … China is not the only country where a living man has been made a God. Men have submitted to superior strength to enjoy with impunity the pleasure of the moment; womenhave only done the same, and therefore till it is proved that the courtier, who servilely resigns the birthright of a man, is not a moral agent, it cannot be demonstrated that woman is essentially inferior to man because she has always been subjugated.
The Napoleonic Code Regulates Gender
Napoleon I
(1804)
Of the Rights and Respective Duties of Husband and Wife
212. Husband and wife mutually owe to each other fidelity, succor, and assistance.
213. The husband owes protection to his wife, the wife obedience to her husband.
214. The wife is obliged to live with her husband, and to follow him wherever he may think proper to dwell; the husband is bound to receive her, and to furnish her with everything necessary for the purposes of life, according to his means and condition.
215. The wife can do no act in law without the authority of her husband. …
Of Causes of Divorce
229. The husband may demand divorce for cause of adultery on the part of his wife.
230. The wife may demand divorce for cause of adultery on the part of her husband, where he shall have kept his concubine in their common house.
Of the Effects of Divorce
298. In the case of divorce allowed at law for cause of adultery, the guilty party can never marry his or her accomplice. The adulterous wife shall be condemned by the same judgment, and upon the requisition of the public ministry, to confinement in a house of correction for a certain period, which shall not be less than three months, nor exceed two years.
The Imperial Catechism Hangs a New Star in God’s Firmament
French Catholic Church
(1806)
Question. What are the duties of Christians toward those who govern them, and what in particular are our duties towards Napoleon I, our emperor?
Answer. Christians owe to the princes who govern them, and we in particular owe to Napoleon I, our emperor, love, respect, obedience, fidelity, military service, and the taxes levied for the preservation and defense of the empire and of his throne. We also owe him fervent prayers for his safety and for the spiritual and temporal prosperity of the state.
Question. Why are we subject to all these duties toward our emperor?
Answer. First, because God, who has created empires and distributes them according to his will, has, by loading our emperor with gifts both in peace and in war, established him as our sovereign and made him the agent of his power and his image upon earth. To honor and serve our emperor is therefore to honor and serve God himself. Secondly, because our Lord Jesus Christ himself, both by his teaching and his example, has taught us what we owe to our sovereign. Even at his very birth he obeyed the edict of Caesar Augustus; he paid the established tax; and while he commanded us to render to God those things which belong to God, he also commanded us to render unto Caesar those things which are Caesar’s.
Question. Are there not special motives which should attach us more closely to Napoleon I, our emperor?
Answer. Yes, for it is he whom God has raised up in trying times to re‘stablish the public worship of the holy religion of our fathers and to be its protector; he has re‘tablished and preserved public order by his profound and active wisdom; he defends the state by his mighty arm; he has become the anointed of the Lord by the consecration which he has received from the sovereign pontiff, head of the Church universal.
Question. What must we think of those who are wanting in their duties toward our emperor?
Answer. According to the apostle Paul, they are resisting the order established by God himself and render themselves worthy of eternal damnation.
Prussia Abolishes Serfdom: The Reform Edict of 1807
Frederick William III
(1807)
We, Frederick William, by the grace of God king of Prussia, etc., etc., hereby make known and proclaim that: Since peace has been established we have been occupied before everything else with the care for the depressed condition of our faithful subjects and the speediest revival and greatest possible improvement in this respect. We have considered that, in face of the prevailing want, the means at our disposal would be insufficient to aid each individual, and even if they were sufficient, we could not hope to accomplish our object; and that, moreover, in accordance with the imperative demands of justice and with the principles of a judicious economic policy, it behooves us to remove every obstacle which has hitherto prevented the individual from attaining such a state of prosperity as he was capable of reaching. We have further considered that the existing restrictions, both on the possession and enjoyment of landed property and on the personal condition of the agricultural laborer, especially interfere with our benevolent purpose and disable a great force which might be applied to the restoration of agriculture,–the former, by their prejudicial influence upon the value of landed property and the credit of the proprietor; the latter, by diminishing the value of labor. We desire, therefore, to reduce both kinds of restrictions so far as the common well-being demands, and we accordingly ordain the following.
1. Every inhabitant of our states is competent, without any limitation on the part of the state, to own or mortgage landed property of every kind. The noble may therefore own not only noble, but also non-noble, citizen and peasant lands of every kind, and the citizen and peasant may possess not only citizen, peasant, and other non-noble, but also noble tracts of land without in any case needing special permission for any acquisition whatever, although henceforth, as before, every change of ownership must be announced to the authorities. All privileges which are possessed by noble over citizen inheritances are entirely abolished. …
2. Every noble is henceforth permitted, without any derogation from his station, to engage in citizen occupation, and every citizen or peasant is allowed to pass from the citizen into the peasant class or from the peasant into the citizen class. …
10. From the date of this ordinance no new relation of serfdom, whether by birth or marriage, or by assuming the position of a serf, or by contract, can be created.
11. With the publication of the present ordinance the existing relations of serfdom of those serfs, with their wives and children, who possess their peasant holdings by inheritance, or in their own right, or by perpetual leases, or of copyhold, shall cease entirely, together with all mutual rights and duties.
12. From Martinmas, one thousand eight hundred and ten (1810), all serfdom shall cease throughout our whole realm. From Martinmas, 1810, there shall be only free persons, as is already the case upon the royal domains in all our provinces,–free persons, however, still subject, as a matter of course, to all obligations which bind them, as free persons, by reason of the possession of an estate or by virtue of a special contract.
To this declaration of our supreme will every one whom it may concern, and in particular our provincial authorities and other officials, are exactly and dutifully to conform, and the present ordinance is to be universally made known.
Napoleon I “Enlightens” Spain
Napoleon I
(1808)
To date from the publication of the present decree, feudal rights are abolished in Spain.
All personal obligations, all exclusive fishing rights and other rights of similar nature on the coast or on rivers and streams, all feudal monopolies ( banalites) of ovens, mills, and inns are suppressed. It shall be free to every one who shall conform to the laws to develop his industry without restraint.
The tribunal of the Inquisition is abolished, as inconsistent with the civil sovereignty and authority.
The property of the Inquisition shall be sequestered and fall to the Spanish state, to serve as security for the bonded debt.
Considering that the members of the various monastic orders have increased to an undue degree and that, although a certain number of them are useful in assisting the ministers of the altar in the administration of the sacraments, the existence of too great a number interferes with the prosperity of the state, we have decreed and do decree as follows:
The number of convents now in existence in Spain shall be reduced to a third of their present number. This reduction shall be accomplished by uniting the members of several convents of the same order into one.
From the publication of the present decree, no one shall be admitted to the novitiate or permitted to take the monastic vow until the number of the religious of both sexes has been reduced to one third of that now in existence. …
All regular ecclesiastics who desire to renounce the monastic life and live as secular ecclesiastics are at liberty to leave their monasteries. …
In view of the fact that the institution which stands most in the way of the internal prosperity of Spain is that of the customs lines separating the provinces, we have decreed and do decree what follows:
To date from January 1 next, the barriers existing between the provinces shall be suppressed. The custom houses shall be removed to the frontiers and there established.
The Grande Armee in Retreat: the Russian Campaign
Benjamin Constant
(1812)
On the 25th of November [1812] there had been thrown across the river temporary bridges made of beams taken from the cabins of the Poles. … At a little after five in the afternoon the beams gave way, not being sufficiently strong; and as it was necessary to wait until the next day, the army again abandoned itself to gloomy forebodings. It was evident that they would have to endure the fire of the enemy all the next day. But there was no longer any choice; for it was only at the end of this night of agony and suffering of every description that the first beams were secured in the river. It is hard to comprehend how men could submit to stand, up to their mouths in water filled with ice, rallying all the strength which nature had given them, added to all that the energy of devotion furnished, and drive piles several feet deep into a miry bed, struggling against the most horrible fatigue, pushing back with their hands enormous blocks of ice which threatened to submerge and sink them. …
The emperor awaited daylight in a poor hut, and in the morning said to Prince Berthier, “Well, Berthier, how do we get out of this?” He was seated in his room, great tears flowing down his cheeks, which were paler than usual and the prince was seated near him. They exchanged words, and the emperor appeared overcome by his grief, leave to the imagination what was passing in his soul.
When the artillery and baggage wagons passed, the bridge was so overweighted that it fell in. Instantly a backward movement took place, which crowded together all the magnitude of stragglers who were advancing in the rear of the artillery, like a flock being herded. Another bridge had been constructed, as if the sad thought had occurred that the first might give way, but the second was narrow and without a railing; nevertheless it seemed at first a very valuable makeshift in such a calamity. But how disasters follow one upon another! The stragglers rushed to the second bridge in crowds. But the artillery, the baggage wagons,–a word, all the army supplies,–had been in front on the first bridge when it broke down. … Now, since it was urgent that the artillery should pass first, it rushed impetuously toward the only road to safety which remained. No one can describe the scene of horror which ensued; for it was literally over a road of trampled human bodies that conveyances of all sorts reached the bridge. On this occasion one could see how much brutality and cold-blooded ferocity can be produced in human minds by the instinct of self-preservation. … As I have said, the bridge had no railing; and crowds of those who forced their way across fell into the river and were engulfed beneath the ice. Others, in the fall, tried to stop themselves by grasping the planks of the bridge, and remained suspended over the abyss until, their hands crushed by the wheels of the vehicles, they lost their grasp and went to join their comrades as the waves closed over them. Entire caissons with drivers and horses were precipitated into the water. …
Officers harnessed themselves to sleds to carry some of their companions who were rendered helpless by their wounds. They wrapped these unfortunates as warmly as possible, cheered them from time to time with a glass of brandy when they could procure it, and lavished upon them the most touching attention. There were many who behaved in this unselfish manner, of whose names we are ignorant; and how few returned to enjoy in their own country the remembrance of the most heroic deeds of their lives!
On the 29th the emperor quitted the banks of the Beretina and we slept at Kamen, where his Majesty occupied a poor wooden building which the icy air penetrated from all sides through the windows, for nearly all the glass was broken. We closed the openings as well as we could with bundles of hay. A short distance from us, in a large lot, were penned up the wretched Russian prisoners whom the army drove before it. I had much difficulty in comprehending the delusion of victory which our poor soldiers still kept up by dragging after them this wretched luxury of prisoners, who could only be an added burden, as they required constant surveillance. When the conquerors are dying of famine, what becomes of the conquered? These poor Russians, exhausted by marches and hunger, nearly all perished that night. …
[Napoleon secretly decided to leave his stricken army and return to France as quickly as possible.] The emperor left in the night. By daybreak the army had learned the news, and the impression it made cannot be depicted. Discouragement was at its height, and many soldiers cursed the emperor and reproached him for abandoning them.
This night, the 6th [of December], the cold increased greatly. Its severity may be imagined, as birds were found on the ground frozen stiff. Soldiers seated themselves with their heads in their hands and bodies bent forward in order thus to feel less the emptiness of their stomachs. … Everything had failed us. Long before reaching Wilna [Vilnius, today in Lithuania], the horses being dead, we received orders to burn our carriages and all their contents.
Constitutional Monarchy in France, Again
Louis XVIII
(1814)
Louis by the Grace of God, King of France and Navarre–to all those to whom these presents come, salutation. Divine Providence in recalling us to our estates after a long absence has imposed grave responsibilities upon us. Peace was the first necessity of our subjects, and we have unceasingly occupied ourselves with this. That peace, so essential to France and to the rest of Europe has been signed. A constitutional charter was demanded by the existing condition of the kingdom, we promised this and now publish it. We have taken into consideration the fact that although the whole authority in France resides in the person of the king, our predecessors have not hesitated to modify the exercise of this in accordance with the differences of the times. It was thus that the communes owed their enfranchisement to Louis the Fat, the confirmation and extension of their rights to Saint Louis and Philip the Fair, and that the judicial system was established and developed by the laws of Louis XI, Henry II, and Charles IX. It was in this way finally that Louis XIV regulated almost every portion of the public administration by various ordinances which have never been surpassed in wisdom. We, like the kings our predecessors, have had to consider the effects of the ever increasing progress of knowledge, the new relations which this progress has introduced into society, the direction given to the public mind during half a century and the serious troubles resulting therefrom. We have perceived that the wish of our subjects for a constitutional charter was the expression of a real need, but in yielding to this wish we have taken every precaution that this charter should be worthy of us and of the people whom we are proud to rule. Able men taken from the first bodies of the state were added to the commissioners of our council to elaborate this important work. While we recognize that the expectations of enlightened Europe ought to be gratified by a free monarchical constitution, we have had to remember that our first duty toward our peoples was to preserve for their own interest the rights and prerogatives of our crown. We hope that, taught by experience, they may be convinced that the supreme authority can alone give to institutions which it establishes the power, permanence and dignity with which it is itself clothed. That, consequently, when the wisdom of kings freely harmonizes with the wish of the peoples, a constitutional charter may long endure, but that when concessions are snatched with violence from a weak government, public liberty is not less endangered than the throne itself.
We have sought the principles of the constitutional charter in the French character and in the venerable monuments of past centuries. Thus we perceived in the revival of the peerage a truly national institution which binds memories to hope, by uniting ancient and modern times. We have replaced by the chamber of deputies, those ancient assemblies of the March Field and May Field, and those chambers of the third estate which so often exhibited at once proof of their zeal for the interests of the people, and fidelity and respect for the authority of kings. In thus endeavoring to renew the chain of time which fatal excesses had broken, we effaced from our memory, as we would we might blot out from history, all the evils which have afflicted the country during our absence. Happy to find ourselves again in the bosom of our great family, we could only respond to the love of which we receive so many testimonies by uttering words of peace and consolation. The dearest wish of our heart is that all the French may live like brothers, and that no bitter memory should ever trouble the security which ought to follow the solemn act which we grant them to-day.
Confident in our intentions, strong in our conscience, we engage ourselves before the assembly which listens to us to be faithful to this Constitutional Charter, with the intention of swearing to maintain it with added solemnity before the altars of Him who weighs in the same balance kings and nations.
For these reasons we have voluntarily and by the free exercise of our royal authority granted and do grant, concede and accord, as well for us as for our successors forever, the Constitutional Charter as follows: …
Turgot Prepares Louis XVI for the Resistance to Fiscal Reform and Budgetary Retrenchment
Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot
(1774)
Compiegne, August 24, 1774.
Sire:
Having just come from the private interview with which your Majesty has honored me, still full of the anxiety produced by the immensity of the duties now imposed upon me, agitated by all the feelings excited by the touching kindness with which you have encouraged me, I hasten to convey to you my respectful gratitude and the devotion of my whole life.
Your Majesty has been good enough to permit me to place on record the engagement you have taken upon you to sustain me in the execution of those plans of economy which are at all times, and to-day more than ever, an indispensable necessity. … At this moment, sire, I confine myself to recalling to you these three items:
No bankruptcy.
No increase of taxes.
No loans.
No bankruptcy, either avowed or disguised by illegal reductions.
No increase of taxes; the reason for this lying in the condition of your people, and, still more, in that of your Majesty’s own generous heart.
No loans; because every loan always diminishes the free revenue and necessitates, at the end of a certain time, either bankruptcy or the increase of taxes. In times of peace it is permissible to borrow only in order to liquidate old debts, or in order to redeem other loans contracted on less advantageous terms.
To meet these three points there is but one means. It is to reduce expenditure below the revenue, and sufficiently below it to insure each year a saving of twenty millions, to be applied to redemption of the old debts. Without that, the first gunshot will force the state into bankruptcy.
The question will be asked incredulously, “On what can we retrench?” and each one, speaking for his own department, will maintain that nearly every particular item of expense is indispensable. They will be able to allege very good reasons, but these must all yield to the absolute necessity of economy. …
These are the matters which I have been permitted to recall to your Majesty. You will not forget that in accepting the place of comptroller general I have felt the full value of the confidence with which you honor me; I have felt that you intrust to me the happiness of your people, and, if it be permitted to me to say so, the care of promoting among your people the love of your person and of your authority.
At the same time I feel all the danger to which I expose myself. I foresee that I shall be alone in fighting against abuses of every kind, against the power of those who profit by these abuses, against the crowd of prejudiced people who oppose themselves to all reform, and who are such powerful instruments in the hands of interested parties for perpetuating the disorder. I shall have to struggle even against the natural goodness and generosity of your Majesty, and of the persons who are most dear to you. I shall be feared, hated even, by nearly all the court, by all who solicit favors. They will impute to me all the refusals; they will describe me as a hard man because I shall have advised your Majesty that you ought not to enrich even those that you love at the expense of your people’s subsistence.
And this people, for whom I shall sacrifice myself, are so easily deceived that perhaps I shall encounter their hatred by the very measures I take to defend them against exactions. I shall be calumniated (having, perhaps, appearances against me) in order to deprive me of your Majesty’s confidence. I shall not regret losing a place which I never solicited. I am ready to resign it to your Majesty as soon as I can no longer hope to be useful in it. …
Your Majesty will remember that it is upon the faith of your promises made to me that I charge myself with a burden perhaps beyond my strength, and it is to yourself personally, to the upright man, the just and good man, rather than to the king, that I give myself.
I venture to repeat here what you have already been kind enough to hear and approve of. The affecting kindness with which you condescended to press my hands within your own, as if sealing my devotion, will never be effaced from my memory. It will sustain my courage. It has forever united my personal happiness with the interest, the glory, and the happiness of your Majesty. It is with these sentiments that I am, sire, etc.
Turgot Abolishes the French Guilds
Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot
(1774)
In almost all the towns the exercise of the different arts and trades is concentrated in the hands of a small number of masters, united in corporations, who alone can, to the exclusion of all other citizens, make or sell the articles belonging to their particular industry. Any person who, by inclination or necessity, intends following an art or trade can only do so by acquiring the mastership [i.e., freedom of the corporation] after a probation as long and vexatious as it is superfluous. By having to satisfy repeated exactions, the money he had so much need of in order to start his trade or open his workshop has been consumed in mere waste. …
Citizens of all classes are deprived both of the right to choose the workmen they would employ, and of the advantages they would enjoy from competition operating toward improvements in manufacture and reduction in price. Often one cannot get the simplest work done without its having to go through the hands of several workmen of different corporations, and without enduring the delays, tricks, and exaction which the pretensions of the different corporations, and the caprices of their arbitrary and mercenary directors, demand and encourage. …
Among the infinite number of unreasonable regulations, we find in some corporations that all are excluded from them except the sons of masters, or those who marry the widows of masters. Others reject all those whom they call “strangers,”–that is, those born in another town. In many of them for a young man to be married is enough to exclude him from the apprenticeship, and consequently from the mastership. The spirit of monopoly which has dictated the making of these statutes has been carried out to the excluding of women even from the trades the most suitable to their sex, such as embroidery, which they are forbidden to exercise on their own account. …
God, by giving to man wants, and making his recourse to work necessary to supply them, has made the right to work the property of every man, and this property is the first, the most sacred, the most imprescriptible of all. …
It shall be free to all persons, of whatever quality or condition they may be, even to all foreigners, to undertake and to exercise in all our kingdom, and particularly in our good city of Paris, whatever kind of trade and whatever profession of art or industry may seem good to them; for which purpose we now extinguish and suppress all corporations and communities of merchants and artisans, as well as all masterships and guild directories. We abrogate all privileges, statutes, and regulations of the said corporations, so that none of our subjects shall be troubled in the exercise of his trade or profession by any cause or under any pretext whatever.
William Pitt Gives a Whiggish Defense of American Resistance to Taxation
William Pitt
(1775)
This resistance to your arbitrary system of taxation might have been foreseen; it was obvious from the nature of things and of mankind, and, above all, from the Whiggish spirit flourishing in that country. The spirit which now resists your taxation in America is the same which formerly opposed loans, benevolences, and ship money in England; the same spirit which called all England on its legs, and by the Bill of Rights vindicated the English constitution; the same spirit which established the great, fundamental, essential maxim of your liberties, that no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent.
This glorious spirit of Whiggism animates three millions in America, who prefer poverty with liberty to gilded chains and sordid affluence, and who will die in the defense of their rights as men, as free men. What shall oppose this spirit, aided by the congenial flame glowing in the breast of every Whig in England, to the amount, I hope, of double the American numbers? Ireland they have to a man. In that country, joined as it is with the cause of the colonies, and placed at their head, the distinction I contend for is and must be observed. This country superintends and controls their trade and navigation, but they tax themselves. And this distinction between external and internal control is sacred and insurmountable; it is involved in the abstract nature of things. Property is private, individual, absolute. Trade is an extended and complicated consideration; it reaches as far as ships can sail or winds can blow; it is a great and various machine. To regulate the numberless movements of the several parts and combine them into effect for the good of the whole, requires the superintending wisdom and energy of the supreme power in the empire. But this supreme power has no effect towards internal taxation, for it does not exist in that relation; there is no such thing, no such idea in this constitution, as a supreme power operating upon property. Let this distinction then remain forever ascertained: taxation is theirs, commercial regulation is ours. As an American, I would recognize to England her supreme right of regulating commerce and navigation; as an Englishman by birth and principle, I recognize to the Americans their supreme unalienable right in their property,–a right which they are justified in the defense of to the last extremity. To maintain this principle is the common cause of the Whigs on the other side of the Atlantic and on this. “‘Tis liberty to liberty engaged,” that they will defend themselves, their families, and their country. In this great cause they are immovably allied: it is the alliance of God and nature,–immovable, eternal, fixed as the firmament of heaven.
Arthur Young’s Travels in France on the Eve of the Revolution
Arthur Young
(1787)
October 17, 1787 . … Dined to-day with a party whose conversation was entirely political. Monsieur de Calonne’s Requete au Roi is come over, and all the world are reading and disputing on it. It seems, however, generally agreed that, without exonerating himself from the charge of the agiotage, he has thrown no inconsiderable load on the shoulders of the Archbishop of Toulouse, the present premier, who will be puzzled to get rid of the attack. But both these ministers were condemned on all hands in the lump as being absolutely unequal to the difficulties of so arduous a period. One opinion pervaded the whole company, that they are on the eve of some great revolution in the government: that everything points to it: the confusion in the finances great; with a deficit impossible to provide for without the estates-general of the kingdom, yet no ideas formed of what would be the consequence of their meeting: no minister existing, or to be looked to in or out of power, with such decisive talents as to promise any other remedy than palliative ones: a prince on the throne, with excellent dispositions, but without the resources of a mind that could govern in such a moment without ministers: a court buried in pleasure and dissipation; and adding to the distress instead of endeavouring to be placed in a more independent situation: a great ferment amongst all ranks of men, who are eager for some change, without knowing what to look to or to hope for: and a strong leaven of liberty, increasing every hour since the American revolution–altogether form a combination of circumstances that promise e’er long to ferment into motion if some master hand of very superior talents and inflexible courage is not found at the helm to guide events, instead of being driven by them. It is very remarkable that such conversation never occurs but a bankruptcy is a topic: the curious question on which is, would a bankruptcy occasion a civil war and a total overthrow of the government? The answers that I have received to this question appear to be just: such a measure conducted by a man of abilities, vigour, and firmness would certainly not occasion either one or the other. But the same measure, attempted by a man of a different character, might possibly do both. All agree that the states of the kingdom cannot assemble without more liberty being the consequence; but I meet with so few men that have any just ideas of freedom that I question much the species of this new liberty that is to arise. They know not how to value the privileges of THE PEOPLE: as to the nobility and the clergy, if a revolution added anything to their scale I think it would do more mischief than good. …
October 25, 1787. This great city [Paris] appears to be in many respects the most ineligible and inconvenient for the residence of a person of small fortune of any that I have seen; and vastly inferior to London. The streets are very narrow, and many of them crowded, ninetenths dirty, and all without foot-pavements. Walking, which in London is so pleasant and so clean that ladies do it every day, is here a toil and a fatigue to a man and an impossibility to a well-dressed woman. The coaches are numerous, and, what are much worse, there are an infinity of one-horse cabriolets which are driven by young men of fashion and their imitators, alike fools, with such rapidity as to be real nuisances, and render the streets exceedingly dangerous without an incessant caution. I saw a poor child run over and probably killed, and have been myself many times blackened with the mud of the kennels. This beggarly practice of driving a one-horse booby hutch about the streets of a great capital flows either from poverty or wretched and despicable economy; nor is it possible to speak of it with too much severity. If young noblemen at London were to drive their chaises in streets without foot-ways, as their brethren do at Paris, they would speedily and justly get very well thrashed or rolled in the kennel. This circumstance renders Paris an ineligible residence for persons, particularly families, that cannot afford to keep a coach; a convenience which is as dear as at London. The fiacres, hackney-coaches, are much worse than at that city; and chairs there are none, for they would be driven down in the streets. To this circumstance also it is owing that all persons of small or moderate fortune are forced to dress in black, with black stockings; the dusky hue of this in company is not so disagreeable a circumstance as being too great a distinction; too clear a line drawn in company between a man that has a good fortune and another that has not. With the pride, arrogance, and ill-temper of English wealth this could not be borne; but the prevailing good humour of the French eases all such untoward circumstances. Lodgings are not half so good as at London, yet considerably dearer. If you do not hire a whole suite of rooms at a hotel, you must probably mount three, four, or five pair of stairs, and in general have nothing but a bed-chamber. After the horrid fatigue of the streets, such an elevation is a delectable circumstance. You must search with trouble before you will be lodged in a private family as gentlemen usually are at London, and pay a higher price. Servants’ wages are about the same as at that city. It is to be regretted that Paris should have these disadvantages, for in other respects I take it to be a most eligible residence for such as prefer a great city. The society for a man of letters, or who has any scientific pursuit, cannot be exceeded. The intercourse between such men and the great, which, if it is not upon an equal footing, ought never to exist at all, is reflict. As you read, bear in mind the differing interpretations and how each section supports or detracts from the two interpretations. spectable. Persons of the highest rank pay an attention to science and literature, and emulate the character they confer. I should pity the man who expected, without other advantages of a very different nature, to be well received in a brilliant circle at London because he was a fellow of the Royal Society. But this would not be the case with a member of the Academy of Sciences at Paris; he is sure of a good reception everywhere. Perhaps this contrast depends in a great measure on the difference of the governments of the two countries. Politics are too much attended to in England to allow a due respect to be paid to anything else; and should the French establish a freer government, academicians will not be held in such estimation when rivalled in the public esteem by the orators who hold forth liberty and property in a free parliament.
Condorcet Affirms the Inevitability of Progress
Antoine Nicolas de Condorcet
(1794)
The aim of the book that I have undertaken to write, and what it will prove, is that man by using reason and facts will attain perfection. Nature has set no limits to the perfection of the human faculties. The perfectibility of mankind is truly indefinite; and the progress of this perfectibility, henceforth to be free of all hindrances, will last as long as the globe on which nature has placed us. Doubtless this progress will be more or less rapid, but it will never retrograde, at least as long as the globe occupies its present place in the system of the universe; and unless the general laws that govern this system bring to pass a universal cataclysm, or such changes as will prevent man from maintaining his existence, from using his faculties, and from finding his needed resources. …
Since the period when alphabetical writing flourished in Greece the history of mankind has been linked to the condition of man of our time in the most enlightened countries of Europe by an unbroken chain of facts and observations. The picture of the march and progress of the human mind is now revealed as being truly historical. Philosophy no longer has to guess, no longer has to advance hypothetical theories. It now suffices to assemble and to arrange the facts, and to show the truths that arise from their connection and from their totality. …
If man can predict with almost complete certainty those phenomena whose laws he knows; and if, when he does not know these laws, he can, on the basis of his experience in the past, predict future events with assurance why then should it be regarded as chimerical to trace with a fair degree of accuracy the picture of man’s future on the basis of his history? The sole foundation for belief in the natural sciences is the principle that universal laws, known or unknown, which regulate the universe are necessary and constant. Why then should this principle be less true for the development of the intellectual and moral faculties of man than it is for the other operations of nature? Finally, since beliefs, based on past experience under like conditions, constitute the only rule according to which the wisest men act, why then forbid the philosopher to support his beliefs on the same foundations, as long as he does not attribute to them a certainty not warranted by the number, the constancy, and the accuracy of his observations. …
A Russian Serf Explains the Facts of Life to an Enlightened Russian Nobleman
Alexander Radishchev
(1790)
A few steps from the road I saw a peasant ploughing a field. The weather was hot. I looked at my watch. It was twenty minutes before one. I had set out on Saturday. It was now Sunday. The ploughing peasant, of course, belonged to a landed proprietor, who would not let him pay [dues in money or kind (obrok)]. The peasant was ploughing very carefully. The field, of course, was not part of his master’s land. He turned the plough with astonishing ease.
“God help you,” I said, walking up to the ploughman, who, without stopping, was finishing the furrow he had started. “God help you,” I repeated.
“Thank you, sir,” the ploughman said to me, shaking the earth off the ploughshare and transferring it to a new furrow.
“You must be a Dissenter [Old Believer], since you plough on a Sunday.”
“No, sir, I make the true sign of the cross,” he said, showing me the three fingers together. “And God is merciful and does not bid us starve to death, so long as we have strength and a family.”
“Have you no time to work during the week, then, and can you not have any rest on Sundays, in the hottest part of the day, at that?”
“In a week, sir, there are six days, and we go six times a week to work on the master’s fields; in the evening, if the weather is good, we haul to the master’s house the hay that is left in the woods; and on holidays the women and girls go walking in the woods, looking for mushrooms and berries. God grant,” he continued, making the sign of the cross, “that it rains this evening. If you have peasants of your own, sir, they are praying to God for the same thing.”
“My friend, I have no peasants, and so nobody curses me. Do you have a large family?”
“Three sons and three daughters. The eldest is nine years old.”
“But how do you manage to get food enough, if you have only the holidays free?”
“Not only the holidays: the nights are ours, too. If a fellow isn’t lazy, he won’t starve to death. You see, one horse is resting; and when this one gets tired, I’ll take the other; so the work gets done.”
“Do you work the same way for your master?”
“No, sir, it would be a sin to work the same way. On his fields there are a hundred hands for one mouth, while I have two for seven mouths: you can figure it out for yourself. No matter how hard you work for the master, no one will thank you for it. The master will not pay our head [soul] tax; but, though he doesn’t pay it, he doesn’t demand one sheep, one hen, or any linen or butter the less. The peasants are much better off where the landlord lets them pay a commutation tax [obrok] without the interference of the steward. It is true that sometimes even good masters take more than three rubles a man; but even that’s better than having to work on the master’s fields. Nowadays it’s getting to be the custom to let [lease] villages to [noble] tenants, as they call it. But we call it putting our heads in a noose. A landless tenant skins us peasants alive; even the best ones don’t leave us any time for ourselves. In the winter he won’t let us do any carting of goods and won’t let us go into town to work; all our work has to be for him, because he pays our head tax. It is an invention of the Devil to turn your peasants over to work for a stranger. You can make a complaint against a bad steward, but to whom can you complain against a bad tenant?”
“My friend, you are mistaken; the laws forbid them to torture people.”
“Torture? That’s true; but all the same, sir, you would not want to be in my hide.” Meanwhile the ploughman hitched up the other horse to the plough and bade me good-bye as he began a new furrow.
The words of this peasant awakened in me a multitude of thoughts. I thought especially of the inequality of treatment within the peasant class. I compared the [state] peasants with the [proprietary] peasants. They both live in villages; but the former pay a fixed sum, while the latter must be prepared to pay whatever their master demands. The former are judged by their equals; the latter are dead to the law, except, perhaps, in criminal cases. A member of society becomes known to the government protecting him, only when he breaks the social bonds, when he becomes a criminal! This thought made my blood boil.
The Federalist Explains the Necessity for the Separation of Government Power
James Madison
(1788)
To what expedient then shall we finally resort for maintaining in practice the necessary partition of power among the several departments, as laid down in the constitution? The only answer that can be given is, that as all these exterior provisions are found to be inadequate, the defect must be supplied, by so contriving the interior structure of the government, as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places. …
… [T]he great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department, the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional right of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
This policy of supplying by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power; where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other; that the private interest of every individual, may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the state.
The Third Estate Speaks: The Cahier de Doleances of the Carcassonne
Commissioners of Third Estate of the Carcassonne Elect Oral District to the Estates General
(1789)
The third estate of the electoral district of Carcassonne, desiring to give to a beloved monarch, and one so worthy of our affection, the most unmistakable proof of its love and respect, of its gratitude and fidelity, desiring to cooperate with the whole nation in repairing the successive misfortunes which have overwhelmed it, and with the hope of reviving once more its ancient glory, declares that the happiness of the nation must, in their opinion, depend upon that of its king, upon the stability of the monarchy, and upon the preservation of the orders which compose it and of the fundamental laws which govern it.
Considering, too, that a holy respect for religion, morality, civil liberty, and the rights of property, a speedy return to true principles, a careful selection and due measure in the matter of the taxes, a strict proportionality in their assessment, a persistent economy in government expenditures, and indispensable reforms in all branches of the administration, are the best and perhaps the only means of perpetuating the existence of the monarchy;
The third estate of the electoral district of Carcassonne very humbly petitions his Majesty to take into consideration these several matters, weigh them in his wisdom, and permit his people to enjoy, as soon as may be, fresh proofs of that benevolence which he has never ceased to exhibit toward them and which is dictated by his affection for them.
In view of the obligation imposed by his Majesty’s command that the third estate of this district should confide to his paternal ear the causes of the ills which afflict them and the means by which they may be remedied or moderated, they believe that they are fulfilling the duties of faithful subjects and zealous citizens in submitting to the consideration of the nation, and to the sentiments of justice and affection which his Majesty entertains for his subjects, the following:
1. Public worship should be confined to the Roman Catholic apostolic religion, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship; its extension should be promoted and the most efficient measures taken to reestablish the discipline of the Church and increase its prestige.
2. Nevertheless the civil rights of those of the king’s subjects who are not Catholics should be confirmed, and they should be admitted to positions and offices in the public administration, without however extending this privilege–which reason and humanity alike demand for them–to judicial or police functions or to those of public instruction.
3. The nation should consider some means of abolishing the annates and all other dues paid to the holy see, to the prejudice and against the protests of the whole French people. …
[The holding of multiple church positions should be prohibited, monasteries reduced in numbers, and holidays suppressed or decreased.]
7. The rights which have just been restored to the nation should be consecrated as fundamental principles of the monarchy, and their perpetual and unalterable enjoyment should be assured by a solemn law, which should so define the rights both of the monarch and of the people that their violation shall hereafter be impossible.
8. Among these rights the following should be especially noted: the nation should hereafter be subject only to such laws and taxes as it shall itself freely ratify.
9. The meetings of the Estates General of the kingdom should be fixed for definite periods, and the subsidies judged necessary for the support of the state and the public service should be voted for no longer a period than to the close of the year in which the next meeting of the Estates General is to occur.
10. In order to assure to the third estate the influence to which it is entitled in view of the number of its members, the amount of its contributions to the public treasury, and the manifold interests which it has to defend or promote in the national assemblies, its votes in the assembly should be taken and counted by head.
11. No order, corporation, or individual citizen may lay claim to any pecuniary exemptions. … All taxes should be assessed on the same system throughout the nation.
12. The due exacted from commoners holding fiefs should be abolished, and also the general or particular regulations which exclude members of the third estate from certain positions, offices, and ranks which have hitherto been bestowed on nobles either for life or hereditarily. A law should be passed declaring members of the third estate qualified to fill all such offices for which they are judged to be personally fitted.
13. Since individual liberty is intimately associated with national liberty, his Majesty is hereby petitioned not to permit that it be hereafter interfered with by arbitrary orders for imprisonment. …
14. Freedom should be granted also to the press, which should however be subjected, by means of strict regulations, to the principles of religion, morality, and public decency. …
60. The third estate of the district of Carcassonne places its trust, for the rest, in the zeal, patriotism, honor, and probity of its deputies in the National Assembly in all matters which may accord with the beneficent views of his Majesty, the welfare of the kingdom, the union of the three estates, and the public peace.
A Royalist Perspective on The Opening of the Estates General
Madame Jeanne Louis Genet de Campan
(1789)
The Estates General opened May 4 [1789]. For the last time the queen appeared in royal magnificence. … The first session of the Estates was held next day. The king delivered his address with assurance and dignity. The queen told me that he gave the matter much attention, and rehearsed his speech frequently in order to be quite master of the intonations of his voice. His Majesty gave public indications of his attachment and deference for the queen, who was applauded; but it was easy to see that the applause was really meant for the king alone.
From the very early sessions it was clear that Mirabeau would prove very dangerous to the government. It is alleged that he revealed at this time to the king, and more particularly to the queen, a part of the plans he had in mind, and the conditions upon which he would abandon them. He had already exhibited the weapons with which his eloquence and audacity furnished him, in order that he might open negotiations with the party he proposed to attack. This man played at revolution in order to gain a fortune. The queen told me at this time that he asked for an embassy,–Constantinople, if I remember rightly. He was refused with that proper contempt which vice inspires, but which policy would doubtless best have disguised, if the future could have been foreseen.
The general enthusiasm which prevailed during the early sessions of the Assembly, the discussions among the deputies of the third estate and nobility, and even of the clergy, filled their Majesties and those attached to the cause of monarchy with increasing alarm. … The deputies of the third estate arrived at Versailles with the deepest prejudices against the court. The wicked sayings of Paris never fail to spread throughout the provinces. The deputies believed that the king indulged in the pleasures of the table to a shameful excess. They were persuaded that the queen exhausted the treasury of the state to gratify the most unreasonable luxury.
Almost all wished to visit the Little Trianon.[1] The extreme simplicity of this pleasure house did not correspond with their ideas. Some insisted that they be shown even the smallest closets, on the ground that some richly furnished apartments were being concealed from them. At last they designated one which they declared was said to be decorated throughout with diamonds and twisted columns set with sapphires and rubies. The queen could not get these silly ideas out of her head and told the king about them. He thought from the description of the room furnished to the guards in the Trianon, that the deputies had in mind the decoration of imitation diamonds in the theater at Fontainebleau constructed in Louis XV’s reign.
[1] A simple little pleasure house in a secluded part of the gardens at Versailles, much beloved by the queen.
An English Commentator Reports on the Opening of the Estates General
Arthur Young
(1789)
The king, court, nobility, clergy, army, and parliament [parlements] are nearly in the same situation. All these consider with equal dread the ideas of liberty now afloat, except the first, who, for reasons obvious to those who know his character, troubles himself little, even with circumstances that concern his power the most intimately. …
The business going forward at present in the pamphlet shops of Paris is incredible. I went to the Palais Royal to see what new things were published, and to procure a catalogue of all. Every hour produces something new. Thirteen came out to-day, sixteen yesterday, and ninety-two last week.
Nineteen-twentieths of these productions are in favor of liberty, and commonly violent against the clergy and the nobility. I have to-day bespoke many of this description that have reputation; but inquiring for such as had appeared on the other side of the question, to my astonishment I find there are but two or three that have merit enough to be known.
But the coffee-houses in the Palais Royal present yet more singular and astonishing spectacles: they are not only crowded within, but other expectant crowds are at the doors and windows, listening a gorge deploye [with gaping mouths] to certain orators, who from chairs or tables harangue each his little audience. The eagerness with which they are heard, and the thunder of applause they receive for every sentiment of more than common hardiness or violence against the present government, cannot easily be imagined. I am all amazement at the ministry permitting such nests and hotbeds of sedition and revolt, which disseminate amongst the people every hour principles that by and by must be opposed with vigor; and therefore it seems little short of madness to allow the propagation at present.
Everything conspires to render the present period in France critical. The want of bread is terrible; accounts arrive every moment from the provinces of riots and disturbances, and calling in the military to preserve the peace of the markets. …
June 15. This has been a rich day, and such a one as ten years ago none could believe would ever arrive in France; a very important debate being expected on what, in our House of Commons, would be termed the state of the nation. My friend, Monsieur Lazowski, and myself were at Versailles at eight in the morning. We went immediately to the hall of the states to secure good seats in the gallery; we found some deputies already there, and a pretty numerous audience collected. The room is too large; none but stentorian lungs or the finest, clearest voices can be heard. However, the very size of the apartment, which admits two thousand people, gave a dignity to the scene. It was indeed an interesting one. The spectacle of the representatives of twenty-five millions of people, just emerging from the evils of two hundred years of arbitrary power, and rising to the blessings of a freer constitution, assembled with open doors under the eye of the public, was framed to call into animated feelings every latent spark, every emotion of a liberal bosom; to banish whatever ideas might intrude of their being a people too often hostile to my own country, and to dwell with pleasure on the glorious idea of happiness to a great nation.
Monsieur l’Abbe Sieyes opened the debate. He is one of the most zealous sticklers for the popular cause; carries his ideas not to a regulation of the present government, which he thinks too bad to be regulated at all, but wishes to see it absolutely overturned,–being in fact a violent republican: this is the character he commonly bears, and in his pamphlets he seems pretty much to justify such an idea. He speaks ungracefully and uneloquently, but logically,–or rather reads so, for he read his speech, which was prepared. His motion, or rather string of motions, was to declare themselves the representatives known and verified of the French nation, admitting the right of all absent deputies [the nobility and clergy] to be received among them on the verification of their powers.
Monsieur de Mirabeau spoke without notes for near an hour, with a warmth, animation, and eloquence that entitles him to the reputation of an undoubted orator. He opposed the words “known” and “verified,” in the proposition of Abbe Sieyes, with great force of reasoning, and proposed in lieu that they should declare themselves simply Representatives du peuple Francais [Representatives of the French People]; that no veto should exist against their resolves in any other assembly; that all [existing] taxes are illegal, but should be granted during the present sessions of the states, and no longer; that the debt of the king should become the debt of the nation, and be secured on funds accordingly. Monsieur de Mirabeau was well heard, and his proposition much applauded.
In regard to their general method of proceeding, there are two circumstances in which they are very deficient. The spectators in the galleries are allowed to interfere in the debates by clapping their hands, and other noisy expressions of approbation: this is grossly indecent; it is also dangerous; for, if they are permitted to express approbation, they are, by parity of reason, allowed expressions of dissent, and they may hiss as well as clap; which it is said they have sometimes done: this would be to overrule the debate and influence the deliberations.
Another circumstance is the want of order among themselves. More than once to-day there were a hundred members on their legs at a time, and Monsieur Bailly* absolutely without power to keep order.
[1] The presiding officer
“What Is the Third Estate?”
Abbe Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes
(1789)
What is necessary that a nation should subsist and prosper? Individual effort and public functions.
All individual efforts may be included in four classes: 1. Since the earth and the waters furnish crude products for the needs of man, the first class, in logical sequence, will be that of all families which devote themselves to agricultural labor. 2. Between the first sale of products and their consumption or use, a new manipulation, more or less repeated, adds to these products a second value more or less composite. In this manner human industry succeeds in perfecting the gifts of nature, and the crude product increases two-fold, ten-fold, one hundred-fold in value. Such are the efforts of the second class. 3. Between production and consumption, as well as between the various stages of production, a group of intermediary agents establish themselves, useful both to producers and consumers; these are the merchants and brokers: the brokers who, comparing incessantly the demands of time and place, speculate upon the profit of retention and transportation; merchants who are charged with distribution, in the last analysis, either at wholesale or at retail. This species of utility characterizes the third class. 4. Outside of these three classes of productive and useful citizens, who are occupied with real objects of consumption and use, there is also need in a society of a series of efforts and pains, whose objects are directly useful or agreeable to the individual. This fourth class embraces all those who stand between the most distinguished and liberal professions and the less esteemed services of domestics.
Such are the efforts which sustain society. Who puts them forth? The Third Estate.
Public functions may be classified equally well, in the present state of affairs, under four recognized heads; the sword, the robe, the church and the administration. It would be superfluous to take them up one by one, for the purpose of showing that everywhere the Third Estate attends to nineteen-twentieths of them, with this distinction; that it is laden with all that which is really painful, with all the burdens which the privileged classes refuse to carry. Do we give the Third Estate credit for this? That this might come about, it would be necessary that the Third Estate should refuse to fill these places, or that it should be less ready to exercise their functions. The facts are well known. Meanwhile they have dared to impose a prohibition upon the order of the Third Estate. They have said to it: “Whatever may be your services, whatever may be your abilities, you shall go thus far; you may not pass beyond!” Certain rare exceptions, properly regarded, are but a mockery, and the terms which are indulged in on such occasions, one insult the more.
If this exclusion is a social crime against the Third Estate; if it is a veritable act of hostility, could it perhaps be said that it is useful to the public weal? Alas! who is ignorant of the effects of monopoly? If it discourages those whom it rejects, is it not well known that it tends to render less able those whom it favors? Is it not understood that every employment from which free competition is removed, becomes dearer and less effective?
In setting aside any function whatsoever to serve as an appanage for a distinct class among citizens, is it not to be observed that it is no longer the man alone who does the work that it is necessary to reward, but all the unemployed members of that same caste, and also the entire families of those who are employed as well as those who are not? Is it not to be remarked that since the government has become the patrimony of a particular class, it has been distended beyond all measure; places have been created, not on account of the necessities of the governed, but in the interests of the governing, etc., etc.? Has not attention been called to the fact that this order of things, which is basely and–I even presume to say–beastly respectable with us, when we find it in reading the History of Ancient Egypt or the accounts of Voyages to the Indies,[1] is despicable, monstrous, destructive of all industry, the enemy of social progress; above all degrading to the human race in general, and particularly intolerable to Europeans, etc., etc.? But I must leave these considerations, which, if they increase the importance of the subject and throw light upon it, perhaps, along with the new light, slacken our progress.
It suffices here to have made it clear that the pretended utility of a privileged order for the public service is nothing more than a chimera; that with it all that which is burdensome in this service is performed by the Third Estate; that without it the superior places would be infinitely better filled; that they naturally ought to be the lot and the recompense of ability and recognized services, and that if privileged persons have come to usurp all the lucrative and honorable posts, it is a hateful injustice to the rank and file of citizens and at the same time a treason to the public weal.
Who then shall dare to say that the Third Estate has not within itself all that is necessary for the information of a complete nation? It is the strong and robust man who has one arm still shackled. If the privileged order should be abolished, the nation would be nothing less, but something more. Therefore, what is the Third Estate? Everything; but an everything shackled and oppressed. What would it be without the privileged order? Everything, but an everything free and flourishing. Nothing can succeed without it, everything would be infinitely better without the others.
It is not sufficient to show that privileged persons, far from being useful to the nation, cannot but enfeeble and injure it; it is necessary to prove further that the noble order does not enter at all into the social organization; that it may indeed be a burden upon the nation, but that it cannot of itself constitute a nation.
In the first place, it is not possible in the number of all the elementary parts of a nation to find a place for thecaste of nobles. I know that there are individuals in great number whom infirmities, incapacity, incurable laziness, or the weight of bad habits render strangers to the labors of society. The exception and the abuse are everywhere found beside the rule. But it will be admitted that the less there are of these abuses, the better it will be for the State. The worst possible arrangement of all would be where not alone isolated individuals, but a whole class of citizens should take pride in remaining motionless in the midst of the general movement, and should consume the best part of the product without bearing any part in its production. Such a class is surely estranged to the nation by its indolence.
The noble order is not less estranged from the generality of us by its civil and political prerogatives.
What is a nation? A body of associates, living under a common law, and represented by the same legislature, etc.
Is it not evident that the noble order has privileges and expenditures which it dares to call its rights, but which are apart from the rights of the great body of citizens? It departs there from the common order, from the common law. So its civil rights make of it an isolated people in the midst of the great nation. This is trulyimperium in imperio [a state within the state].
In regard to its political rights, these also it exercises apart. It has its special representatives, which are not charged with securing the interests of the people. The body of its deputies sit apart; and when it is assembled in the same hall with the deputies of simple citizens, it is nonetheless true that its representation is essentially distinct and separate: it is a stranger to the nation, in the first place, by its origin, since its commission is not derived from the people; then by its object, which consists of defending not the general, but the particular interest.
The Third Estate embraces then all that which belongs to the nation; and all that which is not the Third Estate, cannot be regarded as being of the nation. What is the Third Estate? It is the whole.
[1] The reference here is to a widely read book of the time describing the caste system in India.
The Taking of the Bastille and Its Aftermath: An English Perspective
Edward Rigby
(1789)
July 14. A Canadian Frenchman, whom we found in the crowd and who spoke good English, was the first who intimated to us that it had been resolved to attack the Bastille. We smiled at the gentleman, and suggested the improbability of undisciplined citizens taking a citadel which had held out against the most experienced troops in Europe; little thinking it would be actually in the hands of the people before night. From the commencement of the struggle on Sunday evening there had been scarcely any time in which the firing of guns had not been heard in all quarters of the city, and, as this was principally produced by exercising the citizens in the use of the musket, in trying cannon, etc., it excited, except at first, but little alarm. Another sound equally incessant was produced by the ringing of bells to call together the inhabitants in different parts of the city. These joint sounds being constantly iterated, the additional noise produced by the attack on the Bastille was so little distinguished that I doubt not it had begun a considerable time, and even been completed, before it was known to many thousands of the inhabitants as well as to ourselves.
We ran to the end of the Rue St. Honore. We here soon perceived an immense crowd proceeding towards the Palais Royal with acceleration of an extraordinary kind, but which sufficiently indicated a joyful event, and, as it approached we saw a flag, some large keys, and a paper elevated on a pole above the crowd, in which was inscribed “La Bastille est prise et les portes sont ouvertes.” ["The Bastille is taken and the gates are open."] The intelligence of this extraordinary event thus communicated, produced an impression upon the crowd really indescribable. Asudden burst of the most frantic joy instantaneously took place; every possible mode in which the most rapturous feelings of joy could be expressed, were everywhere exhibited. Shouts and shrieks, leaping and embracing, laughter and tears, every sound and every gesture, including even what approached to nervous and hysterical affection, manifested, among the promiscuous crowd, such an instantaneous and unanimous emotion of extreme gladness as I should suppose was never before experienced by human beings. …
The crowd passed on to the Palais Royal, and in a few minutes another succeeded. Its approach was also announced by loud and triumphant acclamations, but, as it came nearer, we soon perceived a different character, as though bearing additional testimony to the fact reported by the first crowd, the impression by it on the people was of a very different kind. Adeep and hollow murmur at once pervaded them, their countenances expressing amazement mingled with alarm. We could not at first explain these circumstances; but as we pressed more to the centre of the crowd we suddenly partook of the general sensation, for we then, and not till then, perceived two bloody heads raised on pikes, which were said to be the heads of the Marquis de Launay, Governor of the Bastille, and of Monsieur Flesselles, Prevot des Marchands. It was a chilling and a horrid sight! An idea of savageness and ferocity was impressed on the spectators, and instantly checked those emotions of joy which had before prevailed. Many others, as well as ourselves, shocked and disgusted at this scene, retired immediately from the streets. …
The night approached; the crowd without continued agitated. Reports of a meditated attack upon the city that night by a formidable army under the command of the Count d’Artois and the Marechal Broglie were in circulation, and gained such credit as to induce the inhabitants to take measures for opposing them. Trees were cut down and thrown across the principal approaches to the city; the streets were impaved, and the stones carried to the tops of houses which fronted the streets through which the troops might pass (for the fate of Pyrrhus was not unknown to the French) and the windows in most parts of the city were illuminated. The night passed with various indications of alarm; guns were firing continually; the tocsin sounded unceasingly; groups of agitated citizens passed hastily along, and parties of the Milice Bourgeoise[citizens' militia] (for such was the name already assumed by those who had taken arms the day before) paraded the streets. …
I went (July 15) and was led by the sound of an approaching crowd towards the end of the Rue St. Honore, and there I witnessed a most affecting spectacle. The Bastille had been scarcely entered and the opposition subdued, when an eager search began to find out and liberate every unhappy captive immured within its walls. Two wretched victims of the detestable tyranny of the old Government had just been discovered and taken from some of the most obscure dungeons of this horrid castle, and were at this time conducted by the crowd to the Palais Royal. One of these was a little feeble old man, I could not learn his history; he exhibited an appearance of childishness and fatuity; he tottered as he walked, and his countenance exhibited little more than the smile of an idiot. … The other was a tall and rather robust old man; his countenance and whole figure interesting in the highest degree; he walked upright, with a firm and steady gait; his hands were folded and turned upwards, he looked but little at the crowd; the character of his face seemed a mixture of surprise and alarm, for he knew not whither they were leading him, he knew not what fate awaited him; his face was directed towards the sky, but his eyes were but little open. … He had a remarkably high forehead, which, with the crown of his head, was completely bald; but he had a very long beard, and on the back of his head the hair was unusually abundant. … His dress was an old greasy reddish tunic; the colour and the form of the garb were probably some indication of what his rank had been; for we afterwards learned that he was a Count d’Auche, that he had been a major of cavalry, and a young man of some talent, and that the offence for which he had sustained this long imprisonment had been his having written a pamphlet against the Jesuits. Every one who witnessed this scene probably felt as I did, an emotion which partook of horror and detestation of the Government which could so obdurately as well as unjustly expose human beings to such sufferings; and of pity for the miserable individuals before us. …
It had been reported that the King was to come to Paris on the Thursday (July 16), and great crowds filled the streets through which it was expected he would pass: but his coming did not take place till the Friday (July 17). We were very desirous of witnessing the spectacle of the monarch thus, I might almost say, led captive. The spectacle was very interesting, though not from the artificial circumstances which have usually given distinction to royal processions. The impression made on the spectator was not the effect of any adventitious splendour of costly robes or glittering ornaments–the appearance of the King was simple, if not humble; the man was no longer concealed in the dazzling radiance of the sovereign. … The streets were lined with the armed bourgeois, three deep–forming a line, as we were assured, of several miles extent. The procession began to pass the place where we were at a quarter past three. The first who appeared were the city officers and the police guards; some women followed them, carrying green branches of trees which were fancifully decorated; then more officers; then the Prevot des Marchands and different members of the city magistracy. Many of the armed bourgeois followed on horseback; then some of the King’s officers, some on horseback and some on foot; then followed the whole body of the Etats Generaux [Estates General] on foot, the noblesse, clergy, and Tiers-Etats [Third Estate], each in their peculiar dresses. That of the noblesse was very beautiful; they wore a peculiar kind of hat with large white feathers, and many of them were tall, elegant young men. The clergy, especially the bishops and some of the higher orders, were most superbly dressed; many of them in lawn dresses, with pink scarfs and massive crosses of gold hanging before them. The dress of the Tiers-Etats was very ordinary, even worse than that of the inferior order of gownsmen at the English universities. More of the King’s officers followed; then the King in a large plain coach with eight horses. After this more bourgeois; then another coach and eight horses with other officers of state; than an immense number of the bourgeois, there having been, it was said, two hundred thousand of them in arms. The countenance of the King was little marked with sensibility, and his general appearance by no means indicated alarm. He was accustomed to throw his head very much back on his shoulders, which, by obliging him to look upwards, gave a kind of stupid character to his countenance by increasing the apparent breadth of his face, by preventing that variation of expression which is produced by looking about. He received neither marks of applause nor insult from the populace, unless their silence could be construed into a negative sort of disrespect. Nor were any insults shown to the noblesse or clergy, except in the instance of the Archbishop of Paris, a very tall thin man. He was very much hissed, the popular clamour having been excited against him by a story circulated of his having encouraged the King to use strong measures against the people, and of his attempting to make an impression on the people by a superstitious exposure of a crucifix. He looked a good deal agitated, and whether he had a leaden eye or not I know not, but it certainly loved the ground. The warm and enthusiastic applause of the people was reserved for the Tiers-Etat. … Vivent les Tiers-Etats! Vive la Liberte! ["Long live the Third Estate! Long live liberty!] were loudly iterated as they passed. …
On the Saturday (July 18) we visited more of the public places, but the most interesting object, and which attracted the greatest number of spectators, was the Bastille. We found two hundred workmen busily employed in the destruction of this castle of despotism. We saw the battlements tumble down amidst the applauding shouts of the people. I observed a number of artists taking drawings of what from this time was to have no existence but on paper. …
And this reminds me of our having a second time seen the other prisoner, the feeble old man. He was placed conspicuously at a window opposite the house where we saw the King pass, and at that time he was brought forward and made to wave his hat, having a three coloured cockade on it.
Popular Revolution: The Women of Paris March on Versailles
Joseph Weber et al.
(1789)
The March to Versailles
(a) On Sunday, October 4, the people resorted to acts of violence in the public promenades against officers of the army and other individuals who were pointed out to them as aristocrats. There was in Paris an extreme agitation. The symptoms of a violent insurrection were alarmingly manifest in the evening. Monday, the fifth, as early as morning, one saw women, a species of furies, running the streets, crying out that there was no bread at the baker’s. They were soon joined by a considerable number of men in the Place de l’Hotel de Ville. Their first operation was to hang on a lamp-post a baker accused of having sold bread under weight. This man was saved by M. De Gouvion, a major of the national guard. These maniacs wanted to get into the town hall; there they turned the papers in some of the offices topsy-turvy, threatening to set fire to them; but they were prevented from executing their project. They loaded the most atrocious insults on MM. Bailly, de La Fayette, and the members of the commune; and this circumstance proves better than any amount of reasoning that the authorities who then governed Paris had no connection with the insurgents who directed this disorder.
(b) [Maillard] was occupied with a crowd of women … he took away their torches, and nearly lost his life in thus opposing their project. He told them that they could go in a deputation to the commune to demand justice and present their situation, which was that all demanded bread. But they replied that the commune was made up of bad citizens, all deserving to be hanged to the lamp-post, MM. Bailly and La Fayette first of all … these women would not listen to reason, and after having put in ruin the Hotel de Ville, they wanted to go to the National Assembly to find out what had been decreed previous to this day of the fifth of October. … [Maillard secured] a drum at the door of the Hotel de Ville, where the women had already assembled in great numbers. Detachments of them departed for various districts to recruit other women, to whom they gave rendezvous at the Place Louis XV. Maillard saw several men place themselves at their head, and make to them harangues calculated to excite sedition … they took the route to Versailles, having before them eight or ten drummers. The women at that time might have numbered six or seven thousand.
At Versailles
(c) They [the mob of women] consented to do what he [Maillard] wished. In consequence the cannons were placed behind them and the said women were invited to sing Vive Henri IV! while entering Versailles and to cry “Long live the King!” This they ceaselessly did in the midst of the people of the city, who awaited them, crying, “Long live our Parisiennes!” They arrived at the door of the National Assembly. …
After some debating among these women, fifteen were found to enter with him to the bar of the National Assembly. … He asked the president, M. Mounier, for permission to speak. This being accorded him, he said that two or three persons whom they had encountered on the way, and who were riding in a carriage from the court, had told him that an abbe attached to the Assembly had given a miller two hundred livres to stop making flour, and had promised him a like sum every week. The National Assembly vigorously demanded his name, but Maillard was unable to give it. … The Assembly still persisting in its desire to know the name of the man denounced, M. de Robespierre, deputy from Artois, took the floor and said that … the Abbe Gregoire could throw some light on the subject. … Maillard then asked for the floor and said it was also essential that they end the disorder and uncertainty which had spread through the capital upon the arrival of the regiment of Flanders in Versailles. This regiment should be sent away because the citizens feared that they would start a revolution. M. Mounier replied that they would inform the king of this in the evening when he returned from the hunt, which was where he was said to be.
(d) Maillard and the women who accompanied him appeared to be drunk. “Where is our Comte de Mirabeau?” these women asked repeatedly. “We want to see our Comte de Mirabeau!” Some of them showed a piece of black and moldy bread and added, “We will make the Austrian [Marie Antoinette] swallow it and we will cut her throat.” The number of women gradually increased. They entered pell-mell into the seats of the deputies and carried on loud conversations with those in the tribunes. Some surrounded the desk of the secretaries, others the chair of the president. They obliged the president and several of the deputies to receive their grimy and unpleasant kisses.
(e) After the return of the king to the palace, several gardes du corps [members of the palace guard] and other persons in service at the court, who had been searching for the king in all directions, found themselves in the grand avenue in the midst of these brigands of both sexes, and were assailed with insults and musket shots. Several balls fired at them struck the walls of the hall of the National Assembly.
The insults and indignities, together with the musket shots fired by the first column of brigands, had given just cause for uneasiness at the court. The king’s guard, the regiment of Flanders, and the national guard of Versailles were ordered to take to arms. The guards at the gate closed the grills, and the king’s guards, stationed outside, received orders not to touch their sabers or pistols, and to avoid everything that might irritate the people. The gardes du corps conformed to this order with such resignation that they could have been peaceably massacred one after the other if only their enemies had dared to attempt it.
(f) A deputation of eight women was introduced into the palace. They were conducted to M. de Saint-Priest, the minister of Paris, of whom they demanded bread. “When you had only one king,” dryly replied Saint-Priest, “you did not lack for bread; now that you have twelve hundred, go ask them for it.” The women were then admitted to the council room; they repeated to the king the request they had proffered to M. de Saint-Priest. “You should know my benevolence,” replied the king. “I am going to order that all the bread in Versailles be brought and given to you.” This response appeared to satisfy these women. Most of them were there in good faith, knowing nothing of the projects of the conspirators. Forcibly dragged to Versailles, they had had it dinned into their ears that the people were dying of hunger and that the only means of ending the famine was to address themselves to the king and the National Assembly. They believed they were fulfilling the purpose of their expedition in obtaining a decree on sustenance from the Assembly, and having it sanctioned by the king. These women, enchanted with the way they had been received, left the council room, crying, “Long live the King! Long live the gardes du corps! “
(g) The people, who had given quarter to the gardes du corps, did not, for all that, lose sight of the principal object of their enterprise. They demanded, with shrieks, that the king come to Paris; they said that if the royal family would come to Paris to live there would be no lack of provisions. M. de La Fayette seconded this desire with all his might in the council which was then held in the presence of Their Majesties. Finally, the king, fatigued, solicited, and pressed by all, gave his word that he would depart at midday. This promise flew from mouth to mouth; the acclamations of the people and a fusillade of musketry were the results.
His Majesty appeared then for the second time on the balcony to confirm to the people the promise he had just given to M. de La Fayette. At this second appearance, the joy of the populace was unrestrained. Avoice demanded “the queen on the balcony.” This princess, who was never greater nor more magnanimous than at moments when danger was most imminent, unhesitatingly presented herself on the balcony, holding M. le Dauphin by one hand and Madame Royale by the other. At that a voice cried out, “No children!” The queen, by a backward movement of her arms, pushed the children back into the room, and remained alone on the balcony, folding her hands on her breast, with a countenance showing calmness, nobility, and dignity impossible to describe, and seemed thus to wait for death. This act of resignation astonished the assassins so much and inspired so much admiration in the coarse people that a general clapping of hands and cries of “Bravo! Long live the queen!” repeated on all sides, disconcerted the malevolent. I saw, however, one of these madmen aim at the queen, and his neighbor knock down the barrel of the musket with a blow of his hand, nearly massacring this brigand who was doubtless one of those who had made the irruption of the morning.
The Return to Paris
(h) One saw first the mass of the Parisian troops file by. Each soldier carried a loaf on the end of his bayonet. Then came the fishwives, drunk with fury, joy and wine, holding branches of trees ornamented with ribbons, sitting astride the cannon, mounted on the horses of the gardes du corps, and wearing their hats. Some disported cuirasses before and behind, and others were armed with sabers and muskets. They were accompanied by the multitude of brigands and Paris laborers. … They halted from time to time to fire new salvos, while the fishwives descended from their horses and cannon to march around the carriage of the king. They embraced the soldiers and roared out songs to the refrain of “Here is the baker, the baker’s wife, and the baker’s little boy!” The horror of a cold, somber, rainy day; the infamous militia splattering through the mud; the harpies, monsters with human faces; the captive monarch and his family ignominiously dragged along surrounded by guards; all formed such a frightful spectacle, such a mixture of shame and anguish, that to this very day I cannot think of it without my senses being completely overwhelmed.
At times the queen was in a state of passive endurance difficult to describe. Her son was on her knees; he suffered hunger and asked for food. Unable to fulfill his desires, Marie Antoinette pressed him to her heart, weeping. She exhorted him to suffer in silence. The young prince became resigned. …
(i) As soon as the royal family entered the Hotel de Ville, the king had to listen to two harangues by M. Bailly, and to denunciations against his ministers. Then an official report of the sitting was drawn up and publicly read by M. Bailly. But as it cited some words of the king’s discourse inexactly, the queen interrupted him with the presence of mind which was one of the fine traits of her character. He had forgotten one of the most touching parts of the discourse of the king. The queen recalled to him gracefully that His Majesty had said, “I have relied upon the attachment and fidelity of my people, and have placed myself in the midst of my subjects with complete confidence.” …
After this the family re-entered the carriage in the midst of acclamations and betook themselves, with a part of the national guard, to the palace of the Tuileries. Monsieur and Madame went to the Luxembourg.
(j) The Comte de Mirabeau announced [to the Assembly] that the king was about to depart for Paris. In eagerness to hold their sessions in the midst of the tumult of the capital, they declared themselves inseparable from the monarch, and carried to him this declaration as a proof of their zeal for his interests. In reality, it was an express approbation of the violation of his liberty.
The Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen
National Assembly of France
(1789)
The representatives of the French people, organized as a National Assembly, believing that the ignorance, neglect, or contempt of the rights of man are the sole cause of public calamities and of the corruption of governments, have determined to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of man, in order that this declaration, being constantly before all the members of the social body, shall remind them continually of their rights and duties; in order that the acts of the legislative power, as well as those of the executive power, may be compared at any moment with the objects and purposes of all political institutions and may thus be more respected; and, lastly, in order that the grievances of the citizens, based hereafter upon simple and incontestable principles, shall tend to the maintenance of the constitution and redound to the happiness of all. Therefore the National Assembly recognizes and proclaims, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man and of the citizen:
ARTICLE 1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.
2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.
3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.
4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.
5. Law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society. Nothing may be prevented which is not forbidden by law, and no one may be forced to do anything not provided for by law.
6. Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its formation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations, according to their abilities, and without distinction except that of their virtues and talents.
7. No person shall be accused, arrested, or imprisoned except in the cases and according to the forms prescribed by law. Any one soliciting, transmitting, executing, or causing to be executed, any arbitrary order, shall be punished. But any citizen summoned or arrested in virtue of the law shall submit without delay, as resistance constitutes an offense.
8. The law shall provide for such punishments only as are strictly and obviously necessary, and no one shall suffer punishment except it be legally inflicted in virtue of a law passed and promulgated before the commission of the offense.
9. As all persons are held innocent until they shall have been declared guilty, if arrest shall be deemed indispensable, all harshness not essential to the securing of the prisoner’s person shall be severely repressed by law.
10. No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.
11. The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.
12. The security of the rights of man and of the citizen requires public military forces. These forces are, therefore, established for the good of all and not for the personal advantage of those to whom they shall be intrusted.
13. A common contribution is essential for the maintenance of the public forces and for the cost of administration. This should be equitably distributed among all the citizens in proportion to their means.
14. All the citizens have a right to decide, either personally or by their representatives, as to the necessity of the public contribution; to grant this freely; to know to what uses it is put; and to fix the proportion, the mode of assessment and of collection and the duration of the taxes.
15. Society has the right to require of every public agent an account of his administration.
16. A society in which the observance of the law is not assured, nor the separation of powers defined, has no constitution at all.
17. Since property is an inviolable and sacred right, no one shall be deprived thereof except where public necessity, legally determined, shall clearly demand it, and then only on condition that the owner shall have been previously and equitably indemnified.
Revolutionary Paris One Year After 1789
William Wellesley-Pole, Third Earl of Mornington
(1790)
You are well able to judge how strange the contrast must be between Paris governed, and Paris governing; but it is so strange in so many ways, that I own I find great difficulty in attempting to answer your question of what strikes me most, for I am quite perplexed by the number and variety of ridiculous and absurd things, which I hear and see everywhere, and every day. The common people appear to me to be exactly as gay as I remember them, though it is undoubtedly true that the greater part of them is starving for want of employment, especially the tradesmen; and notwithstanding they all talk the highest language in favour of the Revolution, they laugh at the National Assembly without scruple, and say they had rather have Aristocratical Louis, than Democratical Assignats. The streets are crowded with newsmen and hawkers, crying about libels of all sorts from morning till night, exactly in the manner you must have observed in Dublin; nothing is too indecent or abusive. There being an end of the police, it is not possible to imagine any kind of bawdy print that is not publicly stuck up in the Palais Royal, and on the Boulevards: the Attorney General’s blood would boil at the sight of such audacious bawdery. The object seems to be everywhere to mark a contempt for all former regulations. At the spectacle, they have introduced monks and nuns and crucifixes on the stage; and the actors are violently applauded, merely for wearing these forbidden garments. The parterre is more riotous than twenty English upper galleries put together; a few nights ago Richard Coeur de Lion was acted, and a woman of fashion was absolutely forced to leave the house, because she clapped with too much violence while the famous song of O Richard, O mon roi! was singing; a hundred fellows started up together roaring a bas la femme en eventail blanc ["down with the woman with the white fan": Marie Antoinette], and would not suffer the actors to proceed till this Aristocrate left the house. … Nothing can be more tiresome than all their new plays and operas; they are a heap of hackneyed public sentiments on general topics of the rights of men and duties of Kings, just like Sheridan’s grand paragraphs in the Morning Post [a London newspaper]: these are applauded to the skies. I do not know whether you have heard that many of the Petits Maitres [young gentlemen], in order to show their attachment to the Democracy, have sacrificed their curls, toupees, and queues: [i.e., their powdered wigs]; some of them go about with cropped locks like English farmers without any powder, and others wear little black scratch wigs, both these fashions are called Tetes a la Romaine ["Roman heads"], which is a comical name for such folly. I must not forget that I have seen several wear gold earrings with their black scratches. … I understand from everybody whom I have seen that nothing can be more changed than the whole of their manners. The Democrates out of the Assembly are very few indeed among the people of any distinction, and theAristocrates are melancholy and miserable to the last degree; this makes the society at Paris very gloomy; the number of deserted houses is immense, and if it were not for the Deputies, the Ambassadors, and some refugees from Brussels, there would be scarcely a gentleman’s coach to be seen in the streets. You have certainly been informed of the principles of the two clubs, the Enragees, whose name is easily understood, and the Quatre Vingt Neuf, the latter is something like our armed neutrality … ; for this club acting together, can give a majority either to the cote gauche or droite[1] in the Assembly. … I have never been at this club of 1789, although they admit English members of Parliament, because I understand nothing is done publicly excepting the recital of speeches and motions intended for the Assembly; and with these I have been sufficiently tired at the Assembly itself. I have been there several times, and it is not possible to imagine so strange a scene; the confusion at times surpasses all that ever has been known since government appeared in the world. … They have no regular forms of debate on ordinary business; some speak from their seats, some from the floor, some from the table, and some from the tribunes or desks; … they speak without preparation, and I thought many of them acquitted themselves well enough in that way, where only a few sentences were to be delivered; but on these occasions the riot is so great that it is very difficult to collect what is said. I am certain that I have seen above a hundred in the act of addressing the Assembly together, all persisting to speak, and as many more replying in different parts of the House, sentence by sentence; then the President claps his hands on both ears and roars order, as if he was calling a coach; sometimes he is quite driven to despair; he beats his table, his breast; … wringing his hands is quite a common action, and I really believe he swears. … At last he seizes a favourable moment of quiet, either to put the question or to name who ought to speak; then five hundred reclamations all at once renew the confusion, which seldom ends till the performers are completely hoarse, and obliged to give way to a fresh set. On great occasions the speakers deliver their speeches from the tribune, and these are always written speeches, or so generally, that I believe Mirabeau and Maury and Barnave are the only exceptions; and even these often read their speeches. Nothing can be more fatiguing than these readings, which entirely destroy all the spirit and interest of debate. … I heard Mirabeau and Maury both speak a few sentences in the midst of one of the riots I have mentioned, and I preferred Maury, whose manner is bold and unaffected, and his voice very fine; Mirabeau appeared to me to be full of affectation, and he has a bad voice, but he is the most admired speaker. There are four galleries which contain above twice the number admitted into the gallery in England, and here a most extraordinary scene is exhibited; for the galleries approve and disapprove by groaning and clapping, exactly as if the whole was a spectacle. … While the orators are reading their speeches, the Assembly frequently shows a most singular degree of patience such as I am certain the English House of Commons is not capable of. … Dulness and monotony are borne in perfect silence; and during such speeches, the President generally amuses himself with reading some pamphlets or newspapers. … I forgot to mention one circumstance that had a most comical effect. The Huissiers ["sergeants at arms"] of the Assembly walk up and down the room during times of great tumult, bellowing silence as loud as they can hollow, and endeavouring to persuade the disorderly orators to sit down.
I went to Court this morning at the Tuilleries, and a most gloomy Court it was; many of the young people of the first fashion and rank wear mourning always for economy. … The King seemed well, but I thought his manner evidently humbled since I was introduced to him before; he now bows to everybody, which was not a Bourbon fashion before the Revolution. The Queen looked very ill; the Dauphin was with her, and she appeared anxious to shew him. They say here that he is her shield; she never stirs out without him.
[1] The left or the right. The custom of grouping the more liberal or radical members on the left and the more conservative ones on the right, from which comes the designation of “left wing” or “right wing” in modern politics, dates from the French Revolution.
The Political Situation in Paris
George Hammond
(1791)
There is one point upon which all parties seem to be agreed–that the restoration of the ancient form of government is become totally impracticable, from any quarter or by any means whatsoever. The three descriptions of persons in the Kingdom, the most interested in the event, are the Sovereign, the Nobility, and the Clergy; but it is evident that their exertions alone, unaided by foreign Powers, are absolutely inadequate to the accomplishment of it. That loyalty and attachment to their Sovereign, which were formerly the characteristics of this nation, exist no longer. The mental imbecility of the present King, and the profligacy of some branches of the royal family, have implanted contempt and aversion so deeply in the bulk of the people that his present melancholy state of captivity and humiliation, so far from creating a spirit of indignation against those who have usurped his authority, has afforded a subject of ridicule and triumph to a great majority of the nation. In regard to the nobility, their dispersion, their want of concert, of pecuniary resources and of a leader, but chiefly the circumstances of their estates being at the mercy of their enemies, all concur to prevent them from forming or carrying into execution any enterprize of much magnitude and moment. The respect that used to be paid to the character and functions of the clergy has long been dwindling away, and the influence which that body derived from their great territorial possessions, now act[s] as an instrument against them. Not only inasmuch as their estates have been wrested from them, but also as the individuals who have purchased those estates under the national faith are now materially interested in protecting them, by every means, against any invasion of their newly acquired rights, and the possibility of their ever reverting to their original possessors. With respect to the prospect of any external interference, you, Sir, are better able to judge of that than I can be. I am, however, firmly persuaded that no serious apprehensions on that head are entertained here. The ruling party, indeed, do not rely on the three millions of men (now trained to arms) alone–they assert they have a more effectual pledge for the non-intervention of foreign Powers, in possessing the persons of the King, and of such of the Aristocratical party as have not chosen to expatriate themselves, both of whom they would not scruple to deliver up to the fury of an exasperated populace on the first appearance of a foreign invasion. …
There is no assertion of Mr. [Edmund] Burke’s more true than this–that the French have shown themselves much more skilful in destroying than in erecting. As I am convinced that no man in this country, even at this moment, has any clear notion of the new order of things that is to arise in the place of the old, it is therefore needless to enter into any discussion of the numerous speculative theories that now swarm in the nation, which have no other foundation than the heated imaginations of their fabricators.
No party in the National Assembly seems to be actuated by an adherence to a regular well-defined system, which is, I think, pretty clearly proved by the contradictory decrees that are every day issuing out to answer the emergency of the moment. And even if there was a system, there does not appear to be any man of abilities so transcendent, or of patriotism so unsuspected, as to be capable of giving direction and energy to the movements of any compact concentrated body of individuals. This is a circumstance which separates the French Revolution from every preceding one in any other country, and renders it impossible to discern a clue to the present and future operations of that body, in whom all authority is at present centered. …
In the meantime they avoid rendering themselves obnoxious and unpopular, by throwing the execution of everything that is either odious or absurd in their own numerous decrees on the King and his ministers. They have stripped royalty of everything that could make it either respectable or amiable, and by perpetually separating the function from the person of the monarch, they insensibly confound him in the general mass of citizens. Indeed their affectation is carried to so ridiculous a pitch, that I am rather surprised that we do not hear of the pouvoir executif’s [executive power] looking out of the window, or going to bed to its wife.
In the midst of all this wretched scene of political confusion, it is strongly suspected that several members of the National Assembly have enriched themselves by stock-jobbing and other arts, and Mirabeau in particular. That arch-patriot is now living in great magnificence, and indulges his ruling passion for buying up valuable books with unexampled profusion.
As you may have been perhaps surprised that the late discussion of the question of Regency should have appeared to be a matter of such urgency, I think it necessary to remark that the King’s health, not from extreme sensibility, but from want of exercise, and from indulging too freely in the pleasures of the table, has suffered so much that it is not expected his Majesty can survive many years.
I must not omit to mention two circumstances that have struck me greatly in my present residence in this capital–the tranquillity which now appears to subsist in it, and the little interruption that the newly-created paper money has had to encounter in its circulation. Excepting a greater number of men in military uniforms parading the streets, all the common occupations of life proceed as smoothly and regularly as if no event of consequence had occurred, and the public amusements are followed with as much avidity as in the most quiet and flourishing periods of the monarchy. In regard to the Assignats, although they are now at a discount of 7 per cent and are expected to fall lower, no person seems to murmur at taking them in payment, or to express any doubts of their validity.
A French Woman Broadens the Revolution: Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen
Olympe de Gouges
(1791)
The mothers, daughters, and sisters, representatives of the nation, demand to be constituted a national assembly. Considering that ignorance, disregard of or contempt for the rights of women are the only causes of public misfortune and of governmental corruption, they have resolved to set forth in a solemn declaration, the natural, inalienable and sacred rights of woman. …
1. Woman is born free and remains equal in rights to man. …
3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation, which is none other than the union of Woman and Man. …
4. Liberty and Justice consist of rendering to persons those things that belong to them; thus, the exercise of woman’s natural rights is limited only by the perpetual tyranny with which man opposes her; these limits must be changed according to the laws of nature and reason. …
10. No one should be punished for their opinions. Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she should likewise have the right to speak in public, provided that her demonstrations do not disrupt public order as established by law.
Newspaper Reportage on Parisian Reaction to the King’s Flight to Varennes
Louis-Marie Prudhomme
(1791)
It was not until ten o’clock in the morning that the municipal government announced, by firing a cannon thrice, the unexpected event of the day. But for three hours the news had already been passing from mouth to mouth and was circulating in all quarters of the city. During these three hours many outrages might have been committed. The king had gone. This news produced a moment of anxiety, and everybody ran in a crowd to the palace of the Tuileries to see if it were true; but every one turned almost immediately to the hall where the National Assembly met, declaring that their king was in there and that Louis XVI might go where he pleased.
Then the people became curious to visit the apartments vacated by the royal family; they traversed them all, and we questioned the sentinels we found there, “Where, and how, could he have escaped? How could this fat royal person, who complained of the meanness of his lodging, manage to make himself invisible to the sentries,–he whose girth would stop up any passage?” The soldiers of the guard had nothing to say to this. We insisted: “This flight is not natural; your commanders must have been in the plot … for while you were at your post Louis XVI left his without your knowing it and yet passing close to you.” These reflections, which naturally suggested themselves, account for the reception which made Lafayette pale when he appeared in the Place de Greve and passed along the quays. He took refuge in the National Assembly, where he made some confessions that did little to restore him to popular favor.
Far from being “famished for a glimpse of the king,” the people proved, by the way in which they took the escape of Louis XVI, that they were sick of the throne and tired of paying for it. If they had known, moreover, that Louis XVI, in his message, which was just then being read in the National Assembly, complained “that he had not been able to find in the palace of the Tuileries the most simple conveniences of life,” the people might have been roused to some excess; but they knew their own strength and did not permit themselves any of those little exhibitions of vengeance which are natural to irritated weakness.
They contented themselves with making sport, in their own way, of royalty and of the man who was invested with it. The portrait of the king was taken down from its place of honor and hung on the door. A fruit woman took possession of Antoinette’s bed and used it to display her cherries, saying, “It’s the nation’s turn now to be comfortable.” A young girl refused to let them put the queen’s bonnet on her head and trampled on it with indignation and contempt. They had more respect for the dauphin’s study,–but we should blush to report the titles of the books which his mother had selected.
The streets and public squares offered a spectacle of another kind. The national force deployed itself everywhere in an imposing manner. The brave Santerre alone enrolled two thousand pikemen in this faubourg.These were not the “active” citizens and the royal bluecoats, that were enjoying the honors of the celebration. The woolen caps reappeared and eclipsed the bearskins. The women contested with the men the duty of guarding the city gates, saying, “It was the women who brought the king to Paris and the men who let him escape.” But do not boast too loudly, ladies; it was not much of a present, after all.
The prevailing spirit was apathy in regard to kings in general and contempt for Louis XVI in particular. This showed itself in the least details. On the Place de Greve the people broke up a bust of Louis XVI, which was illuminated by that celebrated lantern which had been a source of terror to the enemies of the Revolution. When will the people execute justice upon all these bronze kings, monuments of our idolatry? In the Rue St. Honore they forced a dealer to sacrifice a plaster head which somewhat resembled Louis XVI. In another shop they contented themselves with putting a paper band over his eyes. The words “king,” “queen,” “royal,” “Bourbon,” “Louis,” “court,” “Monsieur,” “the king’s brother,” were effaced wherever they were found on pictures or on the signs over shops and stores.
L’Ami du peuple (Friend of the People) denounces the Moderate Royalists
Jean-Paul Marat
(1791)
O credulous Parisians! can you be duped by these shameful deceits and cowardly impostures? See if their aim in massacring the patriots was not to annihilate your clubs! Even while the massacre was going on, the emissaries of Mottier [Lafayette] were running about the streets mixing with the groups of people and loudly accusing the fraternal societies and the club of the Cordeliers of causing the misfortunes. The same evening the club of the Cordeliers, wishing to come together, found the doors of their place of meeting nailed up. Two pieces of artillery barred the entrance to the Fraternal Society, and only those conscript fathers who were sold to the court were permitted to enter the Jacobin Club, by means of their deputy’s cards.
Not satisfied with annihilating the patriotic associations, these scoundrels violate the liberty of the press, annihilate the Declaration of Rights–the rights of nature. Cowardly citizens, can you hear this without trembling? They declare the oppressed, who, in order to escape their tyranny, would make a weapon of his despair and counsel the massacre of his oppressors, a disturber of the public peace. They declare every citizen a disturber of the public peace who cries, in an uprising, to the ferocious satellites to lower or lay down their arms, thus metamorphosing into crimes the very humanity of peaceful citizens, the cries of terror and natural self-defense.
Infamous legislators, vile scoundrels, monsters satiated with gold and blood, privileged brigands who traffic with the monarch, with our fortunes, our rights, our liberty, and our lives! You thought to strike terror into the hearts of patriotic writers and paralyze them with fright at the sight of the punishments you inflict. I flatter myself that they will not soften. As for The Friend of the People, you know that for a long time your decrees directed against the Declaration of Rights have been waste paper to him. Could he but rally at his call two thousand determined men to save the country, he would proceed at their head to tear out the heart of the infernal Mottier in the midst of his battalions of slaves. He would burn the monarch and his minions in his palace, and impale you on your seats and bury you in the burning ruins of your lair.
Royal Ambivalence: Louis XVI’s Secret Appeal to the Prussian King
Louis XVI
(1791)
Paris, December 3, 1791
My Brother:
I have learned through M. du Moustier of the interest which your Majesty has expressed not only in my person but also in the welfare of my kingdom. In giving me these proofs, the attitude of your Majesty has, in all cases where your interest might prove advantageous to my people, excited my lively appreciation. I confidently take advantage of it at this time when, in spite of the fact that I have accepted the new constitution, seditious leaders are openly exhibiting their purpose of entirely destroying the remnants of the monarchy. I have just addressed myself to the emperor, the empress of Russia, and to the kings of Spain and Sweden; I am suggesting to them the idea of a congress of the chief powers of Europe, supported by an armed force, as the best means of checking seditious parties, of establishing a more desirable order of things, and of preventing the evil which afflicts us from reaching the other states of Europe.
I trust that your Majesty will approve my ideas, and that you will maintain the most absolute secrecy about the proposition I am making to you. You will easily understand that the circumstances in which I find myself force me to observe the greatest caution. That is why no one but the baron of Breteuil is informed of my plans, and your Majesty may therefore communicate to him anything you wish. …
Your good brother,
Louis
An English Traveler Describes a New Paris in the Summer of 1792
Richard Twiss
(1792)
In every one of the towns between Calais and Paris a full-grown tree (generally a poplar) has been planted in the market place, with many of its boughs and leaves; these last being withered, it makes but a dismal appearance; on the top of this tree or pole is a red woollen or cotton night-cap, which is called the Cap of Liberty, with streamers about the pole, or red, blue and white ribbands. I saw several statues of saints, both within and without the churches (and in Paris likewise) with similar caps, and several crucifixes with the national cockade of ribbands tied to the left arm of the image on the cross, but not one with the cockade in its proper place; the reason of which I know not. …
The churches in Paris are not much frequented on the week-days, at present; I found a few old women on their knees in some of them, hearing mass; and, at the same time, at the other end of one of these churches commissaries were sitting and entering the names of volunteers for the army. The iron rails in the churches which part the choir from the nave, and also those which encompass chapels and tombs, are all ordered to be converted into heads for pikes. …
Hitherto cockades of silk had been worn, the aristocrats wore such as were of a paler blue and red than those worn by the democrats, and the former were even distinguished by their carriages, on which a cloud was painted upon the arms, which entirely obliterated them (of these I saw above thirty in the evening promenade in the Bois de Boulogne ), but on the 30th of July, every person was compelled by the people to wear a linen cockade, without any distinction in the red and blue colours. …
I went once to Versailles; there is hardly anything in the palace but the bare walls, a very few of the lookingglasses, tapestry, and large pictures remaining, as it has now been near two years uninhabited. I crossed the great canal on foot; there was not a drop of water in it….
I went several times to the National Assembly; the Tribunes, or Galleries (of which there are three) entered warmly, by applauses and by murmurs and hisses, into the affairs which were treated of. …
All the coats of arms which formerly decorated the gates of Hotels are taken away, and even seals are at present engraven with cyphers only. The Chevaliers de St. Louis still continue to wear the cross, or the ribband, at the buttonhole; all other orders of knighthood are abolished. No liveries are worn by servants, that badge of slavery is likewise abolished; and also all corporation companies, as well as every other monopolizing society, and there are no longer any Royal tobacco or salt shops. …
Books of all sorts are printed without any approbation or privilege. Many are exposed on stalls, which are very improper for the public eye. One of them was called the Private Life of the Queen, in two volumes, with obscene prints. The book itself is contemptible and disgusting, and might as well have been called, the Woman of Pleasure. Of books of this sort I saw above thirty, with plates. Another was a subject not fit even to be mentioned. I read a small pamphlet, entitled ” Le Christ-Roi, or a Parallel of the Sufferings of Louis XVI etc.” I can say nothing in favor of it. …
The common people are in general much better clothed than they were before the Revolution, which may be ascribed to their not being so grievously taxed as they were. … All those ornaments, which three years ago were worn of silver, are now of gold. All the women of lower class, even those who sit behind green-stalls, etc., wear gold earrings, with large drops, some of which cost two or three louis, and necklaces of the same. Many of the men wear plain gold earrings: those worn by officers and other gentlemen are usually as large as a half-crown piece. Even children of two years old have small gold drops in their ears. The general dress of the women is white linen and muslin gowns, large caps which cover all their hair, excepting just a small triangular piece over the forehead, pomatumed, or rather plaistered and powdered, without any hats; neither do they wear any stays, but only corsets (waistcoats or jumps). Tight lacing is not known here, nor yet high and narrow heeled shoes. Because many of the ladies cidevant of quality[1] have emigrated or ran away, and those which remain in Paris keep within doors, I saw no face that was painted, excepting on the stage. Most of the men wear coats made like great-coats, or in other words, long great-coats without any coat; this in fine weather and in the middle of summer made them appear to me like invalides. There is hardly any possibility of distinguishing the rank of either man or woman by their dress at present, or rather, there are no ranks to distinguish. The nation in general is much improved in cleanliness, and even in politeness. The French no longer look on every Englishman as a lord, but as their equal. There are no beggars to be seen about the streets in Paris, and when the chaise stopped for fresh horses, only two or three old and infirm people surrounded it and solicited charity, whereas formerly the beggars used to assemble in hundreds. I did not see a single pair of sabots(wooden-shoes) in France this time. The table of the peasants is also better supplied than it was before the revolution. …
Before the 10th [of August] I saw several dancing parties of the Poissardes and sansculottes in the beer-houses, on the Quai des Ormes and the Quai St.Paul, and have played the favourite and animating air of ca ira,on the fiddle, to eight couple of dancers: the ceiling of these rooms (which open into the street) is not above ten feet high, and on this ceiling (which is generally white washed) are the numbers 1, 2, to 8, in black, and the same in red, which mark the places where the ladies and gentlemen are to stand. When the dance was concluded, I requested the ladies to salute me (m’embrasser) which they did, by gently touching my cheek with their lips. …
I saw many thousands of these men [National Guard] from my windows, on the way to the Tuileries, early onthe Friday morning [August 10th]; their march was at the rate of perhaps five miles an hour, without running or looking aside; and this was the pace they used when they carried heads upon pikes, and when they were in pursuit of important business, rushing along the streets like a torrent, and attending wholly and solely to the object they had in view. On such occasions, when I saw them approaching, I turned into some cross street till they were passed, not that I had anything to apprehend, but the being swept along with the crowd, and perhaps trampled upon. I cannot express what I felt on seeing such immense bodies of men so vigorously actuated by the same principle. I also saw many thousands of volunteers going to join the armies at the frontiers, marching along the Boulevards, almost at the same pace, accompanied as far as Barriersby their women, who were carrying their muskets for them; some with large sausages, pieces of cold meat, and loaves of bread, stuck on the bayonets, and all laughing, or singing ca ira [a famous revolutionary song].
[1] That is, aristocratic women
A National Guardsman Recounts the Revolutionary Journee of August 10, 1792
Anonymous
(1792)
Paris–11 August 1792–Year 4 of Liberty
We are all tired out, doubtless less from spending two nights under arms than from heartache. Men’s spirits were stirred after the unfortunate decree which whitewashed Lafayette. Nevertheless, we had a quiet enough evening; a group of federes from Marseille gaily chanted patriotic songs in the Beaucaire cafe, the refreshment room of the National Assembly. It was rumoured “Tonight the tocsin will ring, the alarm drum will be beaten. All the faubourgs will burst into insurrection, supported by 6,000 federes.” At 11 o’clock we go home, at the same instant as the drums call us back to arms. We speed from our quarters and our battalion, headed by two pieces of artillery, marches to the palace. Hardly have we reached the garden of the Tuileries than we hear the alarm cannon. The alarm drum resounds through all the streets of Paris. People run for arms from all over the place. Soon the public squares, the new bridge, the main thoroughfares, are covered with troops. The National Assembly, which had finished its debate early, was recalled to its duties. It only knew of some of the preparations which had been made for the journee [uprising] of 10 August. First the commandant of the palace wishes to hold the mayor a hostage there, then he sends him to the mayor’s office. The people fear a display of his talents! In the general council of the Commune it is decreed that, according to the wishes of the forty-eight sections, it is no longer necessary to recognise the constituted authorities if dethronement is not immediately announced and new municipal bodies, keeping Petion and Manuel [2] at their head, entrusted with popular authority. However, the faubourgs [subdivisions of the city] organised themselves into an army and placed in their centre Bretons, Marseillais and Bordelais, and all the other federes. More than 20,000 men march across Paris, bristling with pikes and bayonets. Santerre had been obliged to take command of them. The National Assembly are told that the army has broken into the palace. All hearts are frozen. Discussion is provoked again by the question of the safety of the king, when it is learned that Louis XVI seeks refuge in the bosom of the Assembly.
Forty-eight members are sent to the palace. The royal family places itself in the middle of the deputation. The people fling bitter reproaches at the king and accuse him of being the author of his troubles. Hardly was the king safe than the noise of cannon-fire increased. The Breton federes beat a tattoo. Some officers suggested retreat to the commander of the Swiss guards. But he seemed prepared and soon, by a clever tactic, captured the artillery which the National Guard held in the courtyard. These guns, now turned on the people, fire and strike them down. But soon the conflict is intensified everywhere. The Swiss, surrounded, overpowered, stricken, then run out of ammunition. They plea for mercy, but it is impossible to calm the people, furious at Helvetian treachery.
The Swiss were cut to pieces. Some were killed in the state-rooms, others in the garden. Many died on the Champs-Elysees. Heavens! That Liberty should cost Frenchmen blood and tears! How many victims there were among both the People and the National Guard! The total number of dead could run to 2,000. All the Swiss who had been taken prisoner were escorted to the Place de Greve. There they had their brains blown out. They were traitors sacrificed to vengeance. What vengeance! I shivered to the roots of my being. At least 47 heads were cut off. The Greve was littered with corpses, and heads were paraded on the ends of several pikes. The first heads to be severed were those of seven chevaliers du poignard [noblemen], slain at eight o’clock in the morning on the Place Vendome. Many Marseillais perished in the journee of 10 August. Their second-in-command was killed; so was the commander of the Bretons.
The bronze statues in the Place Royale, Place Vendome, Place Louis XIV, Place Louis XV, are thrown to the ground. The Swiss are pursued everywhere. The National Assembly, the department and the municipality are in permanent session. … People are still far from calm and it will be difficult to reestablish order. However, we see peace starting to reappear. The king and his family have passed the night in the porter’s lodging of the National Assembly.
Tonight the National Assembly has decreed [the creation of] the National Convention. The electors are gathered in primary assemblies to select deputies. They only need to be twenty-five years old and have a residence qualification. It appears that the coup of 10 August has forestalled one by the aristocracy. One realizes now that the Swiss are the victims of their credulity, that they hoped for support, but that the rich men who should have fought with them dared not put in an appearance. We have been told that there are 8,000 royalist grenadiers in Paris. These 8,000 citizens seem to have stayed at home. Only one equestrian statue has been preserved in the capital: that of Henri IV.[2]
[1] The incumbent municipal authorities
[2] Henry IV was regarded as the “people’s king,” and his statues and tomb were spared from the destruction visited upon public monuments to other French kings during the Revolution.
Witness to a Slaughter: An English Witness Recounts the September Massacres in Paris
George Munro
(1792)
About one o’clock on Sunday fore-noon [September 4] three signal guns were fired, the Tocsin was rung, and one of the Municipality on horseback proclaimed in different parts of the city, that the enemy was at the gates, Verdun was besieged, and could only hold out a few days. The inhabitants were therefore ordered to assemble in their respective sections, and from thence to march to the Champ de Mars, where they were to select an army of sixty thousand men.
The first part of this proclamation was put in execution, but the second was totally neglected; for I went to the Champ de Mars myself where I only saw M. Pethion, who on finding no one there returned home. During the time the officer of the Municipality was making the proclamation, two others attended at the bar of the National Assembly to acquaint them with the steps that had been taken by the direction of the Conseil de la Commune. The Assembly applauded their conduct, and immediately passed a decree, directing that those who refused their arms to those that wished to serve, or objected serving themselves, should be deemed traitors and worthy of death, that all horses of luxury should be seized for the use of the army, and that those who refused to obey the orders of the present executive power should be punished with death. It concluded by decreeing that twelve members of the National Assembly should be added to the other six that at present compose the executive power. As soon as these decrees were passed, the carriages and horses of gentlemen were seized in the streets (agreeable to the spirit of the decree). Their owners were obliged to walk home, and the horses in general were sent to the Ecole Militaire, and the carriages were put under the care of different guards. The proceedings with the beating of drums, firing of cannon, and the marching up and down of armed men of course created no little agitation in the minds of the people. That however was nothing to the scene of horror that ensued soon after. A party at the instigation of some one or other declared they would not quit Paris, as long as the prisons were filled with Traitors (for they called those so, that were confined in the different Prisons and Churches), who might in the absence of such a number of Citizens rise and not only effect the release of His Majesty, but make an entire counter-revolution. To prevent this, a large body of sans-culottes attended by a number of Marseillais and Brestois, the hired assassins of a Party, proceeded to the Church de Carmes, rue de Vaugirard, where amidst the acclamations of a savage mob they massacred a number of refractory Priests, all the Vicaires de Saint Sulpice, the directors of the Seminaries, and the Doctors of the Sorbonne, with the ci-devant [former] Archbishop of Arles, and a number of others, exceeding in all one hundred and seventy, including those that had been confined there since the tenth. After this they proceeded to the Abbaye, where they massacred a vast number of prisoners, amongst whom were also many respectable characters. These executioners increasing in number, different detachments were sent to the Chatelet, the prison de la Force, de Ste Pelagie, and the prisons of the Conciergerie. At all these places a most horrid massacre took place; none were exempted but debtors and many of these fell victims to the fury of the people. During this sad scene, the more humane, which were but few in number, hurried to the National Assembly to obtain their interference for stopping such melancholy outrages. They immediately decreed that six of their members should go and see if it was possible to prevent such cruelties. With difficulty these members arrived at the Abbaye; when there one of them got upon a chair to harangue the people, but neither he nor the others could make themselves heard, and with some risk, they made their escape. Many of the Municipality attended at the different prisons, and endeavoured to quell the fury of the people, but all in vain; they therefore pro-posed to the mob a plan of establishing a kind of Court of justice in the prisons, for the immediate trial of the remaining offenders. They caught at this, and two of the Municipality with a detachment of the mob, about two on Monday morning, began this strange Court of justice. The gaoler’s list was called for, those that were conpal government, and National Guard took no action to repress the actions of the fined for forging assignats, or theft, with the unhappy people that were any way suspected to be concerned in the affair of the 10th, were in general massacred; this form took place in nearly all the prisons in Paris. But early on Monday morning a detachment with seven pieces of cannon went to attack Bicetre. It is reported that these wretches charged their cannon with small stones and such other things, and fired promiscuously among the prisoners. I cannot however vouch for this; they have however not finished their cruelties there yet, and it is now past six o’clock Tuesday evening. To be convinced of what I could not believe, I made a visit to the prison of the Abbaye about seven o’clock on Monday evening, for the slaughter had not ceased. This prison, which takes its name from an adjoining Abbaye, stands in a narrow street, which was at this time from a variety of lights, as light as day: a single file of men armed with swords, or piques, formed a line of some length, commencing from the prison door. This body might consist of about fifty; these people were either Marseillais, Brestois, or the National Guards of Paris, and when I saw them seemed much fatigued with their horrid work. For besides the irregular massacre that continued till two o’clock on Monday morning, many of them delighted with their strange office continued their services when I left them, which was about nine on Monday evening.
Two of the Municipality were then in the prison with some of the mob distributing their justice. Those they found guilty were seemingly released, but only to be precipitated by the door on a number of piques, and then among the savage cries of vive la nation ["long live the nation!"], to be hacked to pieces by those that had swords and were ready to receive them. After this their dead bodies were dragged by the arms or legs to the Abbaye, which is distant from the prison about two hundred yards; here they were laid up in heaps till carts could carry them away. The kennel was swimming with blood, and a bloody track was traced from the prison to the Abbaye door where they had dragged these unfortunate people.
I was fortunate enough to be present when five men were acquitted. Such a circumstance, a bystander told me, had not happened in the operations of this horrid tribunal; and these inconsistent murderers seemed nearly as much pleased at the acquittal of a prisoner as they were at his condemnation. The Governor of the Invalides happened to be one of those I saw acquitted, the street rung with acclamations of joy, but the old man was so feeble with fear, and suspense, and so overcome with the caresses of his daughter, who was attending to know his fate, that they both sunk lifeless into the arms of some of the spectators, who carried them to the Hospital des Invalides. The same congratulations attended the others that were acquitted and the same those that were condemned. Nothing can exceed the inconsistency of these people. After the general massacre of Sunday night many of the dead bodies were laid on the Pont-neuf to be claimed, a person in the action of stealing a handkerchief from one of the corpses was hacked to pieces on the spot, by the same people who had been guilty of so much cruelty and injustice.
One of the Municipality was fortunate enough for that night to save some of the women, but many of these underwent the same mock trial next day; and the Princess Lamballe, after having been butchered in the most shocking manner, had her head severed from her body, which these monsters carried about, while others dragged her body through many of the streets. It is even said they attempted to carry it to the Queen, but the Guards would not permit that. Mademoiselle de Tourzelles was also reported to have been murdered, but I understand that she and Madame de Ste Brice were saved from the fury of the people, and carried a la section des droits de l’homme. Many other women of family were killed and others escaped. Major Bauchman of the Swiss Guards was beheaded on the Place de Carouzel early on Monday morning. Mr Montmorin, Governor of Fontainebleau and nephew of Mr Montmorin late Minister, who was killed at the Abbaye, had been regularly tried and acquitted on Friday, but not being released was also massacred at the Conciergerie. Monsieur d’Affry was acquitted by the people and escaped. In all it is supposed they have murdered four thousand, some say seven, but I think that exaggerated.
By what I can understand it was late on Sunday evening before Mr Pethion took any steps to prevent the progress of this unexampled outrage, and the National Guards of course made no opposition to such irregularities. The Mayor however at last sent to the Temple the Commandant General of the National Guards, and I am happy to inform you that in the midst of all this confusion, though there was a crowd in the street, yet the court of the Temple was quiet. The Section du Marais has sworn not to permit any violence to be exercised against the prisoners in that place, and the National Assembly have also appointed six of their members as a safe-guard to the sacred persons of Their Majesties, and a number of the Municipality also attend. A motion was made last week to confine Their Majesties in separate apartments; that right was however found to rest with the Municipality, and I have the pleasure of saying that Their Most Christian Majesties still enjoy the comfort of being together, and were, not an hour ago, in perfect good health.
I ask pardon for giving such a detailed account of such uncommon barbarity, which I am sure must be as disagreeable for you to read as it is for me to commit such acts to paper, but they ought to be particularized to the eternal disgrace of a people who pretend to be the most civilized among the nations of Europe.
The French Revolution Becomes a Universal Political Crusade
National Convention
(1792)
The French people to the people of ; brothers and friends:
We have conquered our liberty and we shall maintain it. We offer to bring this inestimable blessing to you, for it has always been rightly ours, and only by a crime have our oppressors robbed us of it. We have driven out your tyrants. Show yourselves free men and we will protect you from their vengeance, their machinations, or their return.
From this moment the French nation proclaims the sovereignty of the people, the suppression of all civil and military authorities which have hitherto governed you and of all that taxes which you bear, under whatever form, the abolition of the tithe, of feudalism, of seigniorial rights and monopolies of every kind, of serfdom, whether real or personal, of hunting and fishing privileges, of the corvee, the salt tax, the tolls and local imposts, and, in general, of all the various kinds of taxes with which you have been loaded by your usurpers; it also proclaims the abolition among you of all noble and ecclesiastical corporations and of all prerogatives and privileges opposed to equality. You are, from this moment, brothers and friends; all are citizens, equal in rights, and all are alike called to govern, to serve, and to defend your country.
The King is Dead, “Vive la Republic!”
Henry Essex Edgeworth de Firmont
(1793)
The unfortunate Louis XVI, foreseeing to what lengths the malice of his enemies was likely to go, and resolved to be prepared at all events, cast his eyes upon me, to assist him in his last moments, if condemned to die. He would not make any application to the ruling party, nor even mention my name without my consent. The message he sent me was touching beyond expression, and worded in a manner which I shall never forget. A King, though in chains, had a right to command, but he commanded not. My attendance was requested merely as a pledge of my attachment for him, and as a favour, which he hoped I would not refuse. But as the service was likely to be attended with some danger for me, he dared not to insist, and only prayed (in case I deemed the danger to be too great) to point out to him a clergyman worthy of his confidence, but less known than I was myself, leaving the person absolutely to my choice. … Being obliged to take my party upon the spot, I resolved to comply with what appeared to be at that moment the call of Almighty God; and committing to His providence all the rest, I made answer to the most unfortunate of Kings, that whether he lived or died, I would be his friend to the last. …
The King finding himself seated in the carriage, where he could neither speak to me nor be spoken to without witness, kept a profound silence. I presented him with my breviary, the only book I had with me, and he seemed to accept it with pleasure: he appeared anxious that I should point out to him the psalms that were most suited to his situation, and he recited them attentively with me. The gend’armes, without speaking, seemed astonished and confounded at the tranquil piety of their monarch, to whom they doubtless never had before approached so near.
The procession lasted almost two hours; the streets were lined with citizens, all armed, some with pikes and some with guns, and the carriage was surrounded by a body of troops, formed of the most desperate people of Paris. As another precaution, they had placed before the horses a number of drums, intended to drown any noise or murmur in favour of the King; but how could they be heard? Nobody appeared either at the doors or windows, and in the street nothing was to be seen, but armed citizens–citizens, all rushing towards the commission of a crime, which perhaps they detested in their hearts.
The carriage proceeded thus in silence to the Place de Louis XV, and stopped in the middle of a large space that had been left round the scaffold: this space was surrounded with cannon, and beyond, an armed multitude extended as far as the eye could reach. As soon as the King perceived that the carriage stopped, he turned and whispered to me, “We are arrived, if I mistake not.” My silence answered that we were. One of the guards came to open the carriage door, and the gend’armes would have jumped out, but the King stopped them, and leaning his arm on my knee, “Gentlemen,” said he, with the tone of majesty, “I recommend to you this good man; take care that after my death no insult be offered to him–I charge you to prevent it.” … As soon as the King had left the carriage, three guards surrounded him, and would have taken off his clothes, but he repulsed them with haughtiness: he undressed himself, untied his neckcloth, opened his shirt, and arranged it himself. The guards, whom the determined countenance of the King had for a moment disconcerted, seemed to recover their audacity. They surrounded him again, and would have seized his hands. “What are you attempting?” said the King, drawing back his hands. “To bind you,” answered the wretches. “To bind me,” said the King, with an indignant air. “No! I shall never consent to that: do what you have been ordered, but you shall never bind me … “
The path leading to the scaffold was extremely rough and difficult to pass; the King was obliged to lean on my arm, and from the slowness with which he proceeded, I feared for a moment that his courage might fail; but what was my astonishment, when arrived at the last step, I felt that he suddenly let go my arm, and I saw him cross with a firm foot the breadth of the whole scaffold; silence, by his look alone, fifteen or twenty drums that were placed opposite to me; and in a voice so loud, that it must have been heard at the Pont Tournant, I heard him pronounce distinctly these memorable words: I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge; I pardon those who have occasioned my death; and I pray to God that the blood you are going to shed may never be visited on France.
He was proceeding, when a man on horseback, in the national uniform, and with a ferocious cry, ordered the drums to beat. Many voices were at the same time heard encouraging the executioners. They seemed reanimated themselves, in seizing with violence the most virtuous of Kings, they dragged him under the axe of the guillotine, which with one stroke severed his head from his body. All this passed in a moment. The youngest of the guards, who seemed about eighteen, immediately seized the head, and shewed it to the people as he walked round the scaffold; he accompanied this monstrous ceremony with the most atrocious and indecent gestures. At first an awful silence prevailed; at length some cries of “Vive la Republique!” were heard. By degrees the voices multiplied, and in less than ten minutes this cry, a thousand times repeated, became the universal shout of the multitude, and every hat was in the air.
Robespierre on Republican Virtue
Maxililien Robespierre
(1794)
We desire an order of things where all base and cruel passions are enchained by the laws, all beneficent and generous feelings awakened by them; where ambition is the desire to deserve glory and to be useful to one’s country; where distinctions arise only from equality itself; where the citizen is sub ject to the magistrate, the magistrate to the people, the people to justice; where the country secures the welfare of each individual, and each individual proudly enjoys the prosperity and glory of his country; where all minds are enlarged by the constant interchange of republican sentiments and by the need of earning the respect of a great people; where industry is an adornment to the liberty that ennobles it, and commerce is the source of public wealth, not simply of monstrous riches for a few families.
We wish to substitute in our country morality for egotism, probity for a mere sense of honour, principle for habit, duty for etiquette, the rule of reason for the tyranny of custom, contempt for vice for contempt for misfortune, pride for insolence, large-mindedness for vanity, the love of glory for the love of money, good men for good company, merit for intrigue, talent for conceit, truth for show, the charm of happiness for the tedium of pleasure, the grandeur of man for the triviality of grand society, a people magnanimous, powerful and happy for a people lovable, frivolous and wretched–that is to say, all the virtues and miracles of the Republic for all the vices and puerilities of the monarchy.
We wish in a word to fulfil the course of nature, to accomplish the destiny of mankind, to make good the promises of philosophy, to absolve Providence from the long reign of tyranny and crime. May France, once illustrious among peoples of slaves, eclipse the glory of all free peoples that have existed, become the model to the nations, the terror of oppressors, the consolation of the oppressed, the ornament of the universe; and in sealing our work with our blood, may we ourselves see at last the dawn of universal felicity gleam before us! That is our ambition. That is our aim.
The Reign of Terror in the Provinces: Lyon Temporary Committee of Republican Surveillance (1793)
The goal of the Revolution is the happiness of the people.
Paragraph I: Concerning the Revolutionary Spirit
The Revolution is made for the people; the happiness of the people is its goal; love of the people is the touchstone of the revolutionary spirit.
It is easy to understand that by “the people” we do not mean that class privileged by its riches which has usurped all the pleasures of life and all its assets from society. “The people” is the universality of French citizens; “the people” is above all the immense class of the poor, that class which gives men to the Patrie,defenders to our frontiers, which maintains society by its labors, embellishes it by its talents, which adorns it and honors it by its virtues. The Revolution would be a political and moral monstrosity if its end was to assure the happiness of a few hundred individuals and to consolidate the misery of twenty-four million citizens. …
Republicans, to be worthy of that name, begin by feeling your dignity. Hold high your head with pride and let men read in your eyes that you know who you are and what the Republic is. Do not be mistaken, to be truly republican each citizen must experience within himself a revolution equal to that which has changed the face of France. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in common between the slave of a tyrant and the inhabitant of a free state: the customs of the latter, his principles, his sentiments, his actions must all be new. You were oppressed; you must crush your oppressors. You were the slaves of superstition; you must no longer worship anything except liberty; you must have no other morality than that of nature. You were strangers to military offices; henceforth all Frenchmen are soldiers. You lived in ignorance; to assure the conquest of your rights, you must be instructed. You knew no Patrie [Fatherland], never had its sweet voice echoed in your hearts; today, you must know nothing apart from it; you must see it, hear it, and adore it in everything. The magistrate is vigilant, the farmer sows his fields, the soldier fights, the citizen breathes only for the Patrie! Its sacred image mingles in all his actions, adds to his pleasures, rewards him for his pains. Long live the Republic! Long live the people! There is his rallying cry, the expression of his joy, the solace of his sorrows. Any man to whom this enthusiasm is foreign, who knows other pleasures, other cares than the happiness of the people … any man who doesn’t feel his blood boil at the very name of tyranny, slavery, or opulence; any man who has tears to shed for the enemies of the people, who doesn’t reserve all his compassion for the victims of despotism, and for the martyrs of liberty, all such men who dare to call themselves Republicans have lied against nature and in their hearts. Let them flee the soil of liberty: they will soon be recognized and will water it with their impure blood. The Republic wants only free men within its bosom; it is determined to exterminate all others and to recognize as its children only those who know how to live, fight and die for it. …
Paragraph III: The Revolutionary Tax on the Rich
The expenses of the war must be defrayed, and the costs of the Revolution met. Who will come to the help of the Patrie in its need if it is not the rich? If they are aristocrats, it is just that they should pay for a war to which they and their supporters alone have given rise; if they are patriots, you will be anticipating their desires by asking them to put their riches to the only use fit for Republicans; that is to say, a purpose useful to the Republic. Thus, nothing can excuse you from establishing this tax promptly. No exemptions are necessary; any man who has more than he needs must participate in this extraordinary assistance. This tax must be proportioned to the great needs of the Patrie, so you must begin by deciding in a grand and truly revolutionary manner the sum that each individual must put in common for the public welfare. This isn’t a case for mathematical exactitude nor for the timid scruple which must be employed to apportion the public taxes; it is an extraordinary measure which must exhibit the character of the times which compel it. Operate, then, on a large scale; take all that a citizen has that is unnecessary; for superfluity is an evident and gratuitous violation of the rights of the people. Any man who has more than his needs cannot use it, he can only abuse it; thus, if he is left what is strictly necessary, all the rest belongs to the Republic and to its unfortunate members. …
Paragraph V : The Eradication of Fanaticism
Priests are the sole cause of the misfortunes of France; it is they who for thirteen hundred years have raised, by degrees, the edifice of our slavery and have adorned it with all the sacred baubles which could conceal flaws from the eye of reason. …
First of all, Citizens, relations between God and man are a purely private matter and, to be sincere, have no need of display in worship and the visible monuments of superstition. You will begin by sending to the treasury of the Republic all the vases, all the gold and silver ornaments which may flatter the vanity of priests but which are nothing to the truly religious man and to the Being whom he claims to honour. …
… The Republican has no other divinity than his Patrie, no other idol than liberty. The Republican is essentially religious because he is good, just, and courageous; the patriot honors virtue, respects age, consoles misfortune, comforts indigence and punishes treachery. What better homage for the Divinity! The patriot isn’t foolish enough to claim to worship him by practices useless to humanity and bad for himself; he does not condemn himself to an apparent celibacy in order to give himself up the more freely to debauchery. Worthy son of nature and useful member of society, he gives happiness to a virtuous wife and raises his numerous children according to the severe principles of morality and republicanism. …
Republicans … be on guard, you have great wrongs to expiate; the crimes of the rebellious Lyonnais are yours. … Regain then, and promptly, in liberty’s way, all the ground that you have lost, and win again by your virtues and patriotic efforts the esteem and confidence of France. The National Convention, the representatives of the people, are watching you and your magistrates; the account that they demand of you will be all the stricter because you have faults to be pardoned. And we, who are intermediaries between them and you, we whom they have charged to watch over you and instruct you, we swear that our glance will not leave you for an instant and that we will use with severity all the authority committed to us and that we will punish as treachery what in other circumstances you might have called dilatoriness, weakness or negligence. The time for half-measures and for beating about the bush is past. Help us to strike great blows or you will be the first to feel them. Liberty or death: reflect and choose.
[Signed by the Commission and approved by the deputies on mission, Collot d'Herbois and Fouche, members of the Committee of Public Safety.]
A Sans-CulotteDescribes the Typical Sans-Culotte
Anonymous
(1793)
A sans culotte, you rogues? He is someone who always goes about on foot, who has not got the millions you would all live to have, who has no castles, no valets to wait on him, and who lives simply with his wife and children, if he has any, on the fourth or fifth story. He is useful because he knows how to till a field, to forge iron, to use a saw, to roof a house, to make shoes, and to spill his blood to the last drop for the safety of the Republic. …
In the evening he goes to the assembly of his Section, not powdered and perfumed and nattily booted, in the hope of being noticed by the citizenesses in the galleries, but ready to support sound proposals with all his might and ready to pulverize those which come from the despised faction of politicians.
Finally, a sans culotte always has his sabre well-sharpened, ready to cut off the ears of all opponents of the Revolution.
Economic Realities in Revolutionary Paris: Prices and Wages
George Rude
(1789-1793)
Percentage of Income Spent on Bread by Parisian Workers, 1789(in sous)
Effective Expenditure on Bread as Percentage Daily Daily of Income
Occupation Wage Earnings1 At 9 s. At 14-1/2 s. At 13-1/2 s. At 12 s.
Laborer in Reveillon’s factory 25 s. 15 s. 60 97 90-1/2 80
Builder’s laborer 30 s. 18 s. 50 80 75-1/2 67
Journeyman mason 40 s. 24 s. 37 60 56-1/2 50
Journeyman locksmith, carpenter, etc. 50 s. 30 s. 30 48 45-1/2 40
Sculptor, goldsmith 100 s. 60 s. 15 24 22-1/2 20
1 In computing ‘effective’ earnings, allowance has been made for the numerous unpaid Feast Days of the ancien regime. Here these are assumed to number 111 per year (G. M. Jaffe, Le Mouvement ouvrier a Paris pendant la Revolution francaise , pp. 26-27). Further allowance should also be made for sickness.
Hypothetical Budgets of Parisian Workers, June 1789 and June 1791
(in sous)
Budget of a Builder’s Laborer Budget of a Journeyman Carpenter, or Locksmith ÷ ÷
(wage, 30 s.; effective income, 18 s.) (wage, 50 s.; effective income, 30 s.) ÷ ÷÷÷ June 1789 June 1791 June 1789 June 1791 ÷÷÷ 4 lb. bread 14-1/2 s. 4 lb. bread 8 s. 4 lb. bread 14-1/2 s. 4 lb. bread 8 s. ÷÷÷
Rent 3 s. Rent 3 s. Rent 3 s. Rent 3 s. ÷÷÷
1/2 liter wine 4 s. 1/2 liter wine 5 s. 1 liter wine 8 s. ÷÷÷ ÷÷÷ 1-1/4 lb. meat 2-1/2 s. 1/2 lb. meat 5 s. 1/2 lb. meat 5 s. ÷÷÷ Balance for oil, ÷÷÷ vegetables, ÷÷÷
clothing, etc. 1/2 s. Balance 1/2 s. Balance 2-1/2 s. Balance 6 s. ÷÷÷
÷÷÷
÷÷÷ ÷÷÷
÷÷÷
Total 18 s. 18 s. 30 s. 30 s.
Hypothetical Budgets of Parisian Workers, June 1790 and June 1793 (in sous)
Budget of a Journeyman Carpenter Budget of a Journeyman Locksmith ÷ ÷ ÷÷÷ June 1790 June 1793 June 1790 June 1793 ÷÷÷ (wage, 50 s.; effective (wage, 80 s.; effective (wage, 50 s.; effective (wage, 110 s.; effective ÷÷÷
income, 30 s.) income, 57 s.) income, 30 s.) income, 78 s.) ÷÷÷ ÷÷÷ 4 lb. bread 11 s. 4 lb. bread 12 s. 4 lb. bread 11 s. 4 lb. bread 12 s. ÷÷÷
Rent 3 s. Rent 6 s. Rent 3 s. Rent 6 s. ÷÷÷
1 liter wine 10 s. 1-1/2 liters wine 24 s. 1 liter wine 10 s. 1-1/2 liters wine 24 s. ÷÷÷ ÷÷÷ 1/2 lb. meat 5 s. 1/2 lb. meat 9 s. 1/2 lb. meat 5 s. 1 lb. meat 18 s. ÷÷÷ Balance for vegetables ÷÷÷
oil, clothing, etc. 1 s. Balance 6 s. Balance 1 s. Balance 18 s. ÷÷÷
÷÷÷
÷÷÷ ÷÷÷
÷÷÷
Total 30 s. 57 s. 30 s. 78 s.
The Law of the General Maximum
French National Convention
(1793)
The National Convention, having heard the report of its Commission on the drafting of a law fixing amaximum for essential goods and merchandise, decrees as follows:
Article 1. The articles which the National Convention has judged to be essential, and of which it has believed it should fix the maximum or highest price are: fresh meat, salt meat and bacon, butter, sweet oil, cattle, salt fish, wine, brandy, vinegar, cider, beer, firewood, charcoal, coal, candles, lamp oil, salt, soda, soap, potash, sugar, honey, white paper, hides, iron, cast iron, lead, steel, copper, hemp, flax, wools, fabrics, linen cloth, the raw materials used for manufacture, clogs, shoes, colza and rape, tobacco.
2. Among the articles listed above, the maximum price of first quality firewood, charcoal and coal is the same as in 1790, plus one-twentieth. The law of 19 August on the fixing by departments of the price of firewood, coal and peat is revoked.
The maximum or the highest price of twist tobacco is 20 sous per livre … that of smoking tobacco is 10 sous;that of a livre of salt is two sous; that of soap is 25 sous.
3. The maximum price of all other goods and merchandise listed in article 1 shall be, over the whole extent of the Republic, until September next, their price in 1790 as stated by the market price lists or the current prices in each department, plus one-third, deduction being made for fiscal and other fees to which they were then subject, under whatever name they may have existed.
4. The tables of the maximum or highest price of each of the goods, listed in article 1 shall be drafted by each district administration, posted within a week of the receipt of this law, and sent to the department.
5. The procureur-general-syndic shall, within the following fortnight, forward copies to both the Provisional Executive Council and the National Convention.
6. The Commissaries of the National Convention are charged with dismissing procureurs of communes,procureurs-syndics, and procureurs-generaux-syndics who shall not have fulfilled the arrangements detailed in the foregoing articles within the time prescribed, each so far as his responsibility extends.
7. Everyone who sells or buys the merchandise listed in article 1 above the maximum determined and posted in each department shall pay, jointly and severally, through the municipal police, a fine of double the value of the object sold, payable to the informant. Their names shall be inscribed on the list of suspect persons and they shall be treated as such. The buyer shall not be subject to the above penalty if he denounces the seller’s breach, and each merchant shall be required to have a list bearing the maximum or highest price of his goods conspicuous in his shop.
8. The maximumor highest rate with respect to salaries, wages, manual labour and day-labour in each place shall be fixed, beginning from the publication of this law, until September next, by general and communal councils, at the 1790 rate plus one-half.
9. Municipalities may requisition and punish, with three days detention, as the circumstances require, workmen, manufacturers and various kinds of labourers who refuse their ordinary work without legitimate cause. …
[Articles 10-16 deal with technical, administrative matters.]
17. For the duration of the war, all exportation of essential merchandise or goods is prohibited over every frontier under any name or commission whatever, salt excepted.
18. The above listed articles destined for export and intercepted in contravention [of the law] within two leagues of the frontier on this side, and without a permit from the municipality of the driver’s place [of residence], shall be confiscated with the conveyances, beasts of burden, or vessels transporting them, for the benefit of those who stop them. There shall be a penalty of ten years imprisonment for the contraveners, owners and drivers.
19. So that the crews of neutral or Frenchified ships may not abuse the favour of hospitality by taking away from maritime cities and places victuals and provisions beyond their needs, they shall appear before the municipality which shall cause all that they need to be purchased for them.
20. The present decree shall be despatched by special messenger.
The Last “Political Testament” of a Feminist During the French Revolution
Olympe de Gouges
(1793)
My son, the wealth of the whole world, the universe in servitude at my feet, the daggers of assassins raised at me, nothing can extinguish the love of country that burns in my soul; nothing could make me betray my conscience. Men deranged by passions, what have you done and what incalculable evils are you perpetrating on Paris and on the whole of France? You are risking everything; you flatter yourselves into thinking that it is only a question of a great purge to save the public; let the departments, infused with terror, blindly adopt your horrible measures.
If, by a last effort, I can save the public welfare, I want even my persecutors, as they destroy me by their furor, to be jealous of my kind of death. And if one day French women are pointed out to future generations perhaps my memory will equal that of the Romans. I have predicted it all; I know that my death is inevitable; but it is glorious for a well-intentioned soul, when an ignominious death threatens all good citizens, to die for a dying country!
I will my heart to the nation, my integrity to men (they have need of it). To women, I will my soul; my creative spirit to dramatic artists; my disinterestedness to the ambitious; my philosophy to those who are persecuted; my intelligence to all fanatics; my religion to atheists; my gaiety to women on the decline; and all the poor remains of an honest fortune to my son, if he survives me.
Frenchmen, those are my last words, listen to what I am saying and reach down into the bottom of your hearts: do you recognize the austere virtues and the unselfishness of a republican? Answer me: who has loved and served the nation more–you or I? People, your reign is over if you fail to stop yourselves at the edge of this abyss. You have never been grander or more sublime than in the majestic calm you have kept during this bloody storm. If you can preserve this calm and this august kind of supervision, you will save Paris, the whole of France, and republican government.
The Women of Revolutionary Paris Demand Action from the Convention
Anonymous
(1793)
Citizen legislators: Justly indignant at the endless jobbery which has occurred in the Ministry … we come to demand of you the execution of constitutional laws. We did not accept the principles of the Constitution so that anarchy and the rule of schemers might be prolonged indefinitely. The premeditated war has lasted long enough. It is time for the children of liberty to sacrifice themselves for the Patrie and not for the ambition and pride of a heap of rogues at the head of our armies. Let us see by the dismissal of all nobles that you are not among their defenders. Hurry, and convince all France by your actions that we have not brought the representatives of a great people from all corners of the Republic, with great show, simply to put on a moving performance in the Champ de Mars. Prove that this Constitution, which we have seen accepted, is a reality and will indeed bring about our happiness. It is not sufficient to tell the people that its happiness is drawing near; it must feel its effects. Four years’ experience of misfortune has taught it to mistrust the fine promises made to it endlessly. …
Believe us, legislators, four years of misfortune have taught us enough to be able to discern ambition under the very mask of patriotism; we no longer believe in the virtue of those men who are reduced to praising themselves. More than words is now necessary to convince us that ambition does not reign in your committees. Organize the government along the lines required by the Constitution. In vain do you tell us that this step will bring about the fall of France … we shall see only the fall of the schemers. In a Paris where the laws are strictly observed, do you expect us to believe that the enemies of the Patrie have no official defenders among you? Dismiss all nobles without exception; if there are some men of good faith among them, they will prove it by making a voluntary sacrifice for the happiness of their Patrie.
Don’t be afraid of disorganizing the army; the more talented a general is, the more urgent it is to replace him if he is ill-intentioned. Don’t do patriots the injustice of saying that there aren’t men among them able to command our armies. Let us have some of these fine soldiers whose talents and deserts have been sacrificed to the ambition and pride of that formerly privileged caste. If, under the reign of despotism, their crime won preference, under that of liberty, virtue must sweep it away. You have made a decree according to which all suspects must be arrested; but we ask you, isn’t this law derisory while these very suspects must execute it?
Legislators! Thus is the people mocked! There is the equality which was to be the basis of its happiness; there is its thanks for the countless evils it has suffered so patiently! It will not be said that this people, reduced to despair, was obliged to seek justice for itself; you will render justice by dismissing all guilty administrators, and by creating extraordinary tribunals in a sufficient number so that the people, before leaving for the frontiers, may say: “I am easy about the fate of my wife and children, for I have seen all domestic conspirators perish under the sword of the law.”
Decree these measures, legislators, and the levee en masse, and you will have saved the Patrie!
A Black Revolutionary Leader in Haiti: Toussaint L’Ouverture
Francois Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture
(1797)
The impolitic and incendiary discourse of Vaublanc has not affected the blacks nearly so much as their certainty of the projects which the proprietors of San Domingo are planning: insidious declarations should not have any effect in the eyes of wise legislators who have decreed liberty for the nations. But the attempts on that liberty which the colonists propose are all the more to be feared because it is with the veil of patriotism that they cover their detestable plans. We know that they seek to impose some of them on you by illusory and specious promises, in order to see renewed in this colony its former scenes of horror. Already perfidious emissaries have stepped in among us to ferment the destructive leaven prepared by the hands of liberticides. But they will not succeed. I swear it by all that liberty holds most sacred. My attachment to France, my knowledge of the blacks, make it my duty not to leave you ignorant either of the crimes which they meditate or the oath that we renew, to bury ourselves under the ruins of a country revived by liberty rather than suffer the return of slavery.
It is for you, Citizens Directors, to turn from over our heads the storm which the eternal enemies of our liberty are preparing in the shades of silence. It is for you to enlighten the legislature, it is for you to prevent the enemies of the present system from spreading themselves on our unfortunate shores to sully it with new crimes. Do not allow our brothers, our friends, to be sacrificed to men who wish to reign over the ruins of the human species. But no, your wisdom will enable you to avoid the dangerous snares which our common enemies hold out for you. …
I send you with this letter a declaration which will acquaint you with the unity that exists between the proprietors of San Domingo who are in France, those in the United States, and those who serve under the English banner. You will see there a resolution, unequivocal and carefully constructed, for the restoration of slavery; you will see there that their determination to succeed has led them to envelop themselves in the mantle of liberty in order to strike it more deadly blows. You will see that they are counting heavily on my complacency in lending myself to their perfidious views by my fear for my children. It is not astonishing that these men who sacrifice their country to their interests are unable to conceive how many sacrifices a true love of country can support in a better father than they, since I unhesitatingly base the happiness of my children on that of my country, which they and they alone wish to destroy.
I shall never hesitate between the safety of San Domingo and my personal happiness; but I have nothing to fear. It is to the solicitude of the French Government that I have confided my children. … I would tremble with horror if it was into the hands of the colonists that I had sent them as hostages; but even if it were so, let them know that in punishing them for the fidelity of their father, they would only add one degree more to their barbarism, without any hope of ever making me fail in my duty. … Blind as they are! They cannot see how this odious conduct on their part can become the signal of new disasters and irreparable misfortunes, and that far from making them regain what in their eyes liberty for all has made them lose, they expose themselves to a total ruin and the colony to its inevitable destruction. Do they think that men who have been able to enjoy the blessing of liberty will calmly see it snatched away? They supported their chains only so long as they did not know any condition of life more happy than that of slavery. But to-day when they have left it, if they had a thousand lives they would sacrifice them all rather than be forced into slavery again. But no, the same hand which has broken our chains will not enslave us anew. France will not revoke her principles, she will not withdraw from us the greatest of her benefits. She will protect us against all our enemies; she will not permit her sublime morality to be perverted, those principles which do her most honour to be destroyed, her most beautiful achievement to be degraded, and her Decree of 16 Pluviose which so honors humanity to be revoked. But if, to re-establish slavery in San Domingo, this was done, then I declare to you it would be to attempt the impossible: we have known how to face dangers to obtain our liberty, we shall know how to brave death to maintain it.
This, Citizens Directors, is the morale of the people of San Domingo, those are the principles that they transmit to you by me.
My own you know. It is sufficient to renew, my hand in yours, the oath that I have made, to cease to live before gratitude dies in my heart, before I cease to be faithful to France and to my duty, before the god of liberty is profaned and sullied by the liberticides, before they can snatch from my hands that sword, those arms, which France confided to me for the defence of its rights and those of humanity, for the triumph of liberty and equality.
A Natural Rights Defense of the French Revolution: The Rights of Man
Thomas Paine
(1791)
To George Washington,
President of the United States of America
Sir,
I present you a small treatise in defense of those principles of freedom which your exemplary virtue hath so eminently contributed to establish. That the Rights of Man may become as universal as your benevolence can wish, and that you may enjoy the happiness of seeing the New World regenerate the Old, is the prayer of
Sir,
Your much obliged, and
Obedient humble servant,
Thomas Paine
From the part Mr. Burke took in the American Revolution, it was natural that I should consider him a friend to mankind; and as our acquaintance commenced on that ground, it would have been more agreeable to me to have had cause to continue in that opinion, than to change it.
At the time Mr. Burke made his violent speech last winter in the English Parliament against the French Revolution and the National Assembly, I was in Paris, and had written to him but a short time before, to inform him how prosperously matters were going on. Soon after this, I saw his advertisement of the pamphlet he intended to publish. …
Among the incivilities by which nations or individuals provoke and irritate each other, Mr. Burke’s pamphlet on the French Revolution is an extraordinary instance. Neither the people of France, nor the National Assembly, were troubling themselves about the affairs of England, or the English Parliament; and that Mr. Burke should commence an unprovoked attack upon them, both in Parliament and in public, is a conduct that cannot be pardoned on the score of manners, nor justified on that of policy. …
Not sufficiently content with abusing the National Assembly, a great part of his work is taken up with abusing Dr. Price (one of the best-hearted men that lives), and the two societies in England known by the name of the Revolution Society, and the Society for Constitutional Information.
Dr. Price had preached a sermon on the 4th of November, 1789, being the anniversary of what is called in England the Revolution, which took place in 1688. Mr. Burke, speaking of this sermon, says, “The political divine proceeds dogmatically to assert that, by the principles of the Revolution, the people of England have acquired three fundamental rights:
1. To choose our own governors.
2. To cashier them for misconduct.
3. To frame a government for ourselves.”
Dr. Price does not say that the right to do these things exists in this or in that person, or in this or in that description of persons, but that it exists in the whole;that it is a right resident in the nation. Mr. Burke, on the contrary, denies that such a right exists in the nation, either in whole or in part, or that it exists any where; and, what is still more strange and marvelous, he says, “that the people of England utterly disclaim such a right, and that they will resist the practical assertion of it with their lives and fortunes.”
That men should take up arms, and spend their lives and fortunes, not to maintain their rights, but to maintain they have not rights, is an entirely new species of discovery, and suited to the paradoxical genius of Mr. Burke.
The English Parliament of 1688 did a certain thing, which, for themselves and their constituents, they had a right to do, and which it appeared right should be done: But, in addition to this right, which they possessed by delegation, they set up another right by assumption, that of binding and controlling posterity to the end of time. …
There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the “end of time,” or of commanding forever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore, all such clauses, acts or declarations, by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void.
Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generation which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. …
It was not against Louis XVI, but against the despotic principles of the government, that the nation revolted. These principles had not their origin in him, but in the original establishment, many centuries back; and they were become too deeply rooted to be removed, and the Augean stable of parasites and plunderers too abominably filthy to be cleansed, by anything short of a complete and universal revolution. … There were, if I may so express it, a thousand despotisms to be reformed in France, which had grown up under the hereditary despotism of the monarchy, and became so rooted as to be in a great measure independent of it. …
Not one glance of compassion, not one commiserating reflection, that I can find throughout his book, has he [Burke] bestowed on those who lingered out the most wretched of lives, a life without hope, in the most miserable of prisons.
It is painful to behold a man employing his talents to corrupt himself. Nature has been kinder to Mr. Burke than he is to her. He is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblage of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird. …
More of the citizens fell in this struggle than of their opponents; but four or five persons were seized by the populace, and instantly put to death; the governor of the Bastille, and the mayor of Paris, who was detected in the act of betraying them; and afterwards Foulon, one of the new ministry, and Berthier, his son-in-law, who had accepted the office of intendant of Paris. Their heads were struck upon spikes, and carried about the city; and it is upon this mode of punishment that Mr. Burke builds a great part of his tragic scenes. …
These outrages are not the effect of the principles of the revolution, but of the degraded mind that existed before the revolution, and which the revolution is calculated to reform. Place them then to their proper cause, and take the reproach of them to your own side. …
Mr. Burke, with his usual outrage, abuses the Declaration of the Rights of Man, published by the National Assembly of France, as the basis on which the constitution of France is built. This he calls “paltry and blurred sheets of paper about the rights of man.”
Does Mr. Burke mean to deny that man has any rights? If he does, then he must mean that there are no such things as rights any where, and that he has none himself; for who is there in the world but man? But if Mr. Burke means to admit that man has rights, the question then will be, what are those rights, and how came man by them originally? …
The duty of man is not a wilderness of turnpike gates, through which he is to pass by tickets from one to the other. It is plain and simple, and consists but of two points. His duty to God, which every man must feel, and with respect to his neighbor, to do as he would be done by….
Hitherto we have spoken only (and that but in part) of the natural rights of man. We have now to consider the civil rights of man, and to show how the one originates from the other. Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured. His natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights. …
In casting our eyes over the world, it is extremely easy to distinguish the governments which have arisen out of society, or out of the social compact, from those which have not: but to place this in a clearer light than what a single glance may afford, it will be proper to take a review of the several sources from which the governments have arisen, and on which they have been founded.
They may be all comprehended under three heads. First, superstition. Secondly, power. Thirdly, the common interests of society, and the common rights of man.
The first was a government of priestcraft, the second of conquerors, and the third of reason. …
We have now to review the governments which arise out of society, in contradistinction to those which arose out of superstition and conquest.
It has been thought a considerable advance toward establishing the principles of freedom, to say, that government is a compact between those who govern and those who are governed: but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause, for as a man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governments to form such a compact with.
The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist. … The constitution of a country is not the act of its government, but of the people constituting a government. …
The authority of the present [National] Assembly [of France] is different to what the authority of future assemblies will be. The authority of the present one is to form a constitution; the authority of future assemblies will be to legislate according to the principles and forms prescribed in that constitution; and if experience should hereafter show that alterations, amendments, or additions are necessary, the constitution will point out the mode by which such things shall be done, and not leave it to the discretionary power of the future government. …
The Constitution of France says, that every man who pays a tax of sixty sous per annum (2s. and 6d. English) is an elector. What article will Mr. Burke place against this? Can anything be more limited, and at the same time more capricious, than what the qualifications are in England? …
The French Constitution says, that the number of representatives for any place shall be in a ratio to the number of taxable inhabitants or electors. What article will Mr. Burke place against this? The county of Yorkshire, which contains near a million souls, sends two county members; and so does the county of Rutland, which contains not a hundredth part of that number. …
The French Constitution says, there shall be no game laws; that the farmer on whose land wild game shall be found (for it is by the produce of those lands they are fed) shall have a right to what he can take. That there shall be no monopolies of any kind, that all trades shall be free, and every man free to follow any occupation by which he can procure an honest livelihood, and in any place, town, or city, throughout the nation. What will Mr. Burke say to this? …
The French Constitution says, there shall be no titles; and of consequence, all that class of equivocal generation, which in some countries is called “aristocracy,” and in others “nobility,” is done away, and the peer is exalted intoman.
Titles are but nicknames, and every nickname is a title. The thing is perfectly harmless in itself, but it marks a sort of foppery in the human character which degrades it. …
The French Constitution has reformed the condition of the clergy. It has raised the income of the lower and middle classes, and taken from the higher. None is now less than twelve hundred livres (fifty pounds sterling), nor any higher than about two or three thousand pounds. What will Mr. Burke place against this? …
The French Constitution has abolished tithes, that source of perpetual discontent between the tithe-holder and the parishioner. …
The French Constitution hath abolished or renounced toleration, and intolerance also, and hath established UNIVERSAL RIGHT OF CONSCIENCE. …
Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all law-religions, or religions established by law. Take away the law-establishment, and every religion reassumes its original benignity. In America, a Catholic priest is a good citizen, a good character, and a good neighbor; an Episcopal minister is of the same description: and this proceeds, independently of the men, from there being no law-establishment in America. …
By the French Constitution, the nation is always named before the king. The third article of the Declaration of Rights says, “ The nation is essentially the source (or fountain) of all sovereignty.” Mr. Burke argues, that, in England, a king is the fountain–that he is the fountain of all honor. … In contemplating the French Constitution, we see in it a rational order of things. …
One of the first works of the National Assembly, instead of vindictive proclamations, as has been the case with other governments, published a Declaration of the Rights of Man, as the basis on which the new Constitution was to be built. …
… We see the solemn and majestic spectacle of a nation opening its commission, under the auspices of its Creator, to establish a government; a scene so new, and so transcendently unequalled by any thing in the European world, that the name of a revolution is diminutive of its character, and it rises into a regeneration of man.
What are the present governments of Europe, but a scene of iniquity and oppression? What is that of England? Do not its own inhabitants say? It is a market where every man has his price, and where corruption is common traffic, at the expense of a deluded people? No wonder, then, that the French Revolution is traduced. …
Notwithstanding the nonsense, for it deserves not better name, that Mr. Burke has asserted about hereditary rights, and hereditary succession, and that a nation has not a right to form a government for itself; it happened to fall in his way to give some account of what government is. “Government,” say[s] he, “is a contrivance of human wisdom. ” …
Admitting that government is a contrivance of human wisdomm, it must necessarily follow, that hereditary succession, and hereditary rights (as they are called), can make no part of it, because it is impossible to make wisdom hereditary; and on the other hand, that cannot be a wise contrivance, which in its operation may commit the government of a nation to the wisdom of an idiot. The ground which Mr. Burke now takes, is fatal to every part of his cause. …
What were formerly called revolutions, were little more than a change of persons, or an alteration of local circumstances. … But what we now see in the world, from the revolutions of America and France, is a renovation of the natural order of things, a system of principles as universal as truth and the existence of man, and combining moral with political happiness and national prosperity. …
Government on the old system is an assumption of power for the aggrandizement of itself; on the new, a delegation of power, for the common benefit of society. The former supports itself by keeping up a system of war; the latter promotes a system of peace, as the true means of enriching a nation. The one encourages national prejudices; the other promotes universal society, as the means of universal commerce. The one measures its prosperity, by the quantity of revenue it extorts; the other proves its excellence, by the small quantity of taxes it requires. … The representative system takes society and civilization for its basis; nature, reason, and experience for its guide. …
Never did so great an opportunity offer itself to England, and to all Europe, as is produced by the two revolutions of America and France. By the former, freedom has a national champion in the western world; and by the latter, in Europe. When another nation shall join France, despotism and bad government will scarcely dare to appear. To use a trite expression, the iron is becoming hot all over Europe. The insulted German and the enslaved Spaniard, the Russ and the Pole are beginning to think. The present age will hereafter merit to be called the Age of Reason, and the present generation will appear to the future as the Adam of a new world.
A Feminist Analysis of Natural Law and the Rights of Women
Mary Wollstonecraft
(1792)
My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinatinggraces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists–I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity will soon become objects of contempt.
Dismissing those soft pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind, exquisite sensibility, and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, I wish to shew that elegance is inferior to virtue, that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex.
Youth is the season for love in both sexes; but in those days of thoughtless enjoyment provision should be made for the more important years of life, when reflection takes place of sensation. The woman who has only been taught to please will soon find that her charms are oblique sunbeams and that they cannot have much effect on her husband’s heart when they are seen every day, when the summer is passed and gone. Will she then have sufficient native energy to look into herself for comfort, and cultivate her dormant faculties? or, is it not more rational to expect that she will try to please other men?
Why must the female mind be tainted by coquettish arts to gratify the sensualist and prevent love from subsiding into friendship, or compassionate tenderness, when there are not qualities on which friendship can be built? Let the honest heart shew itself, and reason teach passion to submit to necessity; or, let the dignified pursuit of virtue and knowledge raise the mind above those emotions. …
If then women are not a swarm of ephemeron triflers, why should they be kept in ignorance under the specious name of innocence? … As to the argument respecting the subjection in which the sex has ever been held, it retorts on man. The many have always been enthralled by the few; and monsters, who scarcely have shown any discernment of human excellence, have tyrannized over thousands of their fellow-creatures. … China is not the only country where a living man has been made a God. Men have submitted to superior strength to enjoy with impunity the pleasure of the moment; womenhave only done the same, and therefore till it is proved that the courtier, who servilely resigns the birthright of a man, is not a moral agent, it cannot be demonstrated that woman is essentially inferior to man because she has always been subjugated.
The Napoleonic Code Regulates Gender
Napoleon I
(1804)
Of the Rights and Respective Duties of Husband and Wife
212. Husband and wife mutually owe to each other fidelity, succor, and assistance.
213. The husband owes protection to his wife, the wife obedience to her husband.
214. The wife is obliged to live with her husband, and to follow him wherever he may think proper to dwell; the husband is bound to receive her, and to furnish her with everything necessary for the purposes of life, according to his means and condition.
215. The wife can do no act in law without the authority of her husband. …
Of Causes of Divorce
229. The husband may demand divorce for cause of adultery on the part of his wife.
230. The wife may demand divorce for cause of adultery on the part of her husband, where he shall have kept his concubine in their common house.
Of the Effects of Divorce
298. In the case of divorce allowed at law for cause of adultery, the guilty party can never marry his or her accomplice. The adulterous wife shall be condemned by the same judgment, and upon the requisition of the public ministry, to confinement in a house of correction for a certain period, which shall not be less than three months, nor exceed two years.
The Imperial Catechism Hangs a New Star in God’s Firmament
French Catholic Church
(1806)
Question. What are the duties of Christians toward those who govern them, and what in particular are our duties towards Napoleon I, our emperor?
Answer. Christians owe to the princes who govern them, and we in particular owe to Napoleon I, our emperor, love, respect, obedience, fidelity, military service, and the taxes levied for the preservation and defense of the empire and of his throne. We also owe him fervent prayers for his safety and for the spiritual and temporal prosperity of the state.
Question. Why are we subject to all these duties toward our emperor?
Answer. First, because God, who has created empires and distributes them according to his will, has, by loading our emperor with gifts both in peace and in war, established him as our sovereign and made him the agent of his power and his image upon earth. To honor and serve our emperor is therefore to honor and serve God himself. Secondly, because our Lord Jesus Christ himself, both by his teaching and his example, has taught us what we owe to our sovereign. Even at his very birth he obeyed the edict of Caesar Augustus; he paid the established tax; and while he commanded us to render to God those things which belong to God, he also commanded us to render unto Caesar those things which are Caesar’s.
Question. Are there not special motives which should attach us more closely to Napoleon I, our emperor?
Answer. Yes, for it is he whom God has raised up in trying times to re‘stablish the public worship of the holy religion of our fathers and to be its protector; he has re‘tablished and preserved public order by his profound and active wisdom; he defends the state by his mighty arm; he has become the anointed of the Lord by the consecration which he has received from the sovereign pontiff, head of the Church universal.
Question. What must we think of those who are wanting in their duties toward our emperor?
Answer. According to the apostle Paul, they are resisting the order established by God himself and render themselves worthy of eternal damnation.
Prussia Abolishes Serfdom: The Reform Edict of 1807
Frederick William III
(1807)
We, Frederick William, by the grace of God king of Prussia, etc., etc., hereby make known and proclaim that: Since peace has been established we have been occupied before everything else with the care for the depressed condition of our faithful subjects and the speediest revival and greatest possible improvement in this respect. We have considered that, in face of the prevailing want, the means at our disposal would be insufficient to aid each individual, and even if they were sufficient, we could not hope to accomplish our object; and that, moreover, in accordance with the imperative demands of justice and with the principles of a judicious economic policy, it behooves us to remove every obstacle which has hitherto prevented the individual from attaining such a state of prosperity as he was capable of reaching. We have further considered that the existing restrictions, both on the possession and enjoyment of landed property and on the personal condition of the agricultural laborer, especially interfere with our benevolent purpose and disable a great force which might be applied to the restoration of agriculture,–the former, by their prejudicial influence upon the value of landed property and the credit of the proprietor; the latter, by diminishing the value of labor. We desire, therefore, to reduce both kinds of restrictions so far as the common well-being demands, and we accordingly ordain the following.
1. Every inhabitant of our states is competent, without any limitation on the part of the state, to own or mortgage landed property of every kind. The noble may therefore own not only noble, but also non-noble, citizen and peasant lands of every kind, and the citizen and peasant may possess not only citizen, peasant, and other non-noble, but also noble tracts of land without in any case needing special permission for any acquisition whatever, although henceforth, as before, every change of ownership must be announced to the authorities. All privileges which are possessed by noble over citizen inheritances are entirely abolished. …
2. Every noble is henceforth permitted, without any derogation from his station, to engage in citizen occupation, and every citizen or peasant is allowed to pass from the citizen into the peasant class or from the peasant into the citizen class. …
10. From the date of this ordinance no new relation of serfdom, whether by birth or marriage, or by assuming the position of a serf, or by contract, can be created.
11. With the publication of the present ordinance the existing relations of serfdom of those serfs, with their wives and children, who possess their peasant holdings by inheritance, or in their own right, or by perpetual leases, or of copyhold, shall cease entirely, together with all mutual rights and duties.
12. From Martinmas, one thousand eight hundred and ten (1810), all serfdom shall cease throughout our whole realm. From Martinmas, 1810, there shall be only free persons, as is already the case upon the royal domains in all our provinces,–free persons, however, still subject, as a matter of course, to all obligations which bind them, as free persons, by reason of the possession of an estate or by virtue of a special contract.
To this declaration of our supreme will every one whom it may concern, and in particular our provincial authorities and other officials, are exactly and dutifully to conform, and the present ordinance is to be universally made known.
Napoleon I “Enlightens” Spain
Napoleon I
(1808)
To date from the publication of the present decree, feudal rights are abolished in Spain.
All personal obligations, all exclusive fishing rights and other rights of similar nature on the coast or on rivers and streams, all feudal monopolies ( banalites) of ovens, mills, and inns are suppressed. It shall be free to every one who shall conform to the laws to develop his industry without restraint.
The tribunal of the Inquisition is abolished, as inconsistent with the civil sovereignty and authority.
The property of the Inquisition shall be sequestered and fall to the Spanish state, to serve as security for the bonded debt.
Considering that the members of the various monastic orders have increased to an undue degree and that, although a certain number of them are useful in assisting the ministers of the altar in the administration of the sacraments, the existence of too great a number interferes with the prosperity of the state, we have decreed and do decree as follows:
The number of convents now in existence in Spain shall be reduced to a third of their present number. This reduction shall be accomplished by uniting the members of several convents of the same order into one.
From the publication of the present decree, no one shall be admitted to the novitiate or permitted to take the monastic vow until the number of the religious of both sexes has been reduced to one third of that now in existence. …
All regular ecclesiastics who desire to renounce the monastic life and live as secular ecclesiastics are at liberty to leave their monasteries. …
In view of the fact that the institution which stands most in the way of the internal prosperity of Spain is that of the customs lines separating the provinces, we have decreed and do decree what follows:
To date from January 1 next, the barriers existing between the provinces shall be suppressed. The custom houses shall be removed to the frontiers and there established.
The Grande Armee in Retreat: the Russian Campaign
Benjamin Constant
(1812)
On the 25th of November [1812] there had been thrown across the river temporary bridges made of beams taken from the cabins of the Poles. … At a little after five in the afternoon the beams gave way, not being sufficiently strong; and as it was necessary to wait until the next day, the army again abandoned itself to gloomy forebodings. It was evident that they would have to endure the fire of the enemy all the next day. But there was no longer any choice; for it was only at the end of this night of agony and suffering of every description that the first beams were secured in the river. It is hard to comprehend how men could submit to stand, up to their mouths in water filled with ice, rallying all the strength which nature had given them, added to all that the energy of devotion furnished, and drive piles several feet deep into a miry bed, struggling against the most horrible fatigue, pushing back with their hands enormous blocks of ice which threatened to submerge and sink them. …
The emperor awaited daylight in a poor hut, and in the morning said to Prince Berthier, “Well, Berthier, how do we get out of this?” He was seated in his room, great tears flowing down his cheeks, which were paler than usual and the prince was seated near him. They exchanged words, and the emperor appeared overcome by his grief, leave to the imagination what was passing in his soul.
When the artillery and baggage wagons passed, the bridge was so overweighted that it fell in. Instantly a backward movement took place, which crowded together all the magnitude of stragglers who were advancing in the rear of the artillery, like a flock being herded. Another bridge had been constructed, as if the sad thought had occurred that the first might give way, but the second was narrow and without a railing; nevertheless it seemed at first a very valuable makeshift in such a calamity. But how disasters follow one upon another! The stragglers rushed to the second bridge in crowds. But the artillery, the baggage wagons,–a word, all the army supplies,–had been in front on the first bridge when it broke down. … Now, since it was urgent that the artillery should pass first, it rushed impetuously toward the only road to safety which remained. No one can describe the scene of horror which ensued; for it was literally over a road of trampled human bodies that conveyances of all sorts reached the bridge. On this occasion one could see how much brutality and cold-blooded ferocity can be produced in human minds by the instinct of self-preservation. … As I have said, the bridge had no railing; and crowds of those who forced their way across fell into the river and were engulfed beneath the ice. Others, in the fall, tried to stop themselves by grasping the planks of the bridge, and remained suspended over the abyss until, their hands crushed by the wheels of the vehicles, they lost their grasp and went to join their comrades as the waves closed over them. Entire caissons with drivers and horses were precipitated into the water. …
Officers harnessed themselves to sleds to carry some of their companions who were rendered helpless by their wounds. They wrapped these unfortunates as warmly as possible, cheered them from time to time with a glass of brandy when they could procure it, and lavished upon them the most touching attention. There were many who behaved in this unselfish manner, of whose names we are ignorant; and how few returned to enjoy in their own country the remembrance of the most heroic deeds of their lives!
On the 29th the emperor quitted the banks of the Beretina and we slept at Kamen, where his Majesty occupied a poor wooden building which the icy air penetrated from all sides through the windows, for nearly all the glass was broken. We closed the openings as well as we could with bundles of hay. A short distance from us, in a large lot, were penned up the wretched Russian prisoners whom the army drove before it. I had much difficulty in comprehending the delusion of victory which our poor soldiers still kept up by dragging after them this wretched luxury of prisoners, who could only be an added burden, as they required constant surveillance. When the conquerors are dying of famine, what becomes of the conquered? These poor Russians, exhausted by marches and hunger, nearly all perished that night. …
[Napoleon secretly decided to leave his stricken army and return to France as quickly as possible.] The emperor left in the night. By daybreak the army had learned the news, and the impression it made cannot be depicted. Discouragement was at its height, and many soldiers cursed the emperor and reproached him for abandoning them.
This night, the 6th [of December], the cold increased greatly. Its severity may be imagined, as birds were found on the ground frozen stiff. Soldiers seated themselves with their heads in their hands and bodies bent forward in order thus to feel less the emptiness of their stomachs. … Everything had failed us. Long before reaching Wilna [Vilnius, today in Lithuania], the horses being dead, we received orders to burn our carriages and all their contents.
Constitutional Monarchy in France, Again
Louis XVIII
(1814)
Louis by the Grace of God, King of France and Navarre–to all those to whom these presents come, salutation. Divine Providence in recalling us to our estates after a long absence has imposed grave responsibilities upon us. Peace was the first necessity of our subjects, and we have unceasingly occupied ourselves with this. That peace, so essential to France and to the rest of Europe has been signed. A constitutional charter was demanded by the existing condition of the kingdom, we promised this and now publish it. We have taken into consideration the fact that although the whole authority in France resides in the person of the king, our predecessors have not hesitated to modify the exercise of this in accordance with the differences of the times. It was thus that the communes owed their enfranchisement to Louis the Fat, the confirmation and extension of their rights to Saint Louis and Philip the Fair, and that the judicial system was established and developed by the laws of Louis XI, Henry II, and Charles IX. It was in this way finally that Louis XIV regulated almost every portion of the public administration by various ordinances which have never been surpassed in wisdom. We, like the kings our predecessors, have had to consider the effects of the ever increasing progress of knowledge, the new relations which this progress has introduced into society, the direction given to the public mind during half a century and the serious troubles resulting therefrom. We have perceived that the wish of our subjects for a constitutional charter was the expression of a real need, but in yielding to this wish we have taken every precaution that this charter should be worthy of us and of the people whom we are proud to rule. Able men taken from the first bodies of the state were added to the commissioners of our council to elaborate this important work. While we recognize that the expectations of enlightened Europe ought to be gratified by a free monarchical constitution, we have had to remember that our first duty toward our peoples was to preserve for their own interest the rights and prerogatives of our crown. We hope that, taught by experience, they may be convinced that the supreme authority can alone give to institutions which it establishes the power, permanence and dignity with which it is itself clothed. That, consequently, when the wisdom of kings freely harmonizes with the wish of the peoples, a constitutional charter may long endure, but that when concessions are snatched with violence from a weak government, public liberty is not less endangered than the throne itself.
We have sought the principles of the constitutional charter in the French character and in the venerable monuments of past centuries. Thus we perceived in the revival of the peerage a truly national institution which binds memories to hope, by uniting ancient and modern times. We have replaced by the chamber of deputies, those ancient assemblies of the March Field and May Field, and those chambers of the third estate which so often exhibited at once proof of their zeal for the interests of the people, and fidelity and respect for the authority of kings. In thus endeavoring to renew the chain of time which fatal excesses had broken, we effaced from our memory, as we would we might blot out from history, all the evils which have afflicted the country during our absence. Happy to find ourselves again in the bosom of our great family, we could only respond to the love of which we receive so many testimonies by uttering words of peace and consolation. The dearest wish of our heart is that all the French may live like brothers, and that no bitter memory should ever trouble the security which ought to follow the solemn act which we grant them to-day.
Confident in our intentions, strong in our conscience, we engage ourselves before the assembly which listens to us to be faithful to this Constitutional Charter, with the intention of swearing to maintain it with added solemnity before the altars of Him who weighs in the same balance kings and nations.
For these reasons we have voluntarily and by the free exercise of our royal authority granted and do grant, concede and accord, as well for us as for our successors forever, the Constitutional Charter as follows: …
Primary Sources – Unit Nine – The Revolution in Politics, 1775-1815
Turgot Prepares Louis XVI for the Resistance to Fiscal Reform and Budgetary Retrenchment
Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot
(1774)
Compiegne, August 24, 1774.
Sire:
Having just come from the private interview with which your Majesty has honored me, still full of the anxiety produced by the immensity of the duties now imposed upon me, agitated by all the feelings excited by the touching kindness with which you have encouraged me, I hasten to convey to you my respectful gratitude and the devotion of my whole life.
Your Majesty has been good enough to permit me to place on record the engagement you have taken upon you to sustain me in the execution of those plans of economy which are at all times, and to-day more than ever, an indispensable necessity. … At this moment, sire, I confine myself to recalling to you these three items:
No bankruptcy.
No increase of taxes.
No loans.
No bankruptcy, either avowed or disguised by illegal reductions.
No increase of taxes; the reason for this lying in the condition of your people, and, still more, in that of your Majesty’s own generous heart.
No loans; because every loan always diminishes the free revenue and necessitates, at the end of a certain time, either bankruptcy or the increase of taxes. In times of peace it is permissible to borrow only in order to liquidate old debts, or in order to redeem other loans contracted on less advantageous terms.
To meet these three points there is but one means. It is to reduce expenditure below the revenue, and sufficiently below it to insure each year a saving of twenty millions, to be applied to redemption of the old debts. Without that, the first gunshot will force the state into bankruptcy.
The question will be asked incredulously, “On what can we retrench?” and each one, speaking for his own department, will maintain that nearly every particular item of expense is indispensable. They will be able to allege very good reasons, but these must all yield to the absolute necessity of economy. …
These are the matters which I have been permitted to recall to your Majesty. You will not forget that in accepting the place of comptroller general I have felt the full value of the confidence with which you honor me; I have felt that you intrust to me the happiness of your people, and, if it be permitted to me to say so, the care of promoting among your people the love of your person and of your authority.
At the same time I feel all the danger to which I expose myself. I foresee that I shall be alone in fighting against abuses of every kind, against the power of those who profit by these abuses, against the crowd of prejudiced people who oppose themselves to all reform, and who are such powerful instruments in the hands of interested parties for perpetuating the disorder. I shall have to struggle even against the natural goodness and generosity of your Majesty, and of the persons who are most dear to you. I shall be feared, hated even, by nearly all the court, by all who solicit favors. They will impute to me all the refusals; they will describe me as a hard man because I shall have advised your Majesty that you ought not to enrich even those that you love at the expense of your people’s subsistence.
And this people, for whom I shall sacrifice myself, are so easily deceived that perhaps I shall encounter their hatred by the very measures I take to defend them against exactions. I shall be calumniated (having, perhaps, appearances against me) in order to deprive me of your Majesty’s confidence. I shall not regret losing a place which I never solicited. I am ready to resign it to your Majesty as soon as I can no longer hope to be useful in it. …
Your Majesty will remember that it is upon the faith of your promises made to me that I charge myself with a burden perhaps beyond my strength, and it is to yourself personally, to the upright man, the just and good man, rather than to the king, that I give myself.
I venture to repeat here what you have already been kind enough to hear and approve of. The affecting kindness with which you condescended to press my hands within your own, as if sealing my devotion, will never be effaced from my memory. It will sustain my courage. It has forever united my personal happiness with the interest, the glory, and the happiness of your Majesty. It is with these sentiments that I am, sire, etc.
Turgot Abolishes the French Guilds
Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot
(1774)
In almost all the towns the exercise of the different arts and trades is concentrated in the hands of a small number of masters, united in corporations, who alone can, to the exclusion of all other citizens, make or sell the articles belonging to their particular industry. Any person who, by inclination or necessity, intends following an art or trade can only do so by acquiring the mastership [i.e., freedom of the corporation] after a probation as long and vexatious as it is superfluous. By having to satisfy repeated exactions, the money he had so much need of in order to start his trade or open his workshop has been consumed in mere waste. …
Citizens of all classes are deprived both of the right to choose the workmen they would employ, and of the advantages they would enjoy from competition operating toward improvements in manufacture and reduction in price. Often one cannot get the simplest work done without its having to go through the hands of several workmen of different corporations, and without enduring the delays, tricks, and exaction which the pretensions of the different corporations, and the caprices of their arbitrary and mercenary directors, demand and encourage. …
Among the infinite number of unreasonable regulations, we find in some corporations that all are excluded from them except the sons of masters, or those who marry the widows of masters. Others reject all those whom they call “strangers,”–that is, those born in another town. In many of them for a young man to be married is enough to exclude him from the apprenticeship, and consequently from the mastership. The spirit of monopoly which has dictated the making of these statutes has been carried out to the excluding of women even from the trades the most suitable to their sex, such as embroidery, which they are forbidden to exercise on their own account. …
God, by giving to man wants, and making his recourse to work necessary to supply them, has made the right to work the property of every man, and this property is the first, the most sacred, the most imprescriptible of all. …
It shall be free to all persons, of whatever quality or condition they may be, even to all foreigners, to undertake and to exercise in all our kingdom, and particularly in our good city of Paris, whatever kind of trade and whatever profession of art or industry may seem good to them; for which purpose we now extinguish and suppress all corporations and communities of merchants and artisans, as well as all masterships and guild directories. We abrogate all privileges, statutes, and regulations of the said corporations, so that none of our subjects shall be troubled in the exercise of his trade or profession by any cause or under any pretext whatever.
William Pitt Gives a Whiggish Defense of American Resistance to Taxation
William Pitt
(1775)
This resistance to your arbitrary system of taxation might have been foreseen; it was obvious from the nature of things and of mankind, and, above all, from the Whiggish spirit flourishing in that country. The spirit which now resists your taxation in America is the same which formerly opposed loans, benevolences, and ship money in England; the same spirit which called all England on its legs, and by the Bill of Rights vindicated the English constitution; the same spirit which established the great, fundamental, essential maxim of your liberties, that no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent.
This glorious spirit of Whiggism animates three millions in America, who prefer poverty with liberty to gilded chains and sordid affluence, and who will die in the defense of their rights as men, as free men. What shall oppose this spirit, aided by the congenial flame glowing in the breast of every Whig in England, to the amount, I hope, of double the American numbers? Ireland they have to a man. In that country, joined as it is with the cause of the colonies, and placed at their head, the distinction I contend for is and must be observed. This country superintends and controls their trade and navigation, but they tax themselves. And this distinction between external and internal control is sacred and insurmountable; it is involved in the abstract nature of things. Property is private, individual, absolute. Trade is an extended and complicated consideration; it reaches as far as ships can sail or winds can blow; it is a great and various machine. To regulate the numberless movements of the several parts and combine them into effect for the good of the whole, requires the superintending wisdom and energy of the supreme power in the empire. But this supreme power has no effect towards internal taxation, for it does not exist in that relation; there is no such thing, no such idea in this constitution, as a supreme power operating upon property. Let this distinction then remain forever ascertained: taxation is theirs, commercial regulation is ours. As an American, I would recognize to England her supreme right of regulating commerce and navigation; as an Englishman by birth and principle, I recognize to the Americans their supreme unalienable right in their property,–a right which they are justified in the defense of to the last extremity. To maintain this principle is the common cause of the Whigs on the other side of the Atlantic and on this. “‘Tis liberty to liberty engaged,” that they will defend themselves, their families, and their country. In this great cause they are immovably allied: it is the alliance of God and nature,–immovable, eternal, fixed as the firmament of heaven.
Arthur Young’s Travels in France on the Eve of the Revolution
Arthur Young
(1787)
October 17, 1787 . … Dined to-day with a party whose conversation was entirely political. Monsieur de Calonne’s Requete au Roi is come over, and all the world are reading and disputing on it. It seems, however, generally agreed that, without exonerating himself from the charge of the agiotage, he has thrown no inconsiderable load on the shoulders of the Archbishop of Toulouse, the present premier, who will be puzzled to get rid of the attack. But both these ministers were condemned on all hands in the lump as being absolutely unequal to the difficulties of so arduous a period. One opinion pervaded the whole company, that they are on the eve of some great revolution in the government: that everything points to it: the confusion in the finances great; with a deficit impossible to provide for without the estates-general of the kingdom, yet no ideas formed of what would be the consequence of their meeting: no minister existing, or to be looked to in or out of power, with such decisive talents as to promise any other remedy than palliative ones: a prince on the throne, with excellent dispositions, but without the resources of a mind that could govern in such a moment without ministers: a court buried in pleasure and dissipation; and adding to the distress instead of endeavouring to be placed in a more independent situation: a great ferment amongst all ranks of men, who are eager for some change, without knowing what to look to or to hope for: and a strong leaven of liberty, increasing every hour since the American revolution–altogether form a combination of circumstances that promise e’er long to ferment into motion if some master hand of very superior talents and inflexible courage is not found at the helm to guide events, instead of being driven by them. It is very remarkable that such conversation never occurs but a bankruptcy is a topic: the curious question on which is, would a bankruptcy occasion a civil war and a total overthrow of the government? The answers that I have received to this question appear to be just: such a measure conducted by a man of abilities, vigour, and firmness would certainly not occasion either one or the other. But the same measure, attempted by a man of a different character, might possibly do both. All agree that the states of the kingdom cannot assemble without more liberty being the consequence; but I meet with so few men that have any just ideas of freedom that I question much the species of this new liberty that is to arise. They know not how to value the privileges of THE PEOPLE: as to the nobility and the clergy, if a revolution added anything to their scale I think it would do more mischief than good. …
October 25, 1787. This great city [Paris] appears to be in many respects the most ineligible and inconvenient for the residence of a person of small fortune of any that I have seen; and vastly inferior to London. The streets are very narrow, and many of them crowded, ninetenths dirty, and all without foot-pavements. Walking, which in London is so pleasant and so clean that ladies do it every day, is here a toil and a fatigue to a man and an impossibility to a well-dressed woman. The coaches are numerous, and, what are much worse, there are an infinity of one-horse cabriolets which are driven by young men of fashion and their imitators, alike fools, with such rapidity as to be real nuisances, and render the streets exceedingly dangerous without an incessant caution. I saw a poor child run over and probably killed, and have been myself many times blackened with the mud of the kennels. This beggarly practice of driving a one-horse booby hutch about the streets of a great capital flows either from poverty or wretched and despicable economy; nor is it possible to speak of it with too much severity. If young noblemen at London were to drive their chaises in streets without foot-ways, as their brethren do at Paris, they would speedily and justly get very well thrashed or rolled in the kennel. This circumstance renders Paris an ineligible residence for persons, particularly families, that cannot afford to keep a coach; a convenience which is as dear as at London. The fiacres, hackney-coaches, are much worse than at that city; and chairs there are none, for they would be driven down in the streets. To this circumstance also it is owing that all persons of small or moderate fortune are forced to dress in black, with black stockings; the dusky hue of this in company is not so disagreeable a circumstance as being too great a distinction; too clear a line drawn in company between a man that has a good fortune and another that has not. With the pride, arrogance, and ill-temper of English wealth this could not be borne; but the prevailing good humour of the French eases all such untoward circumstances. Lodgings are not half so good as at London, yet considerably dearer. If you do not hire a whole suite of rooms at a hotel, you must probably mount three, four, or five pair of stairs, and in general have nothing but a bed-chamber. After the horrid fatigue of the streets, such an elevation is a delectable circumstance. You must search with trouble before you will be lodged in a private family as gentlemen usually are at London, and pay a higher price. Servants’ wages are about the same as at that city. It is to be regretted that Paris should have these disadvantages, for in other respects I take it to be a most eligible residence for such as prefer a great city. The society for a man of letters, or who has any scientific pursuit, cannot be exceeded. The intercourse between such men and the great, which, if it is not upon an equal footing, ought never to exist at all, is reflict. As you read, bear in mind the differing interpretations and how each section supports or detracts from the two interpretations. spectable. Persons of the highest rank pay an attention to science and literature, and emulate the character they confer. I should pity the man who expected, without other advantages of a very different nature, to be well received in a brilliant circle at London because he was a fellow of the Royal Society. But this would not be the case with a member of the Academy of Sciences at Paris; he is sure of a good reception everywhere. Perhaps this contrast depends in a great measure on the difference of the governments of the two countries. Politics are too much attended to in England to allow a due respect to be paid to anything else; and should the French establish a freer government, academicians will not be held in such estimation when rivalled in the public esteem by the orators who hold forth liberty and property in a free parliament.
Condorcet Affirms the Inevitability of Progress
Antoine Nicolas de Condorcet
(1794)
The aim of the book that I have undertaken to write, and what it will prove, is that man by using reason and facts will attain perfection. Nature has set no limits to the perfection of the human faculties. The perfectibility of mankind is truly indefinite; and the progress of this perfectibility, henceforth to be free of all hindrances, will last as long as the globe on which nature has placed us. Doubtless this progress will be more or less rapid, but it will never retrograde, at least as long as the globe occupies its present place in the system of the universe; and unless the general laws that govern this system bring to pass a universal cataclysm, or such changes as will prevent man from maintaining his existence, from using his faculties, and from finding his needed resources. …
Since the period when alphabetical writing flourished in Greece the history of mankind has been linked to the condition of man of our time in the most enlightened countries of Europe by an unbroken chain of facts and observations. The picture of the march and progress of the human mind is now revealed as being truly historical. Philosophy no longer has to guess, no longer has to advance hypothetical theories. It now suffices to assemble and to arrange the facts, and to show the truths that arise from their connection and from their totality. …
If man can predict with almost complete certainty those phenomena whose laws he knows; and if, when he does not know these laws, he can, on the basis of his experience in the past, predict future events with assurance why then should it be regarded as chimerical to trace with a fair degree of accuracy the picture of man’s future on the basis of his history? The sole foundation for belief in the natural sciences is the principle that universal laws, known or unknown, which regulate the universe are necessary and constant. Why then should this principle be less true for the development of the intellectual and moral faculties of man than it is for the other operations of nature? Finally, since beliefs, based on past experience under like conditions, constitute the only rule according to which the wisest men act, why then forbid the philosopher to support his beliefs on the same foundations, as long as he does not attribute to them a certainty not warranted by the number, the constancy, and the accuracy of his observations. …
A Russian Serf Explains the Facts of Life to an Enlightened Russian Nobleman
Alexander Radishchev
(1790)
A few steps from the road I saw a peasant ploughing a field. The weather was hot. I looked at my watch. It was twenty minutes before one. I had set out on Saturday. It was now Sunday. The ploughing peasant, of course, belonged to a landed proprietor, who would not let him pay [dues in money or kind (obrok)]. The peasant was ploughing very carefully. The field, of course, was not part of his master’s land. He turned the plough with astonishing ease.
“God help you,” I said, walking up to the ploughman, who, without stopping, was finishing the furrow he had started. “God help you,” I repeated.
“Thank you, sir,” the ploughman said to me, shaking the earth off the ploughshare and transferring it to a new furrow.
“You must be a Dissenter [Old Believer], since you plough on a Sunday.”
“No, sir, I make the true sign of the cross,” he said, showing me the three fingers together. “And God is merciful and does not bid us starve to death, so long as we have strength and a family.”
“Have you no time to work during the week, then, and can you not have any rest on Sundays, in the hottest part of the day, at that?”
“In a week, sir, there are six days, and we go six times a week to work on the master’s fields; in the evening, if the weather is good, we haul to the master’s house the hay that is left in the woods; and on holidays the women and girls go walking in the woods, looking for mushrooms and berries. God grant,” he continued, making the sign of the cross, “that it rains this evening. If you have peasants of your own, sir, they are praying to God for the same thing.”
“My friend, I have no peasants, and so nobody curses me. Do you have a large family?”
“Three sons and three daughters. The eldest is nine years old.”
“But how do you manage to get food enough, if you have only the holidays free?”
“Not only the holidays: the nights are ours, too. If a fellow isn’t lazy, he won’t starve to death. You see, one horse is resting; and when this one gets tired, I’ll take the other; so the work gets done.”
“Do you work the same way for your master?”
“No, sir, it would be a sin to work the same way. On his fields there are a hundred hands for one mouth, while I have two for seven mouths: you can figure it out for yourself. No matter how hard you work for the master, no one will thank you for it. The master will not pay our head [soul] tax; but, though he doesn’t pay it, he doesn’t demand one sheep, one hen, or any linen or butter the less. The peasants are much better off where the landlord lets them pay a commutation tax [obrok] without the interference of the steward. It is true that sometimes even good masters take more than three rubles a man; but even that’s better than having to work on the master’s fields. Nowadays it’s getting to be the custom to let [lease] villages to [noble] tenants, as they call it. But we call it putting our heads in a noose. A landless tenant skins us peasants alive; even the best ones don’t leave us any time for ourselves. In the winter he won’t let us do any carting of goods and won’t let us go into town to work; all our work has to be for him, because he pays our head tax. It is an invention of the Devil to turn your peasants over to work for a stranger. You can make a complaint against a bad steward, but to whom can you complain against a bad tenant?”
“My friend, you are mistaken; the laws forbid them to torture people.”
“Torture? That’s true; but all the same, sir, you would not want to be in my hide.” Meanwhile the ploughman hitched up the other horse to the plough and bade me good-bye as he began a new furrow.
The words of this peasant awakened in me a multitude of thoughts. I thought especially of the inequality of treatment within the peasant class. I compared the [state] peasants with the [proprietary] peasants. They both live in villages; but the former pay a fixed sum, while the latter must be prepared to pay whatever their master demands. The former are judged by their equals; the latter are dead to the law, except, perhaps, in criminal cases. A member of society becomes known to the government protecting him, only when he breaks the social bonds, when he becomes a criminal! This thought made my blood boil.
The Federalist Explains the Necessity for the Separation of Government Power
James Madison
(1788)
To what expedient then shall we finally resort for maintaining in practice the necessary partition of power among the several departments, as laid down in the constitution? The only answer that can be given is, that as all these exterior provisions are found to be inadequate, the defect must be supplied, by so contriving the interior structure of the government, as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places. …
… [T]he great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department, the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional right of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
This policy of supplying by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power; where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other; that the private interest of every individual, may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the state.
The Third Estate Speaks: The Cahier de Doleances of the Carcassonne
Commissioners of Third Estate of the Carcassonne Elect Oral District to the Estates General
(1789)
The third estate of the electoral district of Carcassonne, desiring to give to a beloved monarch, and one so worthy of our affection, the most unmistakable proof of its love and respect, of its gratitude and fidelity, desiring to cooperate with the whole nation in repairing the successive misfortunes which have overwhelmed it, and with the hope of reviving once more its ancient glory, declares that the happiness of the nation must, in their opinion, depend upon that of its king, upon the stability of the monarchy, and upon the preservation of the orders which compose it and of the fundamental laws which govern it.
Considering, too, that a holy respect for religion, morality, civil liberty, and the rights of property, a speedy return to true principles, a careful selection and due measure in the matter of the taxes, a strict proportionality in their assessment, a persistent economy in government expenditures, and indispensable reforms in all branches of the administration, are the best and perhaps the only means of perpetuating the existence of the monarchy;
The third estate of the electoral district of Carcassonne very humbly petitions his Majesty to take into consideration these several matters, weigh them in his wisdom, and permit his people to enjoy, as soon as may be, fresh proofs of that benevolence which he has never ceased to exhibit toward them and which is dictated by his affection for them.
In view of the obligation imposed by his Majesty’s command that the third estate of this district should confide to his paternal ear the causes of the ills which afflict them and the means by which they may be remedied or moderated, they believe that they are fulfilling the duties of faithful subjects and zealous citizens in submitting to the consideration of the nation, and to the sentiments of justice and affection which his Majesty entertains for his subjects, the following:
1. Public worship should be confined to the Roman Catholic apostolic religion, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship; its extension should be promoted and the most efficient measures taken to reestablish the discipline of the Church and increase its prestige.
2. Nevertheless the civil rights of those of the king’s subjects who are not Catholics should be confirmed, and they should be admitted to positions and offices in the public administration, without however extending this privilege–which reason and humanity alike demand for them–to judicial or police functions or to those of public instruction.
3. The nation should consider some means of abolishing the annates and all other dues paid to the holy see, to the prejudice and against the protests of the whole French people. …
[The holding of multiple church positions should be prohibited, monasteries reduced in numbers, and holidays suppressed or decreased.]
7. The rights which have just been restored to the nation should be consecrated as fundamental principles of the monarchy, and their perpetual and unalterable enjoyment should be assured by a solemn law, which should so define the rights both of the monarch and of the people that their violation shall hereafter be impossible.
8. Among these rights the following should be especially noted: the nation should hereafter be subject only to such laws and taxes as it shall itself freely ratify.
9. The meetings of the Estates General of the kingdom should be fixed for definite periods, and the subsidies judged necessary for the support of the state and the public service should be voted for no longer a period than to the close of the year in which the next meeting of the Estates General is to occur.
10. In order to assure to the third estate the influence to which it is entitled in view of the number of its members, the amount of its contributions to the public treasury, and the manifold interests which it has to defend or promote in the national assemblies, its votes in the assembly should be taken and counted by head.
11. No order, corporation, or individual citizen may lay claim to any pecuniary exemptions. … All taxes should be assessed on the same system throughout the nation.
12. The due exacted from commoners holding fiefs should be abolished, and also the general or particular regulations which exclude members of the third estate from certain positions, offices, and ranks which have hitherto been bestowed on nobles either for life or hereditarily. A law should be passed declaring members of the third estate qualified to fill all such offices for which they are judged to be personally fitted.
13. Since individual liberty is intimately associated with national liberty, his Majesty is hereby petitioned not to permit that it be hereafter interfered with by arbitrary orders for imprisonment. …
14. Freedom should be granted also to the press, which should however be subjected, by means of strict regulations, to the principles of religion, morality, and public decency. …
60. The third estate of the district of Carcassonne places its trust, for the rest, in the zeal, patriotism, honor, and probity of its deputies in the National Assembly in all matters which may accord with the beneficent views of his Majesty, the welfare of the kingdom, the union of the three estates, and the public peace.
A Royalist Perspective on The Opening of the Estates General
Madame Jeanne Louis Genet de Campan
(1789)
The Estates General opened May 4 [1789]. For the last time the queen appeared in royal magnificence. … The first session of the Estates was held next day. The king delivered his address with assurance and dignity. The queen told me that he gave the matter much attention, and rehearsed his speech frequently in order to be quite master of the intonations of his voice. His Majesty gave public indications of his attachment and deference for the queen, who was applauded; but it was easy to see that the applause was really meant for the king alone.
From the very early sessions it was clear that Mirabeau would prove very dangerous to the government. It is alleged that he revealed at this time to the king, and more particularly to the queen, a part of the plans he had in mind, and the conditions upon which he would abandon them. He had already exhibited the weapons with which his eloquence and audacity furnished him, in order that he might open negotiations with the party he proposed to attack. This man played at revolution in order to gain a fortune. The queen told me at this time that he asked for an embassy,–Constantinople, if I remember rightly. He was refused with that proper contempt which vice inspires, but which policy would doubtless best have disguised, if the future could have been foreseen.
The general enthusiasm which prevailed during the early sessions of the Assembly, the discussions among the deputies of the third estate and nobility, and even of the clergy, filled their Majesties and those attached to the cause of monarchy with increasing alarm. … The deputies of the third estate arrived at Versailles with the deepest prejudices against the court. The wicked sayings of Paris never fail to spread throughout the provinces. The deputies believed that the king indulged in the pleasures of the table to a shameful excess. They were persuaded that the queen exhausted the treasury of the state to gratify the most unreasonable luxury.
Almost all wished to visit the Little Trianon.[1] The extreme simplicity of this pleasure house did not correspond with their ideas. Some insisted that they be shown even the smallest closets, on the ground that some richly furnished apartments were being concealed from them. At last they designated one which they declared was said to be decorated throughout with diamonds and twisted columns set with sapphires and rubies. The queen could not get these silly ideas out of her head and told the king about them. He thought from the description of the room furnished to the guards in the Trianon, that the deputies had in mind the decoration of imitation diamonds in the theater at Fontainebleau constructed in Louis XV’s reign.
[1] A simple little pleasure house in a secluded part of the gardens at Versailles, much beloved by the queen.
An English Commentator Reports on the Opening of the Estates General
Arthur Young
(1789)
The king, court, nobility, clergy, army, and parliament [parlements] are nearly in the same situation. All these consider with equal dread the ideas of liberty now afloat, except the first, who, for reasons obvious to those who know his character, troubles himself little, even with circumstances that concern his power the most intimately. …
The business going forward at present in the pamphlet shops of Paris is incredible. I went to the Palais Royal to see what new things were published, and to procure a catalogue of all. Every hour produces something new. Thirteen came out to-day, sixteen yesterday, and ninety-two last week.
Nineteen-twentieths of these productions are in favor of liberty, and commonly violent against the clergy and the nobility. I have to-day bespoke many of this description that have reputation; but inquiring for such as had appeared on the other side of the question, to my astonishment I find there are but two or three that have merit enough to be known.
But the coffee-houses in the Palais Royal present yet more singular and astonishing spectacles: they are not only crowded within, but other expectant crowds are at the doors and windows, listening a gorge deploye [with gaping mouths] to certain orators, who from chairs or tables harangue each his little audience. The eagerness with which they are heard, and the thunder of applause they receive for every sentiment of more than common hardiness or violence against the present government, cannot easily be imagined. I am all amazement at the ministry permitting such nests and hotbeds of sedition and revolt, which disseminate amongst the people every hour principles that by and by must be opposed with vigor; and therefore it seems little short of madness to allow the propagation at present.
Everything conspires to render the present period in France critical. The want of bread is terrible; accounts arrive every moment from the provinces of riots and disturbances, and calling in the military to preserve the peace of the markets. …
June 15. This has been a rich day, and such a one as ten years ago none could believe would ever arrive in France; a very important debate being expected on what, in our House of Commons, would be termed the state of the nation. My friend, Monsieur Lazowski, and myself were at Versailles at eight in the morning. We went immediately to the hall of the states to secure good seats in the gallery; we found some deputies already there, and a pretty numerous audience collected. The room is too large; none but stentorian lungs or the finest, clearest voices can be heard. However, the very size of the apartment, which admits two thousand people, gave a dignity to the scene. It was indeed an interesting one. The spectacle of the representatives of twenty-five millions of people, just emerging from the evils of two hundred years of arbitrary power, and rising to the blessings of a freer constitution, assembled with open doors under the eye of the public, was framed to call into animated feelings every latent spark, every emotion of a liberal bosom; to banish whatever ideas might intrude of their being a people too often hostile to my own country, and to dwell with pleasure on the glorious idea of happiness to a great nation.
Monsieur l’Abbe Sieyes opened the debate. He is one of the most zealous sticklers for the popular cause; carries his ideas not to a regulation of the present government, which he thinks too bad to be regulated at all, but wishes to see it absolutely overturned,–being in fact a violent republican: this is the character he commonly bears, and in his pamphlets he seems pretty much to justify such an idea. He speaks ungracefully and uneloquently, but logically,–or rather reads so, for he read his speech, which was prepared. His motion, or rather string of motions, was to declare themselves the representatives known and verified of the French nation, admitting the right of all absent deputies [the nobility and clergy] to be received among them on the verification of their powers.
Monsieur de Mirabeau spoke without notes for near an hour, with a warmth, animation, and eloquence that entitles him to the reputation of an undoubted orator. He opposed the words “known” and “verified,” in the proposition of Abbe Sieyes, with great force of reasoning, and proposed in lieu that they should declare themselves simply Representatives du peuple Francais [Representatives of the French People]; that no veto should exist against their resolves in any other assembly; that all [existing] taxes are illegal, but should be granted during the present sessions of the states, and no longer; that the debt of the king should become the debt of the nation, and be secured on funds accordingly. Monsieur de Mirabeau was well heard, and his proposition much applauded.
In regard to their general method of proceeding, there are two circumstances in which they are very deficient. The spectators in the galleries are allowed to interfere in the debates by clapping their hands, and other noisy expressions of approbation: this is grossly indecent; it is also dangerous; for, if they are permitted to express approbation, they are, by parity of reason, allowed expressions of dissent, and they may hiss as well as clap; which it is said they have sometimes done: this would be to overrule the debate and influence the deliberations.
Another circumstance is the want of order among themselves. More than once to-day there were a hundred members on their legs at a time, and Monsieur Bailly* absolutely without power to keep order.
[1] The presiding officer
“What Is the Third Estate?”
Abbe Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes
(1789)
What is necessary that a nation should subsist and prosper? Individual effort and public functions.
All individual efforts may be included in four classes: 1. Since the earth and the waters furnish crude products for the needs of man, the first class, in logical sequence, will be that of all families which devote themselves to agricultural labor. 2. Between the first sale of products and their consumption or use, a new manipulation, more or less repeated, adds to these products a second value more or less composite. In this manner human industry succeeds in perfecting the gifts of nature, and the crude product increases two-fold, ten-fold, one hundred-fold in value. Such are the efforts of the second class. 3. Between production and consumption, as well as between the various stages of production, a group of intermediary agents establish themselves, useful both to producers and consumers; these are the merchants and brokers: the brokers who, comparing incessantly the demands of time and place, speculate upon the profit of retention and transportation; merchants who are charged with distribution, in the last analysis, either at wholesale or at retail. This species of utility characterizes the third class. 4. Outside of these three classes of productive and useful citizens, who are occupied with real objects of consumption and use, there is also need in a society of a series of efforts and pains, whose objects are directly useful or agreeable to the individual. This fourth class embraces all those who stand between the most distinguished and liberal professions and the less esteemed services of domestics.
Such are the efforts which sustain society. Who puts them forth? The Third Estate.
Public functions may be classified equally well, in the present state of affairs, under four recognized heads; the sword, the robe, the church and the administration. It would be superfluous to take them up one by one, for the purpose of showing that everywhere the Third Estate attends to nineteen-twentieths of them, with this distinction; that it is laden with all that which is really painful, with all the burdens which the privileged classes refuse to carry. Do we give the Third Estate credit for this? That this might come about, it would be necessary that the Third Estate should refuse to fill these places, or that it should be less ready to exercise their functions. The facts are well known. Meanwhile they have dared to impose a prohibition upon the order of the Third Estate. They have said to it: “Whatever may be your services, whatever may be your abilities, you shall go thus far; you may not pass beyond!” Certain rare exceptions, properly regarded, are but a mockery, and the terms which are indulged in on such occasions, one insult the more.
If this exclusion is a social crime against the Third Estate; if it is a veritable act of hostility, could it perhaps be said that it is useful to the public weal? Alas! who is ignorant of the effects of monopoly? If it discourages those whom it rejects, is it not well known that it tends to render less able those whom it favors? Is it not understood that every employment from which free competition is removed, becomes dearer and less effective?
In setting aside any function whatsoever to serve as an appanage for a distinct class among citizens, is it not to be observed that it is no longer the man alone who does the work that it is necessary to reward, but all the unemployed members of that same caste, and also the entire families of those who are employed as well as those who are not? Is it not to be remarked that since the government has become the patrimony of a particular class, it has been distended beyond all measure; places have been created, not on account of the necessities of the governed, but in the interests of the governing, etc., etc.? Has not attention been called to the fact that this order of things, which is basely and–I even presume to say–beastly respectable with us, when we find it in reading the History of Ancient Egypt or the accounts of Voyages to the Indies,[1] is despicable, monstrous, destructive of all industry, the enemy of social progress; above all degrading to the human race in general, and particularly intolerable to Europeans, etc., etc.? But I must leave these considerations, which, if they increase the importance of the subject and throw light upon it, perhaps, along with the new light, slacken our progress.
It suffices here to have made it clear that the pretended utility of a privileged order for the public service is nothing more than a chimera; that with it all that which is burdensome in this service is performed by the Third Estate; that without it the superior places would be infinitely better filled; that they naturally ought to be the lot and the recompense of ability and recognized services, and that if privileged persons have come to usurp all the lucrative and honorable posts, it is a hateful injustice to the rank and file of citizens and at the same time a treason to the public weal.
Who then shall dare to say that the Third Estate has not within itself all that is necessary for the information of a complete nation? It is the strong and robust man who has one arm still shackled. If the privileged order should be abolished, the nation would be nothing less, but something more. Therefore, what is the Third Estate? Everything; but an everything shackled and oppressed. What would it be without the privileged order? Everything, but an everything free and flourishing. Nothing can succeed without it, everything would be infinitely better without the others.
It is not sufficient to show that privileged persons, far from being useful to the nation, cannot but enfeeble and injure it; it is necessary to prove further that the noble order does not enter at all into the social organization; that it may indeed be a burden upon the nation, but that it cannot of itself constitute a nation.
In the first place, it is not possible in the number of all the elementary parts of a nation to find a place for thecaste of nobles. I know that there are individuals in great number whom infirmities, incapacity, incurable laziness, or the weight of bad habits render strangers to the labors of society. The exception and the abuse are everywhere found beside the rule. But it will be admitted that the less there are of these abuses, the better it will be for the State. The worst possible arrangement of all would be where not alone isolated individuals, but a whole class of citizens should take pride in remaining motionless in the midst of the general movement, and should consume the best part of the product without bearing any part in its production. Such a class is surely estranged to the nation by its indolence.
The noble order is not less estranged from the generality of us by its civil and political prerogatives.
What is a nation? A body of associates, living under a common law, and represented by the same legislature, etc.
Is it not evident that the noble order has privileges and expenditures which it dares to call its rights, but which are apart from the rights of the great body of citizens? It departs there from the common order, from the common law. So its civil rights make of it an isolated people in the midst of the great nation. This is trulyimperium in imperio [a state within the state].
In regard to its political rights, these also it exercises apart. It has its special representatives, which are not charged with securing the interests of the people. The body of its deputies sit apart; and when it is assembled in the same hall with the deputies of simple citizens, it is nonetheless true that its representation is essentially distinct and separate: it is a stranger to the nation, in the first place, by its origin, since its commission is not derived from the people; then by its object, which consists of defending not the general, but the particular interest.
The Third Estate embraces then all that which belongs to the nation; and all that which is not the Third Estate, cannot be regarded as being of the nation. What is the Third Estate? It is the whole.
[1] The reference here is to a widely read book of the time describing the caste system in India.
The Taking of the Bastille and Its Aftermath: An English Perspective
Edward Rigby
(1789)
July 14. A Canadian Frenchman, whom we found in the crowd and who spoke good English, was the first who intimated to us that it had been resolved to attack the Bastille. We smiled at the gentleman, and suggested the improbability of undisciplined citizens taking a citadel which had held out against the most experienced troops in Europe; little thinking it would be actually in the hands of the people before night. From the commencement of the struggle on Sunday evening there had been scarcely any time in which the firing of guns had not been heard in all quarters of the city, and, as this was principally produced by exercising the citizens in the use of the musket, in trying cannon, etc., it excited, except at first, but little alarm. Another sound equally incessant was produced by the ringing of bells to call together the inhabitants in different parts of the city. These joint sounds being constantly iterated, the additional noise produced by the attack on the Bastille was so little distinguished that I doubt not it had begun a considerable time, and even been completed, before it was known to many thousands of the inhabitants as well as to ourselves.
We ran to the end of the Rue St. Honore. We here soon perceived an immense crowd proceeding towards the Palais Royal with acceleration of an extraordinary kind, but which sufficiently indicated a joyful event, and, as it approached we saw a flag, some large keys, and a paper elevated on a pole above the crowd, in which was inscribed “La Bastille est prise et les portes sont ouvertes.” ["The Bastille is taken and the gates are open."] The intelligence of this extraordinary event thus communicated, produced an impression upon the crowd really indescribable. Asudden burst of the most frantic joy instantaneously took place; every possible mode in which the most rapturous feelings of joy could be expressed, were everywhere exhibited. Shouts and shrieks, leaping and embracing, laughter and tears, every sound and every gesture, including even what approached to nervous and hysterical affection, manifested, among the promiscuous crowd, such an instantaneous and unanimous emotion of extreme gladness as I should suppose was never before experienced by human beings. …
The crowd passed on to the Palais Royal, and in a few minutes another succeeded. Its approach was also announced by loud and triumphant acclamations, but, as it came nearer, we soon perceived a different character, as though bearing additional testimony to the fact reported by the first crowd, the impression by it on the people was of a very different kind. Adeep and hollow murmur at once pervaded them, their countenances expressing amazement mingled with alarm. We could not at first explain these circumstances; but as we pressed more to the centre of the crowd we suddenly partook of the general sensation, for we then, and not till then, perceived two bloody heads raised on pikes, which were said to be the heads of the Marquis de Launay, Governor of the Bastille, and of Monsieur Flesselles, Prevot des Marchands. It was a chilling and a horrid sight! An idea of savageness and ferocity was impressed on the spectators, and instantly checked those emotions of joy which had before prevailed. Many others, as well as ourselves, shocked and disgusted at this scene, retired immediately from the streets. …
The night approached; the crowd without continued agitated. Reports of a meditated attack upon the city that night by a formidable army under the command of the Count d’Artois and the Marechal Broglie were in circulation, and gained such credit as to induce the inhabitants to take measures for opposing them. Trees were cut down and thrown across the principal approaches to the city; the streets were impaved, and the stones carried to the tops of houses which fronted the streets through which the troops might pass (for the fate of Pyrrhus was not unknown to the French) and the windows in most parts of the city were illuminated. The night passed with various indications of alarm; guns were firing continually; the tocsin sounded unceasingly; groups of agitated citizens passed hastily along, and parties of the Milice Bourgeoise[citizens' militia] (for such was the name already assumed by those who had taken arms the day before) paraded the streets. …
I went (July 15) and was led by the sound of an approaching crowd towards the end of the Rue St. Honore, and there I witnessed a most affecting spectacle. The Bastille had been scarcely entered and the opposition subdued, when an eager search began to find out and liberate every unhappy captive immured within its walls. Two wretched victims of the detestable tyranny of the old Government had just been discovered and taken from some of the most obscure dungeons of this horrid castle, and were at this time conducted by the crowd to the Palais Royal. One of these was a little feeble old man, I could not learn his history; he exhibited an appearance of childishness and fatuity; he tottered as he walked, and his countenance exhibited little more than the smile of an idiot. … The other was a tall and rather robust old man; his countenance and whole figure interesting in the highest degree; he walked upright, with a firm and steady gait; his hands were folded and turned upwards, he looked but little at the crowd; the character of his face seemed a mixture of surprise and alarm, for he knew not whither they were leading him, he knew not what fate awaited him; his face was directed towards the sky, but his eyes were but little open. … He had a remarkably high forehead, which, with the crown of his head, was completely bald; but he had a very long beard, and on the back of his head the hair was unusually abundant. … His dress was an old greasy reddish tunic; the colour and the form of the garb were probably some indication of what his rank had been; for we afterwards learned that he was a Count d’Auche, that he had been a major of cavalry, and a young man of some talent, and that the offence for which he had sustained this long imprisonment had been his having written a pamphlet against the Jesuits. Every one who witnessed this scene probably felt as I did, an emotion which partook of horror and detestation of the Government which could so obdurately as well as unjustly expose human beings to such sufferings; and of pity for the miserable individuals before us. …
It had been reported that the King was to come to Paris on the Thursday (July 16), and great crowds filled the streets through which it was expected he would pass: but his coming did not take place till the Friday (July 17). We were very desirous of witnessing the spectacle of the monarch thus, I might almost say, led captive. The spectacle was very interesting, though not from the artificial circumstances which have usually given distinction to royal processions. The impression made on the spectator was not the effect of any adventitious splendour of costly robes or glittering ornaments–the appearance of the King was simple, if not humble; the man was no longer concealed in the dazzling radiance of the sovereign. … The streets were lined with the armed bourgeois, three deep–forming a line, as we were assured, of several miles extent. The procession began to pass the place where we were at a quarter past three. The first who appeared were the city officers and the police guards; some women followed them, carrying green branches of trees which were fancifully decorated; then more officers; then the Prevot des Marchands and different members of the city magistracy. Many of the armed bourgeois followed on horseback; then some of the King’s officers, some on horseback and some on foot; then followed the whole body of the Etats Generaux [Estates General] on foot, the noblesse, clergy, and Tiers-Etats [Third Estate], each in their peculiar dresses. That of the noblesse was very beautiful; they wore a peculiar kind of hat with large white feathers, and many of them were tall, elegant young men. The clergy, especially the bishops and some of the higher orders, were most superbly dressed; many of them in lawn dresses, with pink scarfs and massive crosses of gold hanging before them. The dress of the Tiers-Etats was very ordinary, even worse than that of the inferior order of gownsmen at the English universities. More of the King’s officers followed; then the King in a large plain coach with eight horses. After this more bourgeois; then another coach and eight horses with other officers of state; than an immense number of the bourgeois, there having been, it was said, two hundred thousand of them in arms. The countenance of the King was little marked with sensibility, and his general appearance by no means indicated alarm. He was accustomed to throw his head very much back on his shoulders, which, by obliging him to look upwards, gave a kind of stupid character to his countenance by increasing the apparent breadth of his face, by preventing that variation of expression which is produced by looking about. He received neither marks of applause nor insult from the populace, unless their silence could be construed into a negative sort of disrespect. Nor were any insults shown to the noblesse or clergy, except in the instance of the Archbishop of Paris, a very tall thin man. He was very much hissed, the popular clamour having been excited against him by a story circulated of his having encouraged the King to use strong measures against the people, and of his attempting to make an impression on the people by a superstitious exposure of a crucifix. He looked a good deal agitated, and whether he had a leaden eye or not I know not, but it certainly loved the ground. The warm and enthusiastic applause of the people was reserved for the Tiers-Etat. … Vivent les Tiers-Etats! Vive la Liberte! ["Long live the Third Estate! Long live liberty!] were loudly iterated as they passed. …
On the Saturday (July 18) we visited more of the public places, but the most interesting object, and which attracted the greatest number of spectators, was the Bastille. We found two hundred workmen busily employed in the destruction of this castle of despotism. We saw the battlements tumble down amidst the applauding shouts of the people. I observed a number of artists taking drawings of what from this time was to have no existence but on paper. …
And this reminds me of our having a second time seen the other prisoner, the feeble old man. He was placed conspicuously at a window opposite the house where we saw the King pass, and at that time he was brought forward and made to wave his hat, having a three coloured cockade on it.
Popular Revolution: The Women of Paris March on Versailles
Joseph Weber et al.
(1789)
The March to Versailles
(a) On Sunday, October 4, the people resorted to acts of violence in the public promenades against officers of the army and other individuals who were pointed out to them as aristocrats. There was in Paris an extreme agitation. The symptoms of a violent insurrection were alarmingly manifest in the evening. Monday, the fifth, as early as morning, one saw women, a species of furies, running the streets, crying out that there was no bread at the baker’s. They were soon joined by a considerable number of men in the Place de l’Hotel de Ville. Their first operation was to hang on a lamp-post a baker accused of having sold bread under weight. This man was saved by M. De Gouvion, a major of the national guard. These maniacs wanted to get into the town hall; there they turned the papers in some of the offices topsy-turvy, threatening to set fire to them; but they were prevented from executing their project. They loaded the most atrocious insults on MM. Bailly, de La Fayette, and the members of the commune; and this circumstance proves better than any amount of reasoning that the authorities who then governed Paris had no connection with the insurgents who directed this disorder.
(b) [Maillard] was occupied with a crowd of women … he took away their torches, and nearly lost his life in thus opposing their project. He told them that they could go in a deputation to the commune to demand justice and present their situation, which was that all demanded bread. But they replied that the commune was made up of bad citizens, all deserving to be hanged to the lamp-post, MM. Bailly and La Fayette first of all … these women would not listen to reason, and after having put in ruin the Hotel de Ville, they wanted to go to the National Assembly to find out what had been decreed previous to this day of the fifth of October. … [Maillard secured] a drum at the door of the Hotel de Ville, where the women had already assembled in great numbers. Detachments of them departed for various districts to recruit other women, to whom they gave rendezvous at the Place Louis XV. Maillard saw several men place themselves at their head, and make to them harangues calculated to excite sedition … they took the route to Versailles, having before them eight or ten drummers. The women at that time might have numbered six or seven thousand.
At Versailles
(c) They [the mob of women] consented to do what he [Maillard] wished. In consequence the cannons were placed behind them and the said women were invited to sing Vive Henri IV! while entering Versailles and to cry “Long live the King!” This they ceaselessly did in the midst of the people of the city, who awaited them, crying, “Long live our Parisiennes!” They arrived at the door of the National Assembly. …
After some debating among these women, fifteen were found to enter with him to the bar of the National Assembly. … He asked the president, M. Mounier, for permission to speak. This being accorded him, he said that two or three persons whom they had encountered on the way, and who were riding in a carriage from the court, had told him that an abbe attached to the Assembly had given a miller two hundred livres to stop making flour, and had promised him a like sum every week. The National Assembly vigorously demanded his name, but Maillard was unable to give it. … The Assembly still persisting in its desire to know the name of the man denounced, M. de Robespierre, deputy from Artois, took the floor and said that … the Abbe Gregoire could throw some light on the subject. … Maillard then asked for the floor and said it was also essential that they end the disorder and uncertainty which had spread through the capital upon the arrival of the regiment of Flanders in Versailles. This regiment should be sent away because the citizens feared that they would start a revolution. M. Mounier replied that they would inform the king of this in the evening when he returned from the hunt, which was where he was said to be.
(d) Maillard and the women who accompanied him appeared to be drunk. “Where is our Comte de Mirabeau?” these women asked repeatedly. “We want to see our Comte de Mirabeau!” Some of them showed a piece of black and moldy bread and added, “We will make the Austrian [Marie Antoinette] swallow it and we will cut her throat.” The number of women gradually increased. They entered pell-mell into the seats of the deputies and carried on loud conversations with those in the tribunes. Some surrounded the desk of the secretaries, others the chair of the president. They obliged the president and several of the deputies to receive their grimy and unpleasant kisses.
(e) After the return of the king to the palace, several gardes du corps [members of the palace guard] and other persons in service at the court, who had been searching for the king in all directions, found themselves in the grand avenue in the midst of these brigands of both sexes, and were assailed with insults and musket shots. Several balls fired at them struck the walls of the hall of the National Assembly.
The insults and indignities, together with the musket shots fired by the first column of brigands, had given just cause for uneasiness at the court. The king’s guard, the regiment of Flanders, and the national guard of Versailles were ordered to take to arms. The guards at the gate closed the grills, and the king’s guards, stationed outside, received orders not to touch their sabers or pistols, and to avoid everything that might irritate the people. The gardes du corps conformed to this order with such resignation that they could have been peaceably massacred one after the other if only their enemies had dared to attempt it.
(f) A deputation of eight women was introduced into the palace. They were conducted to M. de Saint-Priest, the minister of Paris, of whom they demanded bread. “When you had only one king,” dryly replied Saint-Priest, “you did not lack for bread; now that you have twelve hundred, go ask them for it.” The women were then admitted to the council room; they repeated to the king the request they had proffered to M. de Saint-Priest. “You should know my benevolence,” replied the king. “I am going to order that all the bread in Versailles be brought and given to you.” This response appeared to satisfy these women. Most of them were there in good faith, knowing nothing of the projects of the conspirators. Forcibly dragged to Versailles, they had had it dinned into their ears that the people were dying of hunger and that the only means of ending the famine was to address themselves to the king and the National Assembly. They believed they were fulfilling the purpose of their expedition in obtaining a decree on sustenance from the Assembly, and having it sanctioned by the king. These women, enchanted with the way they had been received, left the council room, crying, “Long live the King! Long live the gardes du corps! “
(g) The people, who had given quarter to the gardes du corps, did not, for all that, lose sight of the principal object of their enterprise. They demanded, with shrieks, that the king come to Paris; they said that if the royal family would come to Paris to live there would be no lack of provisions. M. de La Fayette seconded this desire with all his might in the council which was then held in the presence of Their Majesties. Finally, the king, fatigued, solicited, and pressed by all, gave his word that he would depart at midday. This promise flew from mouth to mouth; the acclamations of the people and a fusillade of musketry were the results.
His Majesty appeared then for the second time on the balcony to confirm to the people the promise he had just given to M. de La Fayette. At this second appearance, the joy of the populace was unrestrained. Avoice demanded “the queen on the balcony.” This princess, who was never greater nor more magnanimous than at moments when danger was most imminent, unhesitatingly presented herself on the balcony, holding M. le Dauphin by one hand and Madame Royale by the other. At that a voice cried out, “No children!” The queen, by a backward movement of her arms, pushed the children back into the room, and remained alone on the balcony, folding her hands on her breast, with a countenance showing calmness, nobility, and dignity impossible to describe, and seemed thus to wait for death. This act of resignation astonished the assassins so much and inspired so much admiration in the coarse people that a general clapping of hands and cries of “Bravo! Long live the queen!” repeated on all sides, disconcerted the malevolent. I saw, however, one of these madmen aim at the queen, and his neighbor knock down the barrel of the musket with a blow of his hand, nearly massacring this brigand who was doubtless one of those who had made the irruption of the morning.
The Return to Paris
(h) One saw first the mass of the Parisian troops file by. Each soldier carried a loaf on the end of his bayonet. Then came the fishwives, drunk with fury, joy and wine, holding branches of trees ornamented with ribbons, sitting astride the cannon, mounted on the horses of the gardes du corps, and wearing their hats. Some disported cuirasses before and behind, and others were armed with sabers and muskets. They were accompanied by the multitude of brigands and Paris laborers. … They halted from time to time to fire new salvos, while the fishwives descended from their horses and cannon to march around the carriage of the king. They embraced the soldiers and roared out songs to the refrain of “Here is the baker, the baker’s wife, and the baker’s little boy!” The horror of a cold, somber, rainy day; the infamous militia splattering through the mud; the harpies, monsters with human faces; the captive monarch and his family ignominiously dragged along surrounded by guards; all formed such a frightful spectacle, such a mixture of shame and anguish, that to this very day I cannot think of it without my senses being completely overwhelmed.
At times the queen was in a state of passive endurance difficult to describe. Her son was on her knees; he suffered hunger and asked for food. Unable to fulfill his desires, Marie Antoinette pressed him to her heart, weeping. She exhorted him to suffer in silence. The young prince became resigned. …
(i) As soon as the royal family entered the Hotel de Ville, the king had to listen to two harangues by M. Bailly, and to denunciations against his ministers. Then an official report of the sitting was drawn up and publicly read by M. Bailly. But as it cited some words of the king’s discourse inexactly, the queen interrupted him with the presence of mind which was one of the fine traits of her character. He had forgotten one of the most touching parts of the discourse of the king. The queen recalled to him gracefully that His Majesty had said, “I have relied upon the attachment and fidelity of my people, and have placed myself in the midst of my subjects with complete confidence.” …
After this the family re-entered the carriage in the midst of acclamations and betook themselves, with a part of the national guard, to the palace of the Tuileries. Monsieur and Madame went to the Luxembourg.
(j) The Comte de Mirabeau announced [to the Assembly] that the king was about to depart for Paris. In eagerness to hold their sessions in the midst of the tumult of the capital, they declared themselves inseparable from the monarch, and carried to him this declaration as a proof of their zeal for his interests. In reality, it was an express approbation of the violation of his liberty.
The Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen
National Assembly of France
(1789)
The representatives of the French people, organized as a National Assembly, believing that the ignorance, neglect, or contempt of the rights of man are the sole cause of public calamities and of the corruption of governments, have determined to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of man, in order that this declaration, being constantly before all the members of the social body, shall remind them continually of their rights and duties; in order that the acts of the legislative power, as well as those of the executive power, may be compared at any moment with the objects and purposes of all political institutions and may thus be more respected; and, lastly, in order that the grievances of the citizens, based hereafter upon simple and incontestable principles, shall tend to the maintenance of the constitution and redound to the happiness of all. Therefore the National Assembly recognizes and proclaims, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man and of the citizen:
ARTICLE 1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.
2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.
3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.
4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.
5. Law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society. Nothing may be prevented which is not forbidden by law, and no one may be forced to do anything not provided for by law.
6. Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its formation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations, according to their abilities, and without distinction except that of their virtues and talents.
7. No person shall be accused, arrested, or imprisoned except in the cases and according to the forms prescribed by law. Any one soliciting, transmitting, executing, or causing to be executed, any arbitrary order, shall be punished. But any citizen summoned or arrested in virtue of the law shall submit without delay, as resistance constitutes an offense.
8. The law shall provide for such punishments only as are strictly and obviously necessary, and no one shall suffer punishment except it be legally inflicted in virtue of a law passed and promulgated before the commission of the offense.
9. As all persons are held innocent until they shall have been declared guilty, if arrest shall be deemed indispensable, all harshness not essential to the securing of the prisoner’s person shall be severely repressed by law.
10. No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.
11. The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.
12. The security of the rights of man and of the citizen requires public military forces. These forces are, therefore, established for the good of all and not for the personal advantage of those to whom they shall be intrusted.
13. A common contribution is essential for the maintenance of the public forces and for the cost of administration. This should be equitably distributed among all the citizens in proportion to their means.
14. All the citizens have a right to decide, either personally or by their representatives, as to the necessity of the public contribution; to grant this freely; to know to what uses it is put; and to fix the proportion, the mode of assessment and of collection and the duration of the taxes.
15. Society has the right to require of every public agent an account of his administration.
16. A society in which the observance of the law is not assured, nor the separation of powers defined, has no constitution at all.
17. Since property is an inviolable and sacred right, no one shall be deprived thereof except where public necessity, legally determined, shall clearly demand it, and then only on condition that the owner shall have been previously and equitably indemnified.
Revolutionary Paris One Year After 1789
William Wellesley-Pole, Third Earl of Mornington
(1790)
You are well able to judge how strange the contrast must be between Paris governed, and Paris governing; but it is so strange in so many ways, that I own I find great difficulty in attempting to answer your question of what strikes me most, for I am quite perplexed by the number and variety of ridiculous and absurd things, which I hear and see everywhere, and every day. The common people appear to me to be exactly as gay as I remember them, though it is undoubtedly true that the greater part of them is starving for want of employment, especially the tradesmen; and notwithstanding they all talk the highest language in favour of the Revolution, they laugh at the National Assembly without scruple, and say they had rather have Aristocratical Louis, than Democratical Assignats. The streets are crowded with newsmen and hawkers, crying about libels of all sorts from morning till night, exactly in the manner you must have observed in Dublin; nothing is too indecent or abusive. There being an end of the police, it is not possible to imagine any kind of bawdy print that is not publicly stuck up in the Palais Royal, and on the Boulevards: the Attorney General’s blood would boil at the sight of such audacious bawdery. The object seems to be everywhere to mark a contempt for all former regulations. At the spectacle, they have introduced monks and nuns and crucifixes on the stage; and the actors are violently applauded, merely for wearing these forbidden garments. The parterre is more riotous than twenty English upper galleries put together; a few nights ago Richard Coeur de Lion was acted, and a woman of fashion was absolutely forced to leave the house, because she clapped with too much violence while the famous song of O Richard, O mon roi! was singing; a hundred fellows started up together roaring a bas la femme en eventail blanc ["down with the woman with the white fan": Marie Antoinette], and would not suffer the actors to proceed till this Aristocrate left the house. … Nothing can be more tiresome than all their new plays and operas; they are a heap of hackneyed public sentiments on general topics of the rights of men and duties of Kings, just like Sheridan’s grand paragraphs in the Morning Post [a London newspaper]: these are applauded to the skies. I do not know whether you have heard that many of the Petits Maitres [young gentlemen], in order to show their attachment to the Democracy, have sacrificed their curls, toupees, and queues: [i.e., their powdered wigs]; some of them go about with cropped locks like English farmers without any powder, and others wear little black scratch wigs, both these fashions are called Tetes a la Romaine ["Roman heads"], which is a comical name for such folly. I must not forget that I have seen several wear gold earrings with their black scratches. … I understand from everybody whom I have seen that nothing can be more changed than the whole of their manners. The Democrates out of the Assembly are very few indeed among the people of any distinction, and theAristocrates are melancholy and miserable to the last degree; this makes the society at Paris very gloomy; the number of deserted houses is immense, and if it were not for the Deputies, the Ambassadors, and some refugees from Brussels, there would be scarcely a gentleman’s coach to be seen in the streets. You have certainly been informed of the principles of the two clubs, the Enragees, whose name is easily understood, and the Quatre Vingt Neuf, the latter is something like our armed neutrality … ; for this club acting together, can give a majority either to the cote gauche or droite[1] in the Assembly. … I have never been at this club of 1789, although they admit English members of Parliament, because I understand nothing is done publicly excepting the recital of speeches and motions intended for the Assembly; and with these I have been sufficiently tired at the Assembly itself. I have been there several times, and it is not possible to imagine so strange a scene; the confusion at times surpasses all that ever has been known since government appeared in the world. … They have no regular forms of debate on ordinary business; some speak from their seats, some from the floor, some from the table, and some from the tribunes or desks; … they speak without preparation, and I thought many of them acquitted themselves well enough in that way, where only a few sentences were to be delivered; but on these occasions the riot is so great that it is very difficult to collect what is said. I am certain that I have seen above a hundred in the act of addressing the Assembly together, all persisting to speak, and as many more replying in different parts of the House, sentence by sentence; then the President claps his hands on both ears and roars order, as if he was calling a coach; sometimes he is quite driven to despair; he beats his table, his breast; … wringing his hands is quite a common action, and I really believe he swears. … At last he seizes a favourable moment of quiet, either to put the question or to name who ought to speak; then five hundred reclamations all at once renew the confusion, which seldom ends till the performers are completely hoarse, and obliged to give way to a fresh set. On great occasions the speakers deliver their speeches from the tribune, and these are always written speeches, or so generally, that I believe Mirabeau and Maury and Barnave are the only exceptions; and even these often read their speeches. Nothing can be more fatiguing than these readings, which entirely destroy all the spirit and interest of debate. … I heard Mirabeau and Maury both speak a few sentences in the midst of one of the riots I have mentioned, and I preferred Maury, whose manner is bold and unaffected, and his voice very fine; Mirabeau appeared to me to be full of affectation, and he has a bad voice, but he is the most admired speaker. There are four galleries which contain above twice the number admitted into the gallery in England, and here a most extraordinary scene is exhibited; for the galleries approve and disapprove by groaning and clapping, exactly as if the whole was a spectacle. … While the orators are reading their speeches, the Assembly frequently shows a most singular degree of patience such as I am certain the English House of Commons is not capable of. … Dulness and monotony are borne in perfect silence; and during such speeches, the President generally amuses himself with reading some pamphlets or newspapers. … I forgot to mention one circumstance that had a most comical effect. The Huissiers ["sergeants at arms"] of the Assembly walk up and down the room during times of great tumult, bellowing silence as loud as they can hollow, and endeavouring to persuade the disorderly orators to sit down.
I went to Court this morning at the Tuilleries, and a most gloomy Court it was; many of the young people of the first fashion and rank wear mourning always for economy. … The King seemed well, but I thought his manner evidently humbled since I was introduced to him before; he now bows to everybody, which was not a Bourbon fashion before the Revolution. The Queen looked very ill; the Dauphin was with her, and she appeared anxious to shew him. They say here that he is her shield; she never stirs out without him.
[1] The left or the right. The custom of grouping the more liberal or radical members on the left and the more conservative ones on the right, from which comes the designation of “left wing” or “right wing” in modern politics, dates from the French Revolution.
The Political Situation in Paris
George Hammond
(1791)
There is one point upon which all parties seem to be agreed–that the restoration of the ancient form of government is become totally impracticable, from any quarter or by any means whatsoever. The three descriptions of persons in the Kingdom, the most interested in the event, are the Sovereign, the Nobility, and the Clergy; but it is evident that their exertions alone, unaided by foreign Powers, are absolutely inadequate to the accomplishment of it. That loyalty and attachment to their Sovereign, which were formerly the characteristics of this nation, exist no longer. The mental imbecility of the present King, and the profligacy of some branches of the royal family, have implanted contempt and aversion so deeply in the bulk of the people that his present melancholy state of captivity and humiliation, so far from creating a spirit of indignation against those who have usurped his authority, has afforded a subject of ridicule and triumph to a great majority of the nation. In regard to the nobility, their dispersion, their want of concert, of pecuniary resources and of a leader, but chiefly the circumstances of their estates being at the mercy of their enemies, all concur to prevent them from forming or carrying into execution any enterprize of much magnitude and moment. The respect that used to be paid to the character and functions of the clergy has long been dwindling away, and the influence which that body derived from their great territorial possessions, now act[s] as an instrument against them. Not only inasmuch as their estates have been wrested from them, but also as the individuals who have purchased those estates under the national faith are now materially interested in protecting them, by every means, against any invasion of their newly acquired rights, and the possibility of their ever reverting to their original possessors. With respect to the prospect of any external interference, you, Sir, are better able to judge of that than I can be. I am, however, firmly persuaded that no serious apprehensions on that head are entertained here. The ruling party, indeed, do not rely on the three millions of men (now trained to arms) alone–they assert they have a more effectual pledge for the non-intervention of foreign Powers, in possessing the persons of the King, and of such of the Aristocratical party as have not chosen to expatriate themselves, both of whom they would not scruple to deliver up to the fury of an exasperated populace on the first appearance of a foreign invasion. …
There is no assertion of Mr. [Edmund] Burke’s more true than this–that the French have shown themselves much more skilful in destroying than in erecting. As I am convinced that no man in this country, even at this moment, has any clear notion of the new order of things that is to arise in the place of the old, it is therefore needless to enter into any discussion of the numerous speculative theories that now swarm in the nation, which have no other foundation than the heated imaginations of their fabricators.
No party in the National Assembly seems to be actuated by an adherence to a regular well-defined system, which is, I think, pretty clearly proved by the contradictory decrees that are every day issuing out to answer the emergency of the moment. And even if there was a system, there does not appear to be any man of abilities so transcendent, or of patriotism so unsuspected, as to be capable of giving direction and energy to the movements of any compact concentrated body of individuals. This is a circumstance which separates the French Revolution from every preceding one in any other country, and renders it impossible to discern a clue to the present and future operations of that body, in whom all authority is at present centered. …
In the meantime they avoid rendering themselves obnoxious and unpopular, by throwing the execution of everything that is either odious or absurd in their own numerous decrees on the King and his ministers. They have stripped royalty of everything that could make it either respectable or amiable, and by perpetually separating the function from the person of the monarch, they insensibly confound him in the general mass of citizens. Indeed their affectation is carried to so ridiculous a pitch, that I am rather surprised that we do not hear of the pouvoir executif’s [executive power] looking out of the window, or going to bed to its wife.
In the midst of all this wretched scene of political confusion, it is strongly suspected that several members of the National Assembly have enriched themselves by stock-jobbing and other arts, and Mirabeau in particular. That arch-patriot is now living in great magnificence, and indulges his ruling passion for buying up valuable books with unexampled profusion.
As you may have been perhaps surprised that the late discussion of the question of Regency should have appeared to be a matter of such urgency, I think it necessary to remark that the King’s health, not from extreme sensibility, but from want of exercise, and from indulging too freely in the pleasures of the table, has suffered so much that it is not expected his Majesty can survive many years.
I must not omit to mention two circumstances that have struck me greatly in my present residence in this capital–the tranquillity which now appears to subsist in it, and the little interruption that the newly-created paper money has had to encounter in its circulation. Excepting a greater number of men in military uniforms parading the streets, all the common occupations of life proceed as smoothly and regularly as if no event of consequence had occurred, and the public amusements are followed with as much avidity as in the most quiet and flourishing periods of the monarchy. In regard to the Assignats, although they are now at a discount of 7 per cent and are expected to fall lower, no person seems to murmur at taking them in payment, or to express any doubts of their validity.
A French Woman Broadens the Revolution: Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen
Olympe de Gouges
(1791)
The mothers, daughters, and sisters, representatives of the nation, demand to be constituted a national assembly. Considering that ignorance, disregard of or contempt for the rights of women are the only causes of public misfortune and of governmental corruption, they have resolved to set forth in a solemn declaration, the natural, inalienable and sacred rights of woman. …
1. Woman is born free and remains equal in rights to man. …
3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation, which is none other than the union of Woman and Man. …
4. Liberty and Justice consist of rendering to persons those things that belong to them; thus, the exercise of woman’s natural rights is limited only by the perpetual tyranny with which man opposes her; these limits must be changed according to the laws of nature and reason. …
10. No one should be punished for their opinions. Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she should likewise have the right to speak in public, provided that her demonstrations do not disrupt public order as established by law.
Newspaper Reportage on Parisian Reaction to the King’s Flight to Varennes
Louis-Marie Prudhomme
(1791)
It was not until ten o’clock in the morning that the municipal government announced, by firing a cannon thrice, the unexpected event of the day. But for three hours the news had already been passing from mouth to mouth and was circulating in all quarters of the city. During these three hours many outrages might have been committed. The king had gone. This news produced a moment of anxiety, and everybody ran in a crowd to the palace of the Tuileries to see if it were true; but every one turned almost immediately to the hall where the National Assembly met, declaring that their king was in there and that Louis XVI might go where he pleased.
Then the people became curious to visit the apartments vacated by the royal family; they traversed them all, and we questioned the sentinels we found there, “Where, and how, could he have escaped? How could this fat royal person, who complained of the meanness of his lodging, manage to make himself invisible to the sentries,–he whose girth would stop up any passage?” The soldiers of the guard had nothing to say to this. We insisted: “This flight is not natural; your commanders must have been in the plot … for while you were at your post Louis XVI left his without your knowing it and yet passing close to you.” These reflections, which naturally suggested themselves, account for the reception which made Lafayette pale when he appeared in the Place de Greve and passed along the quays. He took refuge in the National Assembly, where he made some confessions that did little to restore him to popular favor.
Far from being “famished for a glimpse of the king,” the people proved, by the way in which they took the escape of Louis XVI, that they were sick of the throne and tired of paying for it. If they had known, moreover, that Louis XVI, in his message, which was just then being read in the National Assembly, complained “that he had not been able to find in the palace of the Tuileries the most simple conveniences of life,” the people might have been roused to some excess; but they knew their own strength and did not permit themselves any of those little exhibitions of vengeance which are natural to irritated weakness.
They contented themselves with making sport, in their own way, of royalty and of the man who was invested with it. The portrait of the king was taken down from its place of honor and hung on the door. A fruit woman took possession of Antoinette’s bed and used it to display her cherries, saying, “It’s the nation’s turn now to be comfortable.” A young girl refused to let them put the queen’s bonnet on her head and trampled on it with indignation and contempt. They had more respect for the dauphin’s study,–but we should blush to report the titles of the books which his mother had selected.
The streets and public squares offered a spectacle of another kind. The national force deployed itself everywhere in an imposing manner. The brave Santerre alone enrolled two thousand pikemen in this faubourg.These were not the “active” citizens and the royal bluecoats, that were enjoying the honors of the celebration. The woolen caps reappeared and eclipsed the bearskins. The women contested with the men the duty of guarding the city gates, saying, “It was the women who brought the king to Paris and the men who let him escape.” But do not boast too loudly, ladies; it was not much of a present, after all.
The prevailing spirit was apathy in regard to kings in general and contempt for Louis XVI in particular. This showed itself in the least details. On the Place de Greve the people broke up a bust of Louis XVI, which was illuminated by that celebrated lantern which had been a source of terror to the enemies of the Revolution. When will the people execute justice upon all these bronze kings, monuments of our idolatry? In the Rue St. Honore they forced a dealer to sacrifice a plaster head which somewhat resembled Louis XVI. In another shop they contented themselves with putting a paper band over his eyes. The words “king,” “queen,” “royal,” “Bourbon,” “Louis,” “court,” “Monsieur,” “the king’s brother,” were effaced wherever they were found on pictures or on the signs over shops and stores.
L’Ami du peuple (Friend of the People) denounces the Moderate Royalists
Jean-Paul Marat
(1791)
O credulous Parisians! can you be duped by these shameful deceits and cowardly impostures? See if their aim in massacring the patriots was not to annihilate your clubs! Even while the massacre was going on, the emissaries of Mottier [Lafayette] were running about the streets mixing with the groups of people and loudly accusing the fraternal societies and the club of the Cordeliers of causing the misfortunes. The same evening the club of the Cordeliers, wishing to come together, found the doors of their place of meeting nailed up. Two pieces of artillery barred the entrance to the Fraternal Society, and only those conscript fathers who were sold to the court were permitted to enter the Jacobin Club, by means of their deputy’s cards.
Not satisfied with annihilating the patriotic associations, these scoundrels violate the liberty of the press, annihilate the Declaration of Rights–the rights of nature. Cowardly citizens, can you hear this without trembling? They declare the oppressed, who, in order to escape their tyranny, would make a weapon of his despair and counsel the massacre of his oppressors, a disturber of the public peace. They declare every citizen a disturber of the public peace who cries, in an uprising, to the ferocious satellites to lower or lay down their arms, thus metamorphosing into crimes the very humanity of peaceful citizens, the cries of terror and natural self-defense.
Infamous legislators, vile scoundrels, monsters satiated with gold and blood, privileged brigands who traffic with the monarch, with our fortunes, our rights, our liberty, and our lives! You thought to strike terror into the hearts of patriotic writers and paralyze them with fright at the sight of the punishments you inflict. I flatter myself that they will not soften. As for The Friend of the People, you know that for a long time your decrees directed against the Declaration of Rights have been waste paper to him. Could he but rally at his call two thousand determined men to save the country, he would proceed at their head to tear out the heart of the infernal Mottier in the midst of his battalions of slaves. He would burn the monarch and his minions in his palace, and impale you on your seats and bury you in the burning ruins of your lair.
Royal Ambivalence: Louis XVI’s Secret Appeal to the Prussian King
Louis XVI
(1791)
Paris, December 3, 1791
My Brother:
I have learned through M. du Moustier of the interest which your Majesty has expressed not only in my person but also in the welfare of my kingdom. In giving me these proofs, the attitude of your Majesty has, in all cases where your interest might prove advantageous to my people, excited my lively appreciation. I confidently take advantage of it at this time when, in spite of the fact that I have accepted the new constitution, seditious leaders are openly exhibiting their purpose of entirely destroying the remnants of the monarchy. I have just addressed myself to the emperor, the empress of Russia, and to the kings of Spain and Sweden; I am suggesting to them the idea of a congress of the chief powers of Europe, supported by an armed force, as the best means of checking seditious parties, of establishing a more desirable order of things, and of preventing the evil which afflicts us from reaching the other states of Europe.
I trust that your Majesty will approve my ideas, and that you will maintain the most absolute secrecy about the proposition I am making to you. You will easily understand that the circumstances in which I find myself force me to observe the greatest caution. That is why no one but the baron of Breteuil is informed of my plans, and your Majesty may therefore communicate to him anything you wish. …
Your good brother,
Louis
An English Traveler Describes a New Paris in the Summer of 1792
Richard Twiss
(1792)
In every one of the towns between Calais and Paris a full-grown tree (generally a poplar) has been planted in the market place, with many of its boughs and leaves; these last being withered, it makes but a dismal appearance; on the top of this tree or pole is a red woollen or cotton night-cap, which is called the Cap of Liberty, with streamers about the pole, or red, blue and white ribbands. I saw several statues of saints, both within and without the churches (and in Paris likewise) with similar caps, and several crucifixes with the national cockade of ribbands tied to the left arm of the image on the cross, but not one with the cockade in its proper place; the reason of which I know not. …
The churches in Paris are not much frequented on the week-days, at present; I found a few old women on their knees in some of them, hearing mass; and, at the same time, at the other end of one of these churches commissaries were sitting and entering the names of volunteers for the army. The iron rails in the churches which part the choir from the nave, and also those which encompass chapels and tombs, are all ordered to be converted into heads for pikes. …
Hitherto cockades of silk had been worn, the aristocrats wore such as were of a paler blue and red than those worn by the democrats, and the former were even distinguished by their carriages, on which a cloud was painted upon the arms, which entirely obliterated them (of these I saw above thirty in the evening promenade in the Bois de Boulogne ), but on the 30th of July, every person was compelled by the people to wear a linen cockade, without any distinction in the red and blue colours. …
I went once to Versailles; there is hardly anything in the palace but the bare walls, a very few of the lookingglasses, tapestry, and large pictures remaining, as it has now been near two years uninhabited. I crossed the great canal on foot; there was not a drop of water in it….
I went several times to the National Assembly; the Tribunes, or Galleries (of which there are three) entered warmly, by applauses and by murmurs and hisses, into the affairs which were treated of. …
All the coats of arms which formerly decorated the gates of Hotels are taken away, and even seals are at present engraven with cyphers only. The Chevaliers de St. Louis still continue to wear the cross, or the ribband, at the buttonhole; all other orders of knighthood are abolished. No liveries are worn by servants, that badge of slavery is likewise abolished; and also all corporation companies, as well as every other monopolizing society, and there are no longer any Royal tobacco or salt shops. …
Books of all sorts are printed without any approbation or privilege. Many are exposed on stalls, which are very improper for the public eye. One of them was called the Private Life of the Queen, in two volumes, with obscene prints. The book itself is contemptible and disgusting, and might as well have been called, the Woman of Pleasure. Of books of this sort I saw above thirty, with plates. Another was a subject not fit even to be mentioned. I read a small pamphlet, entitled ” Le Christ-Roi, or a Parallel of the Sufferings of Louis XVI etc.” I can say nothing in favor of it. …
The common people are in general much better clothed than they were before the Revolution, which may be ascribed to their not being so grievously taxed as they were. … All those ornaments, which three years ago were worn of silver, are now of gold. All the women of lower class, even those who sit behind green-stalls, etc., wear gold earrings, with large drops, some of which cost two or three louis, and necklaces of the same. Many of the men wear plain gold earrings: those worn by officers and other gentlemen are usually as large as a half-crown piece. Even children of two years old have small gold drops in their ears. The general dress of the women is white linen and muslin gowns, large caps which cover all their hair, excepting just a small triangular piece over the forehead, pomatumed, or rather plaistered and powdered, without any hats; neither do they wear any stays, but only corsets (waistcoats or jumps). Tight lacing is not known here, nor yet high and narrow heeled shoes. Because many of the ladies cidevant of quality[1] have emigrated or ran away, and those which remain in Paris keep within doors, I saw no face that was painted, excepting on the stage. Most of the men wear coats made like great-coats, or in other words, long great-coats without any coat; this in fine weather and in the middle of summer made them appear to me like invalides. There is hardly any possibility of distinguishing the rank of either man or woman by their dress at present, or rather, there are no ranks to distinguish. The nation in general is much improved in cleanliness, and even in politeness. The French no longer look on every Englishman as a lord, but as their equal. There are no beggars to be seen about the streets in Paris, and when the chaise stopped for fresh horses, only two or three old and infirm people surrounded it and solicited charity, whereas formerly the beggars used to assemble in hundreds. I did not see a single pair of sabots(wooden-shoes) in France this time. The table of the peasants is also better supplied than it was before the revolution. …
Before the 10th [of August] I saw several dancing parties of the Poissardes and sansculottes in the beer-houses, on the Quai des Ormes and the Quai St.Paul, and have played the favourite and animating air of ca ira,on the fiddle, to eight couple of dancers: the ceiling of these rooms (which open into the street) is not above ten feet high, and on this ceiling (which is generally white washed) are the numbers 1, 2, to 8, in black, and the same in red, which mark the places where the ladies and gentlemen are to stand. When the dance was concluded, I requested the ladies to salute me (m’embrasser) which they did, by gently touching my cheek with their lips. …
I saw many thousands of these men [National Guard] from my windows, on the way to the Tuileries, early onthe Friday morning [August 10th]; their march was at the rate of perhaps five miles an hour, without running or looking aside; and this was the pace they used when they carried heads upon pikes, and when they were in pursuit of important business, rushing along the streets like a torrent, and attending wholly and solely to the object they had in view. On such occasions, when I saw them approaching, I turned into some cross street till they were passed, not that I had anything to apprehend, but the being swept along with the crowd, and perhaps trampled upon. I cannot express what I felt on seeing such immense bodies of men so vigorously actuated by the same principle. I also saw many thousands of volunteers going to join the armies at the frontiers, marching along the Boulevards, almost at the same pace, accompanied as far as Barriersby their women, who were carrying their muskets for them; some with large sausages, pieces of cold meat, and loaves of bread, stuck on the bayonets, and all laughing, or singing ca ira [a famous revolutionary song].
[1] That is, aristocratic women
A National Guardsman Recounts the Revolutionary Journee of August 10, 1792
Anonymous
(1792)
Paris–11 August 1792–Year 4 of Liberty
We are all tired out, doubtless less from spending two nights under arms than from heartache. Men’s spirits were stirred after the unfortunate decree which whitewashed Lafayette. Nevertheless, we had a quiet enough evening; a group of federes from Marseille gaily chanted patriotic songs in the Beaucaire cafe, the refreshment room of the National Assembly. It was rumoured “Tonight the tocsin will ring, the alarm drum will be beaten. All the faubourgs will burst into insurrection, supported by 6,000 federes.” At 11 o’clock we go home, at the same instant as the drums call us back to arms. We speed from our quarters and our battalion, headed by two pieces of artillery, marches to the palace. Hardly have we reached the garden of the Tuileries than we hear the alarm cannon. The alarm drum resounds through all the streets of Paris. People run for arms from all over the place. Soon the public squares, the new bridge, the main thoroughfares, are covered with troops. The National Assembly, which had finished its debate early, was recalled to its duties. It only knew of some of the preparations which had been made for the journee [uprising] of 10 August. First the commandant of the palace wishes to hold the mayor a hostage there, then he sends him to the mayor’s office. The people fear a display of his talents! In the general council of the Commune it is decreed that, according to the wishes of the forty-eight sections, it is no longer necessary to recognise the constituted authorities if dethronement is not immediately announced and new municipal bodies, keeping Petion and Manuel [2] at their head, entrusted with popular authority. However, the faubourgs [subdivisions of the city] organised themselves into an army and placed in their centre Bretons, Marseillais and Bordelais, and all the other federes. More than 20,000 men march across Paris, bristling with pikes and bayonets. Santerre had been obliged to take command of them. The National Assembly are told that the army has broken into the palace. All hearts are frozen. Discussion is provoked again by the question of the safety of the king, when it is learned that Louis XVI seeks refuge in the bosom of the Assembly.
Forty-eight members are sent to the palace. The royal family places itself in the middle of the deputation. The people fling bitter reproaches at the king and accuse him of being the author of his troubles. Hardly was the king safe than the noise of cannon-fire increased. The Breton federes beat a tattoo. Some officers suggested retreat to the commander of the Swiss guards. But he seemed prepared and soon, by a clever tactic, captured the artillery which the National Guard held in the courtyard. These guns, now turned on the people, fire and strike them down. But soon the conflict is intensified everywhere. The Swiss, surrounded, overpowered, stricken, then run out of ammunition. They plea for mercy, but it is impossible to calm the people, furious at Helvetian treachery.
The Swiss were cut to pieces. Some were killed in the state-rooms, others in the garden. Many died on the Champs-Elysees. Heavens! That Liberty should cost Frenchmen blood and tears! How many victims there were among both the People and the National Guard! The total number of dead could run to 2,000. All the Swiss who had been taken prisoner were escorted to the Place de Greve. There they had their brains blown out. They were traitors sacrificed to vengeance. What vengeance! I shivered to the roots of my being. At least 47 heads were cut off. The Greve was littered with corpses, and heads were paraded on the ends of several pikes. The first heads to be severed were those of seven chevaliers du poignard [noblemen], slain at eight o’clock in the morning on the Place Vendome. Many Marseillais perished in the journee of 10 August. Their second-in-command was killed; so was the commander of the Bretons.
The bronze statues in the Place Royale, Place Vendome, Place Louis XIV, Place Louis XV, are thrown to the ground. The Swiss are pursued everywhere. The National Assembly, the department and the municipality are in permanent session. … People are still far from calm and it will be difficult to reestablish order. However, we see peace starting to reappear. The king and his family have passed the night in the porter’s lodging of the National Assembly.
Tonight the National Assembly has decreed [the creation of] the National Convention. The electors are gathered in primary assemblies to select deputies. They only need to be twenty-five years old and have a residence qualification. It appears that the coup of 10 August has forestalled one by the aristocracy. One realizes now that the Swiss are the victims of their credulity, that they hoped for support, but that the rich men who should have fought with them dared not put in an appearance. We have been told that there are 8,000 royalist grenadiers in Paris. These 8,000 citizens seem to have stayed at home. Only one equestrian statue has been preserved in the capital: that of Henri IV.[2]
[1] The incumbent municipal authorities
[2] Henry IV was regarded as the “people’s king,” and his statues and tomb were spared from the destruction visited upon public monuments to other French kings during the Revolution.
Witness to a Slaughter: An English Witness Recounts the September Massacres in Paris
George Munro
(1792)
About one o’clock on Sunday fore-noon [September 4] three signal guns were fired, the Tocsin was rung, and one of the Municipality on horseback proclaimed in different parts of the city, that the enemy was at the gates, Verdun was besieged, and could only hold out a few days. The inhabitants were therefore ordered to assemble in their respective sections, and from thence to march to the Champ de Mars, where they were to select an army of sixty thousand men.
The first part of this proclamation was put in execution, but the second was totally neglected; for I went to the Champ de Mars myself where I only saw M. Pethion, who on finding no one there returned home. During the time the officer of the Municipality was making the proclamation, two others attended at the bar of the National Assembly to acquaint them with the steps that had been taken by the direction of the Conseil de la Commune. The Assembly applauded their conduct, and immediately passed a decree, directing that those who refused their arms to those that wished to serve, or objected serving themselves, should be deemed traitors and worthy of death, that all horses of luxury should be seized for the use of the army, and that those who refused to obey the orders of the present executive power should be punished with death. It concluded by decreeing that twelve members of the National Assembly should be added to the other six that at present compose the executive power. As soon as these decrees were passed, the carriages and horses of gentlemen were seized in the streets (agreeable to the spirit of the decree). Their owners were obliged to walk home, and the horses in general were sent to the Ecole Militaire, and the carriages were put under the care of different guards. The proceedings with the beating of drums, firing of cannon, and the marching up and down of armed men of course created no little agitation in the minds of the people. That however was nothing to the scene of horror that ensued soon after. A party at the instigation of some one or other declared they would not quit Paris, as long as the prisons were filled with Traitors (for they called those so, that were confined in the different Prisons and Churches), who might in the absence of such a number of Citizens rise and not only effect the release of His Majesty, but make an entire counter-revolution. To prevent this, a large body of sans-culottes attended by a number of Marseillais and Brestois, the hired assassins of a Party, proceeded to the Church de Carmes, rue de Vaugirard, where amidst the acclamations of a savage mob they massacred a number of refractory Priests, all the Vicaires de Saint Sulpice, the directors of the Seminaries, and the Doctors of the Sorbonne, with the ci-devant [former] Archbishop of Arles, and a number of others, exceeding in all one hundred and seventy, including those that had been confined there since the tenth. After this they proceeded to the Abbaye, where they massacred a vast number of prisoners, amongst whom were also many respectable characters. These executioners increasing in number, different detachments were sent to the Chatelet, the prison de la Force, de Ste Pelagie, and the prisons of the Conciergerie. At all these places a most horrid massacre took place; none were exempted but debtors and many of these fell victims to the fury of the people. During this sad scene, the more humane, which were but few in number, hurried to the National Assembly to obtain their interference for stopping such melancholy outrages. They immediately decreed that six of their members should go and see if it was possible to prevent such cruelties. With difficulty these members arrived at the Abbaye; when there one of them got upon a chair to harangue the people, but neither he nor the others could make themselves heard, and with some risk, they made their escape. Many of the Municipality attended at the different prisons, and endeavoured to quell the fury of the people, but all in vain; they therefore pro-posed to the mob a plan of establishing a kind of Court of justice in the prisons, for the immediate trial of the remaining offenders. They caught at this, and two of the Municipality with a detachment of the mob, about two on Monday morning, began this strange Court of justice. The gaoler’s list was called for, those that were conpal government, and National Guard took no action to repress the actions of the fined for forging assignats, or theft, with the unhappy people that were any way suspected to be concerned in the affair of the 10th, were in general massacred; this form took place in nearly all the prisons in Paris. But early on Monday morning a detachment with seven pieces of cannon went to attack Bicetre. It is reported that these wretches charged their cannon with small stones and such other things, and fired promiscuously among the prisoners. I cannot however vouch for this; they have however not finished their cruelties there yet, and it is now past six o’clock Tuesday evening. To be convinced of what I could not believe, I made a visit to the prison of the Abbaye about seven o’clock on Monday evening, for the slaughter had not ceased. This prison, which takes its name from an adjoining Abbaye, stands in a narrow street, which was at this time from a variety of lights, as light as day: a single file of men armed with swords, or piques, formed a line of some length, commencing from the prison door. This body might consist of about fifty; these people were either Marseillais, Brestois, or the National Guards of Paris, and when I saw them seemed much fatigued with their horrid work. For besides the irregular massacre that continued till two o’clock on Monday morning, many of them delighted with their strange office continued their services when I left them, which was about nine on Monday evening.
Two of the Municipality were then in the prison with some of the mob distributing their justice. Those they found guilty were seemingly released, but only to be precipitated by the door on a number of piques, and then among the savage cries of vive la nation ["long live the nation!"], to be hacked to pieces by those that had swords and were ready to receive them. After this their dead bodies were dragged by the arms or legs to the Abbaye, which is distant from the prison about two hundred yards; here they were laid up in heaps till carts could carry them away. The kennel was swimming with blood, and a bloody track was traced from the prison to the Abbaye door where they had dragged these unfortunate people.
I was fortunate enough to be present when five men were acquitted. Such a circumstance, a bystander told me, had not happened in the operations of this horrid tribunal; and these inconsistent murderers seemed nearly as much pleased at the acquittal of a prisoner as they were at his condemnation. The Governor of the Invalides happened to be one of those I saw acquitted, the street rung with acclamations of joy, but the old man was so feeble with fear, and suspense, and so overcome with the caresses of his daughter, who was attending to know his fate, that they both sunk lifeless into the arms of some of the spectators, who carried them to the Hospital des Invalides. The same congratulations attended the others that were acquitted and the same those that were condemned. Nothing can exceed the inconsistency of these people. After the general massacre of Sunday night many of the dead bodies were laid on the Pont-neuf to be claimed, a person in the action of stealing a handkerchief from one of the corpses was hacked to pieces on the spot, by the same people who had been guilty of so much cruelty and injustice.
One of the Municipality was fortunate enough for that night to save some of the women, but many of these underwent the same mock trial next day; and the Princess Lamballe, after having been butchered in the most shocking manner, had her head severed from her body, which these monsters carried about, while others dragged her body through many of the streets. It is even said they attempted to carry it to the Queen, but the Guards would not permit that. Mademoiselle de Tourzelles was also reported to have been murdered, but I understand that she and Madame de Ste Brice were saved from the fury of the people, and carried a la section des droits de l’homme. Many other women of family were killed and others escaped. Major Bauchman of the Swiss Guards was beheaded on the Place de Carouzel early on Monday morning. Mr Montmorin, Governor of Fontainebleau and nephew of Mr Montmorin late Minister, who was killed at the Abbaye, had been regularly tried and acquitted on Friday, but not being released was also massacred at the Conciergerie. Monsieur d’Affry was acquitted by the people and escaped. In all it is supposed they have murdered four thousand, some say seven, but I think that exaggerated.
By what I can understand it was late on Sunday evening before Mr Pethion took any steps to prevent the progress of this unexampled outrage, and the National Guards of course made no opposition to such irregularities. The Mayor however at last sent to the Temple the Commandant General of the National Guards, and I am happy to inform you that in the midst of all this confusion, though there was a crowd in the street, yet the court of the Temple was quiet. The Section du Marais has sworn not to permit any violence to be exercised against the prisoners in that place, and the National Assembly have also appointed six of their members as a safe-guard to the sacred persons of Their Majesties, and a number of the Municipality also attend. A motion was made last week to confine Their Majesties in separate apartments; that right was however found to rest with the Municipality, and I have the pleasure of saying that Their Most Christian Majesties still enjoy the comfort of being together, and were, not an hour ago, in perfect good health.
I ask pardon for giving such a detailed account of such uncommon barbarity, which I am sure must be as disagreeable for you to read as it is for me to commit such acts to paper, but they ought to be particularized to the eternal disgrace of a people who pretend to be the most civilized among the nations of Europe.
The French Revolution Becomes a Universal Political Crusade
National Convention
(1792)
The French people to the people of ; brothers and friends:
We have conquered our liberty and we shall maintain it. We offer to bring this inestimable blessing to you, for it has always been rightly ours, and only by a crime have our oppressors robbed us of it. We have driven out your tyrants. Show yourselves free men and we will protect you from their vengeance, their machinations, or their return.
From this moment the French nation proclaims the sovereignty of the people, the suppression of all civil and military authorities which have hitherto governed you and of all that taxes which you bear, under whatever form, the abolition of the tithe, of feudalism, of seigniorial rights and monopolies of every kind, of serfdom, whether real or personal, of hunting and fishing privileges, of the corvee, the salt tax, the tolls and local imposts, and, in general, of all the various kinds of taxes with which you have been loaded by your usurpers; it also proclaims the abolition among you of all noble and ecclesiastical corporations and of all prerogatives and privileges opposed to equality. You are, from this moment, brothers and friends; all are citizens, equal in rights, and all are alike called to govern, to serve, and to defend your country.
The King is Dead, “Vive la Republic!”
Henry Essex Edgeworth de Firmont
(1793)
The unfortunate Louis XVI, foreseeing to what lengths the malice of his enemies was likely to go, and resolved to be prepared at all events, cast his eyes upon me, to assist him in his last moments, if condemned to die. He would not make any application to the ruling party, nor even mention my name without my consent. The message he sent me was touching beyond expression, and worded in a manner which I shall never forget. A King, though in chains, had a right to command, but he commanded not. My attendance was requested merely as a pledge of my attachment for him, and as a favour, which he hoped I would not refuse. But as the service was likely to be attended with some danger for me, he dared not to insist, and only prayed (in case I deemed the danger to be too great) to point out to him a clergyman worthy of his confidence, but less known than I was myself, leaving the person absolutely to my choice. … Being obliged to take my party upon the spot, I resolved to comply with what appeared to be at that moment the call of Almighty God; and committing to His providence all the rest, I made answer to the most unfortunate of Kings, that whether he lived or died, I would be his friend to the last. …
The King finding himself seated in the carriage, where he could neither speak to me nor be spoken to without witness, kept a profound silence. I presented him with my breviary, the only book I had with me, and he seemed to accept it with pleasure: he appeared anxious that I should point out to him the psalms that were most suited to his situation, and he recited them attentively with me. The gend’armes, without speaking, seemed astonished and confounded at the tranquil piety of their monarch, to whom they doubtless never had before approached so near.
The procession lasted almost two hours; the streets were lined with citizens, all armed, some with pikes and some with guns, and the carriage was surrounded by a body of troops, formed of the most desperate people of Paris. As another precaution, they had placed before the horses a number of drums, intended to drown any noise or murmur in favour of the King; but how could they be heard? Nobody appeared either at the doors or windows, and in the street nothing was to be seen, but armed citizens–citizens, all rushing towards the commission of a crime, which perhaps they detested in their hearts.
The carriage proceeded thus in silence to the Place de Louis XV, and stopped in the middle of a large space that had been left round the scaffold: this space was surrounded with cannon, and beyond, an armed multitude extended as far as the eye could reach. As soon as the King perceived that the carriage stopped, he turned and whispered to me, “We are arrived, if I mistake not.” My silence answered that we were. One of the guards came to open the carriage door, and the gend’armes would have jumped out, but the King stopped them, and leaning his arm on my knee, “Gentlemen,” said he, with the tone of majesty, “I recommend to you this good man; take care that after my death no insult be offered to him–I charge you to prevent it.” … As soon as the King had left the carriage, three guards surrounded him, and would have taken off his clothes, but he repulsed them with haughtiness: he undressed himself, untied his neckcloth, opened his shirt, and arranged it himself. The guards, whom the determined countenance of the King had for a moment disconcerted, seemed to recover their audacity. They surrounded him again, and would have seized his hands. “What are you attempting?” said the King, drawing back his hands. “To bind you,” answered the wretches. “To bind me,” said the King, with an indignant air. “No! I shall never consent to that: do what you have been ordered, but you shall never bind me … “
The path leading to the scaffold was extremely rough and difficult to pass; the King was obliged to lean on my arm, and from the slowness with which he proceeded, I feared for a moment that his courage might fail; but what was my astonishment, when arrived at the last step, I felt that he suddenly let go my arm, and I saw him cross with a firm foot the breadth of the whole scaffold; silence, by his look alone, fifteen or twenty drums that were placed opposite to me; and in a voice so loud, that it must have been heard at the Pont Tournant, I heard him pronounce distinctly these memorable words: I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge; I pardon those who have occasioned my death; and I pray to God that the blood you are going to shed may never be visited on France.
He was proceeding, when a man on horseback, in the national uniform, and with a ferocious cry, ordered the drums to beat. Many voices were at the same time heard encouraging the executioners. They seemed reanimated themselves, in seizing with violence the most virtuous of Kings, they dragged him under the axe of the guillotine, which with one stroke severed his head from his body. All this passed in a moment. The youngest of the guards, who seemed about eighteen, immediately seized the head, and shewed it to the people as he walked round the scaffold; he accompanied this monstrous ceremony with the most atrocious and indecent gestures. At first an awful silence prevailed; at length some cries of “Vive la Republique!” were heard. By degrees the voices multiplied, and in less than ten minutes this cry, a thousand times repeated, became the universal shout of the multitude, and every hat was in the air.
Robespierre on Republican Virtue
Maxililien Robespierre
(1794)
We desire an order of things where all base and cruel passions are enchained by the laws, all beneficent and generous feelings awakened by them; where ambition is the desire to deserve glory and to be useful to one’s country; where distinctions arise only from equality itself; where the citizen is sub ject to the magistrate, the magistrate to the people, the people to justice; where the country secures the welfare of each individual, and each individual proudly enjoys the prosperity and glory of his country; where all minds are enlarged by the constant interchange of republican sentiments and by the need of earning the respect of a great people; where industry is an adornment to the liberty that ennobles it, and commerce is the source of public wealth, not simply of monstrous riches for a few families.
We wish to substitute in our country morality for egotism, probity for a mere sense of honour, principle for habit, duty for etiquette, the rule of reason for the tyranny of custom, contempt for vice for contempt for misfortune, pride for insolence, large-mindedness for vanity, the love of glory for the love of money, good men for good company, merit for intrigue, talent for conceit, truth for show, the charm of happiness for the tedium of pleasure, the grandeur of man for the triviality of grand society, a people magnanimous, powerful and happy for a people lovable, frivolous and wretched–that is to say, all the virtues and miracles of the Republic for all the vices and puerilities of the monarchy.
We wish in a word to fulfil the course of nature, to accomplish the destiny of mankind, to make good the promises of philosophy, to absolve Providence from the long reign of tyranny and crime. May France, once illustrious among peoples of slaves, eclipse the glory of all free peoples that have existed, become the model to the nations, the terror of oppressors, the consolation of the oppressed, the ornament of the universe; and in sealing our work with our blood, may we ourselves see at last the dawn of universal felicity gleam before us! That is our ambition. That is our aim.
The Reign of Terror in the Provinces: Lyon
Temporary Committee of Republican Surveillance
(1793)
The goal of the Revolution is the happiness of the people.
Paragraph I: Concerning the Revolutionary Spirit
The Revolution is made for the people; the happiness of the people is its goal; love of the people is the touchstone of the revolutionary spirit.
It is easy to understand that by “the people” we do not mean that class privileged by its riches which has usurped all the pleasures of life and all its assets from society. “The people” is the universality of French citizens; “the people” is above all the immense class of the poor, that class which gives men to the Patrie,defenders to our frontiers, which maintains society by its labors, embellishes it by its talents, which adorns it and honors it by its virtues. The Revolution would be a political and moral monstrosity if its end was to assure the happiness of a few hundred individuals and to consolidate the misery of twenty-four million citizens. …
Republicans, to be worthy of that name, begin by feeling your dignity. Hold high your head with pride and let men read in your eyes that you know who you are and what the Republic is. Do not be mistaken, to be truly republican each citizen must experience within himself a revolution equal to that which has changed the face of France. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in common between the slave of a tyrant and the inhabitant of a free state: the customs of the latter, his principles, his sentiments, his actions must all be new. You were oppressed; you must crush your oppressors. You were the slaves of superstition; you must no longer worship anything except liberty; you must have no other morality than that of nature. You were strangers to military offices; henceforth all Frenchmen are soldiers. You lived in ignorance; to assure the conquest of your rights, you must be instructed. You knew no Patrie [Fatherland], never had its sweet voice echoed in your hearts; today, you must know nothing apart from it; you must see it, hear it, and adore it in everything. The magistrate is vigilant, the farmer sows his fields, the soldier fights, the citizen breathes only for the Patrie! Its sacred image mingles in all his actions, adds to his pleasures, rewards him for his pains. Long live the Republic! Long live the people! There is his rallying cry, the expression of his joy, the solace of his sorrows. Any man to whom this enthusiasm is foreign, who knows other pleasures, other cares than the happiness of the people … any man who doesn’t feel his blood boil at the very name of tyranny, slavery, or opulence; any man who has tears to shed for the enemies of the people, who doesn’t reserve all his compassion for the victims of despotism, and for the martyrs of liberty, all such men who dare to call themselves Republicans have lied against nature and in their hearts. Let them flee the soil of liberty: they will soon be recognized and will water it with their impure blood. The Republic wants only free men within its bosom; it is determined to exterminate all others and to recognize as its children only those who know how to live, fight and die for it. …
Paragraph III: The Revolutionary Tax on the Rich
The expenses of the war must be defrayed, and the costs of the Revolution met. Who will come to the help of the Patrie in its need if it is not the rich? If they are aristocrats, it is just that they should pay for a war to which they and their supporters alone have given rise; if they are patriots, you will be anticipating their desires by asking them to put their riches to the only use fit for Republicans; that is to say, a purpose useful to the Republic. Thus, nothing can excuse you from establishing this tax promptly. No exemptions are necessary; any man who has more than he needs must participate in this extraordinary assistance. This tax must be proportioned to the great needs of the Patrie, so you must begin by deciding in a grand and truly revolutionary manner the sum that each individual must put in common for the public welfare. This isn’t a case for mathematical exactitude nor for the timid scruple which must be employed to apportion the public taxes; it is an extraordinary measure which must exhibit the character of the times which compel it. Operate, then, on a large scale; take all that a citizen has that is unnecessary; for superfluity is an evident and gratuitous violation of the rights of the people. Any man who has more than his needs cannot use it, he can only abuse it; thus, if he is left what is strictly necessary, all the rest belongs to the Republic and to its unfortunate members. …
Paragraph V : The Eradication of Fanaticism
Priests are the sole cause of the misfortunes of France; it is they who for thirteen hundred years have raised, by degrees, the edifice of our slavery and have adorned it with all the sacred baubles which could conceal flaws from the eye of reason. …
First of all, Citizens, relations between God and man are a purely private matter and, to be sincere, have no need of display in worship and the visible monuments of superstition. You will begin by sending to the treasury of the Republic all the vases, all the gold and silver ornaments which may flatter the vanity of priests but which are nothing to the truly religious man and to the Being whom he claims to honour. …
… The Republican has no other divinity than his Patrie, no other idol than liberty. The Republican is essentially religious because he is good, just, and courageous; the patriot honors virtue, respects age, consoles misfortune, comforts indigence and punishes treachery. What better homage for the Divinity! The patriot isn’t foolish enough to claim to worship him by practices useless to humanity and bad for himself; he does not condemn himself to an apparent celibacy in order to give himself up the more freely to debauchery. Worthy son of nature and useful member of society, he gives happiness to a virtuous wife and raises his numerous children according to the severe principles of morality and republicanism. …
Republicans … be on guard, you have great wrongs to expiate; the crimes of the rebellious Lyonnais are yours. … Regain then, and promptly, in liberty’s way, all the ground that you have lost, and win again by your virtues and patriotic efforts the esteem and confidence of France. The National Convention, the representatives of the people, are watching you and your magistrates; the account that they demand of you will be all the stricter because you have faults to be pardoned. And we, who are intermediaries between them and you, we whom they have charged to watch over you and instruct you, we swear that our glance will not leave you for an instant and that we will use with severity all the authority committed to us and that we will punish as treachery what in other circumstances you might have called dilatoriness, weakness or negligence. The time for half-measures and for beating about the bush is past. Help us to strike great blows or you will be the first to feel them. Liberty or death: reflect and choose.
[Signed by the Commission and approved by the deputies on mission, Collot d'Herbois and Fouche, members of the Committee of Public Safety.]
A Sans-CulotteDescribes the Typical Sans-Culotte
Anonymous
(1793)
A sans culotte, you rogues? He is someone who always goes about on foot, who has not got the millions you would all live to have, who has no castles, no valets to wait on him, and who lives simply with his wife and children, if he has any, on the fourth or fifth story. He is useful because he knows how to till a field, to forge iron, to use a saw, to roof a house, to make shoes, and to spill his blood to the last drop for the safety of the Republic. …
In the evening he goes to the assembly of his Section, not powdered and perfumed and nattily booted, in the hope of being noticed by the citizenesses in the galleries, but ready to support sound proposals with all his might and ready to pulverize those which come from the despised faction of politicians.
Finally, a sans culotte always has his sabre well-sharpened, ready to cut off the ears of all opponents of the Revolution.
Economic Realities in Revolutionary Paris: Prices and Wages
George Rude
(1789-1793)
Percentage of Income Spent on Bread by Parisian Workers, 1789(in sous)
Effective Expenditure on Bread as Percentage Daily Daily of Income
Occupation Wage Earnings1 At 9 s. At 14-1/2 s. At 13-1/2 s. At 12 s.
Laborer in Reveillon’s factory 25 s. 15 s. 60 97 90-1/2 80
Builder’s laborer 30 s. 18 s. 50 80 75-1/2 67
Journeyman mason 40 s. 24 s. 37 60 56-1/2 50
Journeyman locksmith, carpenter, etc. 50 s. 30 s. 30 48 45-1/2 40
Sculptor, goldsmith 100 s. 60 s. 15 24 22-1/2 20
1 In computing ‘effective’ earnings, allowance has been made for the numerous unpaid Feast Days of the ancien regime. Here these are assumed to number 111 per year (G. M. Jaffe, Le Mouvement ouvrier a Paris pendant la Revolution francaise , pp. 26-27). Further allowance should also be made for sickness.
Hypothetical Budgets of Parisian Workers, June 1789 and June 1791
(in sous)
Budget of a Builder’s Laborer Budget of a Journeyman Carpenter, or Locksmith ÷ ÷
(wage, 30 s.; effective income, 18 s.) (wage, 50 s.; effective income, 30 s.) ÷ ÷÷÷ June 1789 June 1791 June 1789 June 1791 ÷÷÷ 4 lb. bread 14-1/2 s. 4 lb. bread 8 s. 4 lb. bread 14-1/2 s. 4 lb. bread 8 s. ÷÷÷
Rent 3 s. Rent 3 s. Rent 3 s. Rent 3 s. ÷÷÷
1/2 liter wine 4 s. 1/2 liter wine 5 s. 1 liter wine 8 s. ÷÷÷ ÷÷÷ 1-1/4 lb. meat 2-1/2 s. 1/2 lb. meat 5 s. 1/2 lb. meat 5 s. ÷÷÷ Balance for oil, ÷÷÷ vegetables, ÷÷÷
clothing, etc. 1/2 s. Balance 1/2 s. Balance 2-1/2 s. Balance 6 s. ÷÷÷
÷÷÷
÷÷÷ ÷÷÷
÷÷÷
Total 18 s. 18 s. 30 s. 30 s.
Hypothetical Budgets of Parisian Workers, June 1790 and June 1793 (in sous)
Budget of a Journeyman Carpenter Budget of a Journeyman Locksmith ÷ ÷ ÷÷÷ June 1790 June 1793 June 1790 June 1793 ÷÷÷ (wage, 50 s.; effective (wage, 80 s.; effective (wage, 50 s.; effective (wage, 110 s.; effective ÷÷÷
income, 30 s.) income, 57 s.) income, 30 s.) income, 78 s.) ÷÷÷ ÷÷÷ 4 lb. bread 11 s. 4 lb. bread 12 s. 4 lb. bread 11 s. 4 lb. bread 12 s. ÷÷÷
Rent 3 s. Rent 6 s. Rent 3 s. Rent 6 s. ÷÷÷
1 liter wine 10 s. 1-1/2 liters wine 24 s. 1 liter wine 10 s. 1-1/2 liters wine 24 s. ÷÷÷ ÷÷÷ 1/2 lb. meat 5 s. 1/2 lb. meat 9 s. 1/2 lb. meat 5 s. 1 lb. meat 18 s. ÷÷÷ Balance for vegetables ÷÷÷
oil, clothing, etc. 1 s. Balance 6 s. Balance 1 s. Balance 18 s. ÷÷÷
÷÷÷
÷÷÷ ÷÷÷
÷÷÷
Total 30 s. 57 s. 30 s. 78 s.
The Law of the General Maximum
French National Convention
(1793)
The National Convention, having heard the report of its Commission on the drafting of a law fixing amaximum for essential goods and merchandise, decrees as follows:
Article 1. The articles which the National Convention has judged to be essential, and of which it has believed it should fix the maximum or highest price are: fresh meat, salt meat and bacon, butter, sweet oil, cattle, salt fish, wine, brandy, vinegar, cider, beer, firewood, charcoal, coal, candles, lamp oil, salt, soda, soap, potash, sugar, honey, white paper, hides, iron, cast iron, lead, steel, copper, hemp, flax, wools, fabrics, linen cloth, the raw materials used for manufacture, clogs, shoes, colza and rape, tobacco.
2. Among the articles listed above, the maximum price of first quality firewood, charcoal and coal is the same as in 1790, plus one-twentieth. The law of 19 August on the fixing by departments of the price of firewood, coal and peat is revoked.
The maximum or the highest price of twist tobacco is 20 sous per livre … that of smoking tobacco is 10 sous;that of a livre of salt is two sous; that of soap is 25 sous.
3. The maximum price of all other goods and merchandise listed in article 1 shall be, over the whole extent of the Republic, until September next, their price in 1790 as stated by the market price lists or the current prices in each department, plus one-third, deduction being made for fiscal and other fees to which they were then subject, under whatever name they may have existed.
4. The tables of the maximum or highest price of each of the goods, listed in article 1 shall be drafted by each district administration, posted within a week of the receipt of this law, and sent to the department.
5. The procureur-general-syndic shall, within the following fortnight, forward copies to both the Provisional Executive Council and the National Convention.
6. The Commissaries of the National Convention are charged with dismissing procureurs of communes,procureurs-syndics, and procureurs-generaux-syndics who shall not have fulfilled the arrangements detailed in the foregoing articles within the time prescribed, each so far as his responsibility extends.
7. Everyone who sells or buys the merchandise listed in article 1 above the maximum determined and posted in each department shall pay, jointly and severally, through the municipal police, a fine of double the value of the object sold, payable to the informant. Their names shall be inscribed on the list of suspect persons and they shall be treated as such. The buyer shall not be subject to the above penalty if he denounces the seller’s breach, and each merchant shall be required to have a list bearing the maximum or highest price of his goods conspicuous in his shop.
8. The maximumor highest rate with respect to salaries, wages, manual labour and day-labour in each place shall be fixed, beginning from the publication of this law, until September next, by general and communal councils, at the 1790 rate plus one-half.
9. Municipalities may requisition and punish, with three days detention, as the circumstances require, workmen, manufacturers and various kinds of labourers who refuse their ordinary work without legitimate cause. …
[Articles 10-16 deal with technical, administrative matters.]
17. For the duration of the war, all exportation of essential merchandise or goods is prohibited over every frontier under any name or commission whatever, salt excepted.
18. The above listed articles destined for export and intercepted in contravention [of the law] within two leagues of the frontier on this side, and without a permit from the municipality of the driver’s place [of residence], shall be confiscated with the conveyances, beasts of burden, or vessels transporting them, for the benefit of those who stop them. There shall be a penalty of ten years imprisonment for the contraveners, owners and drivers.
19. So that the crews of neutral or Frenchified ships may not abuse the favour of hospitality by taking away from maritime cities and places victuals and provisions beyond their needs, they shall appear before the municipality which shall cause all that they need to be purchased for them.
20. The present decree shall be despatched by special messenger.
The Last “Political Testament” of a Feminist During the French Revolution
Olympe de Gouges
(1793)
My son, the wealth of the whole world, the universe in servitude at my feet, the daggers of assassins raised at me, nothing can extinguish the love of country that burns in my soul; nothing could make me betray my conscience. Men deranged by passions, what have you done and what incalculable evils are you perpetrating on Paris and on the whole of France? You are risking everything; you flatter yourselves into thinking that it is only a question of a great purge to save the public; let the departments, infused with terror, blindly adopt your horrible measures.
If, by a last effort, I can save the public welfare, I want even my persecutors, as they destroy me by their furor, to be jealous of my kind of death. And if one day French women are pointed out to future generations perhaps my memory will equal that of the Romans. I have predicted it all; I know that my death is inevitable; but it is glorious for a well-intentioned soul, when an ignominious death threatens all good citizens, to die for a dying country!
I will my heart to the nation, my integrity to men (they have need of it). To women, I will my soul; my creative spirit to dramatic artists; my disinterestedness to the ambitious; my philosophy to those who are persecuted; my intelligence to all fanatics; my religion to atheists; my gaiety to women on the decline; and all the poor remains of an honest fortune to my son, if he survives me.
Frenchmen, those are my last words, listen to what I am saying and reach down into the bottom of your hearts: do you recognize the austere virtues and the unselfishness of a republican? Answer me: who has loved and served the nation more–you or I? People, your reign is over if you fail to stop yourselves at the edge of this abyss. You have never been grander or more sublime than in the majestic calm you have kept during this bloody storm. If you can preserve this calm and this august kind of supervision, you will save Paris, the whole of France, and republican government.
The Women of Revolutionary Paris Demand Action from the Convention
Anonymous
(1793)
Citizen legislators: Justly indignant at the endless jobbery which has occurred in the Ministry … we come to demand of you the execution of constitutional laws. We did not accept the principles of the Constitution so that anarchy and the rule of schemers might be prolonged indefinitely. The premeditated war has lasted long enough. It is time for the children of liberty to sacrifice themselves for the Patrie and not for the ambition and pride of a heap of rogues at the head of our armies. Let us see by the dismissal of all nobles that you are not among their defenders. Hurry, and convince all France by your actions that we have not brought the representatives of a great people from all corners of the Republic, with great show, simply to put on a moving performance in the Champ de Mars. Prove that this Constitution, which we have seen accepted, is a reality and will indeed bring about our happiness. It is not sufficient to tell the people that its happiness is drawing near; it must feel its effects. Four years’ experience of misfortune has taught it to mistrust the fine promises made to it endlessly. …
Believe us, legislators, four years of misfortune have taught us enough to be able to discern ambition under the very mask of patriotism; we no longer believe in the virtue of those men who are reduced to praising themselves. More than words is now necessary to convince us that ambition does not reign in your committees. Organize the government along the lines required by the Constitution. In vain do you tell us that this step will bring about the fall of France … we shall see only the fall of the schemers. In a Paris where the laws are strictly observed, do you expect us to believe that the enemies of the Patrie have no official defenders among you? Dismiss all nobles without exception; if there are some men of good faith among them, they will prove it by making a voluntary sacrifice for the happiness of their Patrie.
Don’t be afraid of disorganizing the army; the more talented a general is, the more urgent it is to replace him if he is ill-intentioned. Don’t do patriots the injustice of saying that there aren’t men among them able to command our armies. Let us have some of these fine soldiers whose talents and deserts have been sacrificed to the ambition and pride of that formerly privileged caste. If, under the reign of despotism, their crime won preference, under that of liberty, virtue must sweep it away. You have made a decree according to which all suspects must be arrested; but we ask you, isn’t this law derisory while these very suspects must execute it?
Legislators! Thus is the people mocked! There is the equality which was to be the basis of its happiness; there is its thanks for the countless evils it has suffered so patiently! It will not be said that this people, reduced to despair, was obliged to seek justice for itself; you will render justice by dismissing all guilty administrators, and by creating extraordinary tribunals in a sufficient number so that the people, before leaving for the frontiers, may say: “I am easy about the fate of my wife and children, for I have seen all domestic conspirators perish under the sword of the law.”
Decree these measures, legislators, and the levee en masse, and you will have saved the Patrie!
A Black Revolutionary Leader in Haiti: Toussaint L’Ouverture
Francois Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture
(1797)
The impolitic and incendiary discourse of Vaublanc has not affected the blacks nearly so much as their certainty of the projects which the proprietors of San Domingo are planning: insidious declarations should not have any effect in the eyes of wise legislators who have decreed liberty for the nations. But the attempts on that liberty which the colonists propose are all the more to be feared because it is with the veil of patriotism that they cover their detestable plans. We know that they seek to impose some of them on you by illusory and specious promises, in order to see renewed in this colony its former scenes of horror. Already perfidious emissaries have stepped in among us to ferment the destructive leaven prepared by the hands of liberticides. But they will not succeed. I swear it by all that liberty holds most sacred. My attachment to France, my knowledge of the blacks, make it my duty not to leave you ignorant either of the crimes which they meditate or the oath that we renew, to bury ourselves under the ruins of a country revived by liberty rather than suffer the return of slavery.
It is for you, Citizens Directors, to turn from over our heads the storm which the eternal enemies of our liberty are preparing in the shades of silence. It is for you to enlighten the legislature, it is for you to prevent the enemies of the present system from spreading themselves on our unfortunate shores to sully it with new crimes. Do not allow our brothers, our friends, to be sacrificed to men who wish to reign over the ruins of the human species. But no, your wisdom will enable you to avoid the dangerous snares which our common enemies hold out for you. …
I send you with this letter a declaration which will acquaint you with the unity that exists between the proprietors of San Domingo who are in France, those in the United States, and those who serve under the English banner. You will see there a resolution, unequivocal and carefully constructed, for the restoration of slavery; you will see there that their determination to succeed has led them to envelop themselves in the mantle of liberty in order to strike it more deadly blows. You will see that they are counting heavily on my complacency in lending myself to their perfidious views by my fear for my children. It is not astonishing that these men who sacrifice their country to their interests are unable to conceive how many sacrifices a true love of country can support in a better father than they, since I unhesitatingly base the happiness of my children on that of my country, which they and they alone wish to destroy.
I shall never hesitate between the safety of San Domingo and my personal happiness; but I have nothing to fear. It is to the solicitude of the French Government that I have confided my children. … I would tremble with horror if it was into the hands of the colonists that I had sent them as hostages; but even if it were so, let them know that in punishing them for the fidelity of their father, they would only add one degree more to their barbarism, without any hope of ever making me fail in my duty. … Blind as they are! They cannot see how this odious conduct on their part can become the signal of new disasters and irreparable misfortunes, and that far from making them regain what in their eyes liberty for all has made them lose, they expose themselves to a total ruin and the colony to its inevitable destruction. Do they think that men who have been able to enjoy the blessing of liberty will calmly see it snatched away? They supported their chains only so long as they did not know any condition of life more happy than that of slavery. But to-day when they have left it, if they had a thousand lives they would sacrifice them all rather than be forced into slavery again. But no, the same hand which has broken our chains will not enslave us anew. France will not revoke her principles, she will not withdraw from us the greatest of her benefits. She will protect us against all our enemies; she will not permit her sublime morality to be perverted, those principles which do her most honour to be destroyed, her most beautiful achievement to be degraded, and her Decree of 16 Pluviose which so honors humanity to be revoked. But if, to re-establish slavery in San Domingo, this was done, then I declare to you it would be to attempt the impossible: we have known how to face dangers to obtain our liberty, we shall know how to brave death to maintain it.
This, Citizens Directors, is the morale of the people of San Domingo, those are the principles that they transmit to you by me.
My own you know. It is sufficient to renew, my hand in yours, the oath that I have made, to cease to live before gratitude dies in my heart, before I cease to be faithful to France and to my duty, before the god of liberty is profaned and sullied by the liberticides, before they can snatch from my hands that sword, those arms, which France confided to me for the defence of its rights and those of humanity, for the triumph of liberty and equality.
A Natural Rights Defense of the French Revolution: The Rights of Man
Thomas Paine
(1791)
To George Washington,
President of the United States of America
Sir,
I present you a small treatise in defense of those principles of freedom which your exemplary virtue hath so eminently contributed to establish. That the Rights of Man may become as universal as your benevolence can wish, and that you may enjoy the happiness of seeing the New World regenerate the Old, is the prayer of
Sir,
Your much obliged, and
Obedient humble servant,
Thomas Paine
From the part Mr. Burke took in the American Revolution, it was natural that I should consider him a friend to mankind; and as our acquaintance commenced on that ground, it would have been more agreeable to me to have had cause to continue in that opinion, than to change it.
At the time Mr. Burke made his violent speech last winter in the English Parliament against the French Revolution and the National Assembly, I was in Paris, and had written to him but a short time before, to inform him how prosperously matters were going on. Soon after this, I saw his advertisement of the pamphlet he intended to publish. …
Among the incivilities by which nations or individuals provoke and irritate each other, Mr. Burke’s pamphlet on the French Revolution is an extraordinary instance. Neither the people of France, nor the National Assembly, were troubling themselves about the affairs of England, or the English Parliament; and that Mr. Burke should commence an unprovoked attack upon them, both in Parliament and in public, is a conduct that cannot be pardoned on the score of manners, nor justified on that of policy. …
Not sufficiently content with abusing the National Assembly, a great part of his work is taken up with abusing Dr. Price (one of the best-hearted men that lives), and the two societies in England known by the name of the Revolution Society, and the Society for Constitutional Information.
Dr. Price had preached a sermon on the 4th of November, 1789, being the anniversary of what is called in England the Revolution, which took place in 1688. Mr. Burke, speaking of this sermon, says, “The political divine proceeds dogmatically to assert that, by the principles of the Revolution, the people of England have acquired three fundamental rights:
1. To choose our own governors.
2. To cashier them for misconduct.
3. To frame a government for ourselves.”
Dr. Price does not say that the right to do these things exists in this or in that person, or in this or in that description of persons, but that it exists in the whole;that it is a right resident in the nation. Mr. Burke, on the contrary, denies that such a right exists in the nation, either in whole or in part, or that it exists any where; and, what is still more strange and marvelous, he says, “that the people of England utterly disclaim such a right, and that they will resist the practical assertion of it with their lives and fortunes.”
That men should take up arms, and spend their lives and fortunes, not to maintain their rights, but to maintain they have not rights, is an entirely new species of discovery, and suited to the paradoxical genius of Mr. Burke.
The English Parliament of 1688 did a certain thing, which, for themselves and their constituents, they had a right to do, and which it appeared right should be done: But, in addition to this right, which they possessed by delegation, they set up another right by assumption, that of binding and controlling posterity to the end of time. …
There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the “end of time,” or of commanding forever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore, all such clauses, acts or declarations, by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void.
Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generation which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. …
It was not against Louis XVI, but against the despotic principles of the government, that the nation revolted. These principles had not their origin in him, but in the original establishment, many centuries back; and they were become too deeply rooted to be removed, and the Augean stable of parasites and plunderers too abominably filthy to be cleansed, by anything short of a complete and universal revolution. … There were, if I may so express it, a thousand despotisms to be reformed in France, which had grown up under the hereditary despotism of the monarchy, and became so rooted as to be in a great measure independent of it. …
Not one glance of compassion, not one commiserating reflection, that I can find throughout his book, has he [Burke] bestowed on those who lingered out the most wretched of lives, a life without hope, in the most miserable of prisons.
It is painful to behold a man employing his talents to corrupt himself. Nature has been kinder to Mr. Burke than he is to her. He is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblage of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird. …
More of the citizens fell in this struggle than of their opponents; but four or five persons were seized by the populace, and instantly put to death; the governor of the Bastille, and the mayor of Paris, who was detected in the act of betraying them; and afterwards Foulon, one of the new ministry, and Berthier, his son-in-law, who had accepted the office of intendant of Paris. Their heads were struck upon spikes, and carried about the city; and it is upon this mode of punishment that Mr. Burke builds a great part of his tragic scenes. …
These outrages are not the effect of the principles of the revolution, but of the degraded mind that existed before the revolution, and which the revolution is calculated to reform. Place them then to their proper cause, and take the reproach of them to your own side. …
Mr. Burke, with his usual outrage, abuses the Declaration of the Rights of Man, published by the National Assembly of France, as the basis on which the constitution of France is built. This he calls “paltry and blurred sheets of paper about the rights of man.”
Does Mr. Burke mean to deny that man has any rights? If he does, then he must mean that there are no such things as rights any where, and that he has none himself; for who is there in the world but man? But if Mr. Burke means to admit that man has rights, the question then will be, what are those rights, and how came man by them originally? …
The duty of man is not a wilderness of turnpike gates, through which he is to pass by tickets from one to the other. It is plain and simple, and consists but of two points. His duty to God, which every man must feel, and with respect to his neighbor, to do as he would be done by….
Hitherto we have spoken only (and that but in part) of the natural rights of man. We have now to consider the civil rights of man, and to show how the one originates from the other. Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured. His natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights. …
In casting our eyes over the world, it is extremely easy to distinguish the governments which have arisen out of society, or out of the social compact, from those which have not: but to place this in a clearer light than what a single glance may afford, it will be proper to take a review of the several sources from which the governments have arisen, and on which they have been founded.
They may be all comprehended under three heads. First, superstition. Secondly, power. Thirdly, the common interests of society, and the common rights of man.
The first was a government of priestcraft, the second of conquerors, and the third of reason. …
We have now to review the governments which arise out of society, in contradistinction to those which arose out of superstition and conquest.
It has been thought a considerable advance toward establishing the principles of freedom, to say, that government is a compact between those who govern and those who are governed: but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause, for as a man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governments to form such a compact with.
The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist. … The constitution of a country is not the act of its government, but of the people constituting a government. …
The authority of the present [National] Assembly [of France] is different to what the authority of future assemblies will be. The authority of the present one is to form a constitution; the authority of future assemblies will be to legislate according to the principles and forms prescribed in that constitution; and if experience should hereafter show that alterations, amendments, or additions are necessary, the constitution will point out the mode by which such things shall be done, and not leave it to the discretionary power of the future government. …
The Constitution of France says, that every man who pays a tax of sixty sous per annum (2s. and 6d. English) is an elector. What article will Mr. Burke place against this? Can anything be more limited, and at the same time more capricious, than what the qualifications are in England? …
The French Constitution says, that the number of representatives for any place shall be in a ratio to the number of taxable inhabitants or electors. What article will Mr. Burke place against this? The county of Yorkshire, which contains near a million souls, sends two county members; and so does the county of Rutland, which contains not a hundredth part of that number. …
The French Constitution says, there shall be no game laws; that the farmer on whose land wild game shall be found (for it is by the produce of those lands they are fed) shall have a right to what he can take. That there shall be no monopolies of any kind, that all trades shall be free, and every man free to follow any occupation by which he can procure an honest livelihood, and in any place, town, or city, throughout the nation. What will Mr. Burke say to this? …
The French Constitution says, there shall be no titles; and of consequence, all that class of equivocal generation, which in some countries is called “aristocracy,” and in others “nobility,” is done away, and the peer is exalted intoman.
Titles are but nicknames, and every nickname is a title. The thing is perfectly harmless in itself, but it marks a sort of foppery in the human character which degrades it. …
The French Constitution has reformed the condition of the clergy. It has raised the income of the lower and middle classes, and taken from the higher. None is now less than twelve hundred livres (fifty pounds sterling), nor any higher than about two or three thousand pounds. What will Mr. Burke place against this? …
The French Constitution has abolished tithes, that source of perpetual discontent between the tithe-holder and the parishioner. …
The French Constitution hath abolished or renounced toleration, and intolerance also, and hath established UNIVERSAL RIGHT OF CONSCIENCE. …
Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all law-religions, or religions established by law. Take away the law-establishment, and every religion reassumes its original benignity. In America, a Catholic priest is a good citizen, a good character, and a good neighbor; an Episcopal minister is of the same description: and this proceeds, independently of the men, from there being no law-establishment in America. …
By the French Constitution, the nation is always named before the king. The third article of the Declaration of Rights says, “ The nation is essentially the source (or fountain) of all sovereignty.” Mr. Burke argues, that, in England, a king is the fountain–that he is the fountain of all honor. … In contemplating the French Constitution, we see in it a rational order of things. …
One of the first works of the National Assembly, instead of vindictive proclamations, as has been the case with other governments, published a Declaration of the Rights of Man, as the basis on which the new Constitution was to be built. …
… We see the solemn and majestic spectacle of a nation opening its commission, under the auspices of its Creator, to establish a government; a scene so new, and so transcendently unequalled by any thing in the European world, that the name of a revolution is diminutive of its character, and it rises into a regeneration of man.
What are the present governments of Europe, but a scene of iniquity and oppression? What is that of England? Do not its own inhabitants say? It is a market where every man has his price, and where corruption is common traffic, at the expense of a deluded people? No wonder, then, that the French Revolution is traduced. …
Notwithstanding the nonsense, for it deserves not better name, that Mr. Burke has asserted about hereditary rights, and hereditary succession, and that a nation has not a right to form a government for itself; it happened to fall in his way to give some account of what government is. “Government,” say[s] he, “is a contrivance of human wisdom. ” …
Admitting that government is a contrivance of human wisdomm, it must necessarily follow, that hereditary succession, and hereditary rights (as they are called), can make no part of it, because it is impossible to make wisdom hereditary; and on the other hand, that cannot be a wise contrivance, which in its operation may commit the government of a nation to the wisdom of an idiot. The ground which Mr. Burke now takes, is fatal to every part of his cause. …
What were formerly called revolutions, were little more than a change of persons, or an alteration of local circumstances. … But what we now see in the world, from the revolutions of America and France, is a renovation of the natural order of things, a system of principles as universal as truth and the existence of man, and combining moral with political happiness and national prosperity. …
Government on the old system is an assumption of power for the aggrandizement of itself; on the new, a delegation of power, for the common benefit of society. The former supports itself by keeping up a system of war; the latter promotes a system of peace, as the true means of enriching a nation. The one encourages national prejudices; the other promotes universal society, as the means of universal commerce. The one measures its prosperity, by the quantity of revenue it extorts; the other proves its excellence, by the small quantity of taxes it requires. … The representative system takes society and civilization for its basis; nature, reason, and experience for its guide. …
Never did so great an opportunity offer itself to England, and to all Europe, as is produced by the two revolutions of America and France. By the former, freedom has a national champion in the western world; and by the latter, in Europe. When another nation shall join France, despotism and bad government will scarcely dare to appear. To use a trite expression, the iron is becoming hot all over Europe. The insulted German and the enslaved Spaniard, the Russ and the Pole are beginning to think. The present age will hereafter merit to be called the Age of Reason, and the present generation will appear to the future as the Adam of a new world.
A Feminist Analysis of Natural Law and the Rights of Women
Mary Wollstonecraft
(1792)
My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinatinggraces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists–I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity will soon become objects of contempt.
Dismissing those soft pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind, exquisite sensibility, and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, I wish to shew that elegance is inferior to virtue, that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex.
Youth is the season for love in both sexes; but in those days of thoughtless enjoyment provision should be made for the more important years of life, when reflection takes place of sensation. The woman who has only been taught to please will soon find that her charms are oblique sunbeams and that they cannot have much effect on her husband’s heart when they are seen every day, when the summer is passed and gone. Will she then have sufficient native energy to look into herself for comfort, and cultivate her dormant faculties? or, is it not more rational to expect that she will try to please other men?
Why must the female mind be tainted by coquettish arts to gratify the sensualist and prevent love from subsiding into friendship, or compassionate tenderness, when there are not qualities on which friendship can be built? Let the honest heart shew itself, and reason teach passion to submit to necessity; or, let the dignified pursuit of virtue and knowledge raise the mind above those emotions. …
If then women are not a swarm of ephemeron triflers, why should they be kept in ignorance under the specious name of innocence? … As to the argument respecting the subjection in which the sex has ever been held, it retorts on man. The many have always been enthralled by the few; and monsters, who scarcely have shown any discernment of human excellence, have tyrannized over thousands of their fellow-creatures. … China is not the only country where a living man has been made a God. Men have submitted to superior strength to enjoy with impunity the pleasure of the moment; womenhave only done the same, and therefore till it is proved that the courtier, who servilely resigns the birthright of a man, is not a moral agent, it cannot be demonstrated that woman is essentially inferior to man because she has always been subjugated.
The Napoleonic Code Regulates Gender
Napoleon I
(1804)
Of the Rights and Respective Duties of Husband and Wife
212. Husband and wife mutually owe to each other fidelity, succor, and assistance.
213. The husband owes protection to his wife, the wife obedience to her husband.
214. The wife is obliged to live with her husband, and to follow him wherever he may think proper to dwell; the husband is bound to receive her, and to furnish her with everything necessary for the purposes of life, according to his means and condition.
215. The wife can do no act in law without the authority of her husband. …
Of Causes of Divorce
229. The husband may demand divorce for cause of adultery on the part of his wife.
230. The wife may demand divorce for cause of adultery on the part of her husband, where he shall have kept his concubine in their common house.
Of the Effects of Divorce
298. In the case of divorce allowed at law for cause of adultery, the guilty party can never marry his or her accomplice. The adulterous wife shall be condemned by the same judgment, and upon the requisition of the public ministry, to confinement in a house of correction for a certain period, which shall not be less than three months, nor exceed two years.
The Imperial Catechism Hangs a New Star in God’s Firmament
French Catholic Church
(1806)
Question. What are the duties of Christians toward those who govern them, and what in particular are our duties towards Napoleon I, our emperor?
Answer. Christians owe to the princes who govern them, and we in particular owe to Napoleon I, our emperor, love, respect, obedience, fidelity, military service, and the taxes levied for the preservation and defense of the empire and of his throne. We also owe him fervent prayers for his safety and for the spiritual and temporal prosperity of the state.
Question. Why are we subject to all these duties toward our emperor?
Answer. First, because God, who has created empires and distributes them according to his will, has, by loading our emperor with gifts both in peace and in war, established him as our sovereign and made him the agent of his power and his image upon earth. To honor and serve our emperor is therefore to honor and serve God himself. Secondly, because our Lord Jesus Christ himself, both by his teaching and his example, has taught us what we owe to our sovereign. Even at his very birth he obeyed the edict of Caesar Augustus; he paid the established tax; and while he commanded us to render to God those things which belong to God, he also commanded us to render unto Caesar those things which are Caesar’s.
Question. Are there not special motives which should attach us more closely to Napoleon I, our emperor?
Answer. Yes, for it is he whom God has raised up in trying times to re‘stablish the public worship of the holy religion of our fathers and to be its protector; he has re‘tablished and preserved public order by his profound and active wisdom; he defends the state by his mighty arm; he has become the anointed of the Lord by the consecration which he has received from the sovereign pontiff, head of the Church universal.
Question. What must we think of those who are wanting in their duties toward our emperor?
Answer. According to the apostle Paul, they are resisting the order established by God himself and render themselves worthy of eternal damnation.
Prussia Abolishes Serfdom: The Reform Edict of 1807
Frederick William III
(1807)
We, Frederick William, by the grace of God king of Prussia, etc., etc., hereby make known and proclaim that: Since peace has been established we have been occupied before everything else with the care for the depressed condition of our faithful subjects and the speediest revival and greatest possible improvement in this respect. We have considered that, in face of the prevailing want, the means at our disposal would be insufficient to aid each individual, and even if they were sufficient, we could not hope to accomplish our object; and that, moreover, in accordance with the imperative demands of justice and with the principles of a judicious economic policy, it behooves us to remove every obstacle which has hitherto prevented the individual from attaining such a state of prosperity as he was capable of reaching. We have further considered that the existing restrictions, both on the possession and enjoyment of landed property and on the personal condition of the agricultural laborer, especially interfere with our benevolent purpose and disable a great force which might be applied to the restoration of agriculture,–the former, by their prejudicial influence upon the value of landed property and the credit of the proprietor; the latter, by diminishing the value of labor. We desire, therefore, to reduce both kinds of restrictions so far as the common well-being demands, and we accordingly ordain the following.
1. Every inhabitant of our states is competent, without any limitation on the part of the state, to own or mortgage landed property of every kind. The noble may therefore own not only noble, but also non-noble, citizen and peasant lands of every kind, and the citizen and peasant may possess not only citizen, peasant, and other non-noble, but also noble tracts of land without in any case needing special permission for any acquisition whatever, although henceforth, as before, every change of ownership must be announced to the authorities. All privileges which are possessed by noble over citizen inheritances are entirely abolished. …
2. Every noble is henceforth permitted, without any derogation from his station, to engage in citizen occupation, and every citizen or peasant is allowed to pass from the citizen into the peasant class or from the peasant into the citizen class. …
10. From the date of this ordinance no new relation of serfdom, whether by birth or marriage, or by assuming the position of a serf, or by contract, can be created.
11. With the publication of the present ordinance the existing relations of serfdom of those serfs, with their wives and children, who possess their peasant holdings by inheritance, or in their own right, or by perpetual leases, or of copyhold, shall cease entirely, together with all mutual rights and duties.
12. From Martinmas, one thousand eight hundred and ten (1810), all serfdom shall cease throughout our whole realm. From Martinmas, 1810, there shall be only free persons, as is already the case upon the royal domains in all our provinces,–free persons, however, still subject, as a matter of course, to all obligations which bind them, as free persons, by reason of the possession of an estate or by virtue of a special contract.
To this declaration of our supreme will every one whom it may concern, and in particular our provincial authorities and other officials, are exactly and dutifully to conform, and the present ordinance is to be universally made known.
Napoleon I “Enlightens” Spain
Napoleon I
(1808)
To date from the publication of the present decree, feudal rights are abolished in Spain.
All personal obligations, all exclusive fishing rights and other rights of similar nature on the coast or on rivers and streams, all feudal monopolies ( banalites) of ovens, mills, and inns are suppressed. It shall be free to every one who shall conform to the laws to develop his industry without restraint.
The tribunal of the Inquisition is abolished, as inconsistent with the civil sovereignty and authority.
The property of the Inquisition shall be sequestered and fall to the Spanish state, to serve as security for the bonded debt.
Considering that the members of the various monastic orders have increased to an undue degree and that, although a certain number of them are useful in assisting the ministers of the altar in the administration of the sacraments, the existence of too great a number interferes with the prosperity of the state, we have decreed and do decree as follows:
The number of convents now in existence in Spain shall be reduced to a third of their present number. This reduction shall be accomplished by uniting the members of several convents of the same order into one.
From the publication of the present decree, no one shall be admitted to the novitiate or permitted to take the monastic vow until the number of the religious of both sexes has been reduced to one third of that now in existence. …
All regular ecclesiastics who desire to renounce the monastic life and live as secular ecclesiastics are at liberty to leave their monasteries. …
In view of the fact that the institution which stands most in the way of the internal prosperity of Spain is that of the customs lines separating the provinces, we have decreed and do decree what follows:
To date from January 1 next, the barriers existing between the provinces shall be suppressed. The custom houses shall be removed to the frontiers and there established.
The Grande Armee in Retreat: the Russian Campaign
Benjamin Constant
(1812)
On the 25th of November [1812] there had been thrown across the river temporary bridges made of beams taken from the cabins of the Poles. … At a little after five in the afternoon the beams gave way, not being sufficiently strong; and as it was necessary to wait until the next day, the army again abandoned itself to gloomy forebodings. It was evident that they would have to endure the fire of the enemy all the next day. But there was no longer any choice; for it was only at the end of this night of agony and suffering of every description that the first beams were secured in the river. It is hard to comprehend how men could submit to stand, up to their mouths in water filled with ice, rallying all the strength which nature had given them, added to all that the energy of devotion furnished, and drive piles several feet deep into a miry bed, struggling against the most horrible fatigue, pushing back with their hands enormous blocks of ice which threatened to submerge and sink them. …
The emperor awaited daylight in a poor hut, and in the morning said to Prince Berthier, “Well, Berthier, how do we get out of this?” He was seated in his room, great tears flowing down his cheeks, which were paler than usual and the prince was seated near him. They exchanged words, and the emperor appeared overcome by his grief, leave to the imagination what was passing in his soul.
When the artillery and baggage wagons passed, the bridge was so overweighted that it fell in. Instantly a backward movement took place, which crowded together all the magnitude of stragglers who were advancing in the rear of the artillery, like a flock being herded. Another bridge had been constructed, as if the sad thought had occurred that the first might give way, but the second was narrow and without a railing; nevertheless it seemed at first a very valuable makeshift in such a calamity. But how disasters follow one upon another! The stragglers rushed to the second bridge in crowds. But the artillery, the baggage wagons,–a word, all the army supplies,–had been in front on the first bridge when it broke down. … Now, since it was urgent that the artillery should pass first, it rushed impetuously toward the only road to safety which remained. No one can describe the scene of horror which ensued; for it was literally over a road of trampled human bodies that conveyances of all sorts reached the bridge. On this occasion one could see how much brutality and cold-blooded ferocity can be produced in human minds by the instinct of self-preservation. … As I have said, the bridge had no railing; and crowds of those who forced their way across fell into the river and were engulfed beneath the ice. Others, in the fall, tried to stop themselves by grasping the planks of the bridge, and remained suspended over the abyss until, their hands crushed by the wheels of the vehicles, they lost their grasp and went to join their comrades as the waves closed over them. Entire caissons with drivers and horses were precipitated into the water. …
Officers harnessed themselves to sleds to carry some of their companions who were rendered helpless by their wounds. They wrapped these unfortunates as warmly as possible, cheered them from time to time with a glass of brandy when they could procure it, and lavished upon them the most touching attention. There were many who behaved in this unselfish manner, of whose names we are ignorant; and how few returned to enjoy in their own country the remembrance of the most heroic deeds of their lives!
On the 29th the emperor quitted the banks of the Beretina and we slept at Kamen, where his Majesty occupied a poor wooden building which the icy air penetrated from all sides through the windows, for nearly all the glass was broken. We closed the openings as well as we could with bundles of hay. A short distance from us, in a large lot, were penned up the wretched Russian prisoners whom the army drove before it. I had much difficulty in comprehending the delusion of victory which our poor soldiers still kept up by dragging after them this wretched luxury of prisoners, who could only be an added burden, as they required constant surveillance. When the conquerors are dying of famine, what becomes of the conquered? These poor Russians, exhausted by marches and hunger, nearly all perished that night. …
[Napoleon secretly decided to leave his stricken army and return to France as quickly as possible.] The emperor left in the night. By daybreak the army had learned the news, and the impression it made cannot be depicted. Discouragement was at its height, and many soldiers cursed the emperor and reproached him for abandoning them.
This night, the 6th [of December], the cold increased greatly. Its severity may be imagined, as birds were found on the ground frozen stiff. Soldiers seated themselves with their heads in their hands and bodies bent forward in order thus to feel less the emptiness of their stomachs. … Everything had failed us. Long before reaching Wilna [Vilnius, today in Lithuania], the horses being dead, we received orders to burn our carriages and all their contents.
Constitutional Monarchy in France, Again
Louis XVIII
(1814)
Louis by the Grace of God, King of France and Navarre–to all those to whom these presents come, salutation. Divine Providence in recalling us to our estates after a long absence has imposed grave responsibilities upon us. Peace was the first necessity of our subjects, and we have unceasingly occupied ourselves with this. That peace, so essential to France and to the rest of Europe has been signed. A constitutional charter was demanded by the existing condition of the kingdom, we promised this and now publish it. We have taken into consideration the fact that although the whole authority in France resides in the person of the king, our predecessors have not hesitated to modify the exercise of this in accordance with the differences of the times. It was thus that the communes owed their enfranchisement to Louis the Fat, the confirmation and extension of their rights to Saint Louis and Philip the Fair, and that the judicial system was established and developed by the laws of Louis XI, Henry II, and Charles IX. It was in this way finally that Louis XIV regulated almost every portion of the public administration by various ordinances which have never been surpassed in wisdom. We, like the kings our predecessors, have had to consider the effects of the ever increasing progress of knowledge, the new relations which this progress has introduced into society, the direction given to the public mind during half a century and the serious troubles resulting therefrom. We have perceived that the wish of our subjects for a constitutional charter was the expression of a real need, but in yielding to this wish we have taken every precaution that this charter should be worthy of us and of the people whom we are proud to rule. Able men taken from the first bodies of the state were added to the commissioners of our council to elaborate this important work. While we recognize that the expectations of enlightened Europe ought to be gratified by a free monarchical constitution, we have had to remember that our first duty toward our peoples was to preserve for their own interest the rights and prerogatives of our crown. We hope that, taught by experience, they may be convinced that the supreme authority can alone give to institutions which it establishes the power, permanence and dignity with which it is itself clothed. That, consequently, when the wisdom of kings freely harmonizes with the wish of the peoples, a constitutional charter may long endure, but that when concessions are snatched with violence from a weak government, public liberty is not less endangered than the throne itself.
We have sought the principles of the constitutional charter in the French character and in the venerable monuments of past centuries. Thus we perceived in the revival of the peerage a truly national institution which binds memories to hope, by uniting ancient and modern times. We have replaced by the chamber of deputies, those ancient assemblies of the March Field and May Field, and those chambers of the third estate which so often exhibited at once proof of their zeal for the interests of the people, and fidelity and respect for the authority of kings. In thus endeavoring to renew the chain of time which fatal excesses had broken, we effaced from our memory, as we would we might blot out from history, all the evils which have afflicted the country during our absence. Happy to find ourselves again in the bosom of our great family, we could only respond to the love of which we receive so many testimonies by uttering words of peace and consolation. The dearest wish of our heart is that all the French may live like brothers, and that no bitter memory should ever trouble the security which ought to follow the solemn act which we grant them to-day.
Confident in our intentions, strong in our conscience, we engage ourselves before the assembly which listens to us to be faithful to this Constitutional Charter, with the intention of swearing to maintain it with added solemnity before the altars of Him who weighs in the same balance kings and nations.
For these reasons we have voluntarily and by the free exercise of our royal authority granted and do grant, concede and accord, as well for us as for our successors forever, the Constitutional Charter as follows: …
Turgot Prepares Louis XVI for the Resistance to Fiscal Reform and Budgetary Retrenchment
Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot
(1774)
Compiegne, August 24, 1774.
Sire:
Having just come from the private interview with which your Majesty has honored me, still full of the anxiety produced by the immensity of the duties now imposed upon me, agitated by all the feelings excited by the touching kindness with which you have encouraged me, I hasten to convey to you my respectful gratitude and the devotion of my whole life.
Your Majesty has been good enough to permit me to place on record the engagement you have taken upon you to sustain me in the execution of those plans of economy which are at all times, and to-day more than ever, an indispensable necessity. … At this moment, sire, I confine myself to recalling to you these three items:
No bankruptcy.
No increase of taxes.
No loans.
No bankruptcy, either avowed or disguised by illegal reductions.
No increase of taxes; the reason for this lying in the condition of your people, and, still more, in that of your Majesty’s own generous heart.
No loans; because every loan always diminishes the free revenue and necessitates, at the end of a certain time, either bankruptcy or the increase of taxes. In times of peace it is permissible to borrow only in order to liquidate old debts, or in order to redeem other loans contracted on less advantageous terms.
To meet these three points there is but one means. It is to reduce expenditure below the revenue, and sufficiently below it to insure each year a saving of twenty millions, to be applied to redemption of the old debts. Without that, the first gunshot will force the state into bankruptcy.
The question will be asked incredulously, “On what can we retrench?” and each one, speaking for his own department, will maintain that nearly every particular item of expense is indispensable. They will be able to allege very good reasons, but these must all yield to the absolute necessity of economy. …
These are the matters which I have been permitted to recall to your Majesty. You will not forget that in accepting the place of comptroller general I have felt the full value of the confidence with which you honor me; I have felt that you intrust to me the happiness of your people, and, if it be permitted to me to say so, the care of promoting among your people the love of your person and of your authority.
At the same time I feel all the danger to which I expose myself. I foresee that I shall be alone in fighting against abuses of every kind, against the power of those who profit by these abuses, against the crowd of prejudiced people who oppose themselves to all reform, and who are such powerful instruments in the hands of interested parties for perpetuating the disorder. I shall have to struggle even against the natural goodness and generosity of your Majesty, and of the persons who are most dear to you. I shall be feared, hated even, by nearly all the court, by all who solicit favors. They will impute to me all the refusals; they will describe me as a hard man because I shall have advised your Majesty that you ought not to enrich even those that you love at the expense of your people’s subsistence.
And this people, for whom I shall sacrifice myself, are so easily deceived that perhaps I shall encounter their hatred by the very measures I take to defend them against exactions. I shall be calumniated (having, perhaps, appearances against me) in order to deprive me of your Majesty’s confidence. I shall not regret losing a place which I never solicited. I am ready to resign it to your Majesty as soon as I can no longer hope to be useful in it. …
Your Majesty will remember that it is upon the faith of your promises made to me that I charge myself with a burden perhaps beyond my strength, and it is to yourself personally, to the upright man, the just and good man, rather than to the king, that I give myself.
I venture to repeat here what you have already been kind enough to hear and approve of. The affecting kindness with which you condescended to press my hands within your own, as if sealing my devotion, will never be effaced from my memory. It will sustain my courage. It has forever united my personal happiness with the interest, the glory, and the happiness of your Majesty. It is with these sentiments that I am, sire, etc.
Turgot Abolishes the French Guilds
Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot
(1774)
In almost all the towns the exercise of the different arts and trades is concentrated in the hands of a small number of masters, united in corporations, who alone can, to the exclusion of all other citizens, make or sell the articles belonging to their particular industry. Any person who, by inclination or necessity, intends following an art or trade can only do so by acquiring the mastership [i.e., freedom of the corporation] after a probation as long and vexatious as it is superfluous. By having to satisfy repeated exactions, the money he had so much need of in order to start his trade or open his workshop has been consumed in mere waste. …
Citizens of all classes are deprived both of the right to choose the workmen they would employ, and of the advantages they would enjoy from competition operating toward improvements in manufacture and reduction in price. Often one cannot get the simplest work done without its having to go through the hands of several workmen of different corporations, and without enduring the delays, tricks, and exaction which the pretensions of the different corporations, and the caprices of their arbitrary and mercenary directors, demand and encourage. …
Among the infinite number of unreasonable regulations, we find in some corporations that all are excluded from them except the sons of masters, or those who marry the widows of masters. Others reject all those whom they call “strangers,”–that is, those born in another town. In many of them for a young man to be married is enough to exclude him from the apprenticeship, and consequently from the mastership. The spirit of monopoly which has dictated the making of these statutes has been carried out to the excluding of women even from the trades the most suitable to their sex, such as embroidery, which they are forbidden to exercise on their own account. …
God, by giving to man wants, and making his recourse to work necessary to supply them, has made the right to work the property of every man, and this property is the first, the most sacred, the most imprescriptible of all. …
It shall be free to all persons, of whatever quality or condition they may be, even to all foreigners, to undertake and to exercise in all our kingdom, and particularly in our good city of Paris, whatever kind of trade and whatever profession of art or industry may seem good to them; for which purpose we now extinguish and suppress all corporations and communities of merchants and artisans, as well as all masterships and guild directories. We abrogate all privileges, statutes, and regulations of the said corporations, so that none of our subjects shall be troubled in the exercise of his trade or profession by any cause or under any pretext whatever.
William Pitt Gives a Whiggish Defense of American Resistance to Taxation
William Pitt
(1775)
This resistance to your arbitrary system of taxation might have been foreseen; it was obvious from the nature of things and of mankind, and, above all, from the Whiggish spirit flourishing in that country. The spirit which now resists your taxation in America is the same which formerly opposed loans, benevolences, and ship money in England; the same spirit which called all England on its legs, and by the Bill of Rights vindicated the English constitution; the same spirit which established the great, fundamental, essential maxim of your liberties, that no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent.
This glorious spirit of Whiggism animates three millions in America, who prefer poverty with liberty to gilded chains and sordid affluence, and who will die in the defense of their rights as men, as free men. What shall oppose this spirit, aided by the congenial flame glowing in the breast of every Whig in England, to the amount, I hope, of double the American numbers? Ireland they have to a man. In that country, joined as it is with the cause of the colonies, and placed at their head, the distinction I contend for is and must be observed. This country superintends and controls their trade and navigation, but they tax themselves. And this distinction between external and internal control is sacred and insurmountable; it is involved in the abstract nature of things. Property is private, individual, absolute. Trade is an extended and complicated consideration; it reaches as far as ships can sail or winds can blow; it is a great and various machine. To regulate the numberless movements of the several parts and combine them into effect for the good of the whole, requires the superintending wisdom and energy of the supreme power in the empire. But this supreme power has no effect towards internal taxation, for it does not exist in that relation; there is no such thing, no such idea in this constitution, as a supreme power operating upon property. Let this distinction then remain forever ascertained: taxation is theirs, commercial regulation is ours. As an American, I would recognize to England her supreme right of regulating commerce and navigation; as an Englishman by birth and principle, I recognize to the Americans their supreme unalienable right in their property,–a right which they are justified in the defense of to the last extremity. To maintain this principle is the common cause of the Whigs on the other side of the Atlantic and on this. “‘Tis liberty to liberty engaged,” that they will defend themselves, their families, and their country. In this great cause they are immovably allied: it is the alliance of God and nature,–immovable, eternal, fixed as the firmament of heaven.
Arthur Young’s Travels in France on the Eve of the Revolution
Arthur Young
(1787)
October 17, 1787 . … Dined to-day with a party whose conversation was entirely political. Monsieur de Calonne’s Requete au Roi is come over, and all the world are reading and disputing on it. It seems, however, generally agreed that, without exonerating himself from the charge of the agiotage, he has thrown no inconsiderable load on the shoulders of the Archbishop of Toulouse, the present premier, who will be puzzled to get rid of the attack. But both these ministers were condemned on all hands in the lump as being absolutely unequal to the difficulties of so arduous a period. One opinion pervaded the whole company, that they are on the eve of some great revolution in the government: that everything points to it: the confusion in the finances great; with a deficit impossible to provide for without the estates-general of the kingdom, yet no ideas formed of what would be the consequence of their meeting: no minister existing, or to be looked to in or out of power, with such decisive talents as to promise any other remedy than palliative ones: a prince on the throne, with excellent dispositions, but without the resources of a mind that could govern in such a moment without ministers: a court buried in pleasure and dissipation; and adding to the distress instead of endeavouring to be placed in a more independent situation: a great ferment amongst all ranks of men, who are eager for some change, without knowing what to look to or to hope for: and a strong leaven of liberty, increasing every hour since the American revolution–altogether form a combination of circumstances that promise e’er long to ferment into motion if some master hand of very superior talents and inflexible courage is not found at the helm to guide events, instead of being driven by them. It is very remarkable that such conversation never occurs but a bankruptcy is a topic: the curious question on which is, would a bankruptcy occasion a civil war and a total overthrow of the government? The answers that I have received to this question appear to be just: such a measure conducted by a man of abilities, vigour, and firmness would certainly not occasion either one or the other. But the same measure, attempted by a man of a different character, might possibly do both. All agree that the states of the kingdom cannot assemble without more liberty being the consequence; but I meet with so few men that have any just ideas of freedom that I question much the species of this new liberty that is to arise. They know not how to value the privileges of THE PEOPLE: as to the nobility and the clergy, if a revolution added anything to their scale I think it would do more mischief than good. …
October 25, 1787. This great city [Paris] appears to be in many respects the most ineligible and inconvenient for the residence of a person of small fortune of any that I have seen; and vastly inferior to London. The streets are very narrow, and many of them crowded, ninetenths dirty, and all without foot-pavements. Walking, which in London is so pleasant and so clean that ladies do it every day, is here a toil and a fatigue to a man and an impossibility to a well-dressed woman. The coaches are numerous, and, what are much worse, there are an infinity of one-horse cabriolets which are driven by young men of fashion and their imitators, alike fools, with such rapidity as to be real nuisances, and render the streets exceedingly dangerous without an incessant caution. I saw a poor child run over and probably killed, and have been myself many times blackened with the mud of the kennels. This beggarly practice of driving a one-horse booby hutch about the streets of a great capital flows either from poverty or wretched and despicable economy; nor is it possible to speak of it with too much severity. If young noblemen at London were to drive their chaises in streets without foot-ways, as their brethren do at Paris, they would speedily and justly get very well thrashed or rolled in the kennel. This circumstance renders Paris an ineligible residence for persons, particularly families, that cannot afford to keep a coach; a convenience which is as dear as at London. The fiacres, hackney-coaches, are much worse than at that city; and chairs there are none, for they would be driven down in the streets. To this circumstance also it is owing that all persons of small or moderate fortune are forced to dress in black, with black stockings; the dusky hue of this in company is not so disagreeable a circumstance as being too great a distinction; too clear a line drawn in company between a man that has a good fortune and another that has not. With the pride, arrogance, and ill-temper of English wealth this could not be borne; but the prevailing good humour of the French eases all such untoward circumstances. Lodgings are not half so good as at London, yet considerably dearer. If you do not hire a whole suite of rooms at a hotel, you must probably mount three, four, or five pair of stairs, and in general have nothing but a bed-chamber. After the horrid fatigue of the streets, such an elevation is a delectable circumstance. You must search with trouble before you will be lodged in a private family as gentlemen usually are at London, and pay a higher price. Servants’ wages are about the same as at that city. It is to be regretted that Paris should have these disadvantages, for in other respects I take it to be a most eligible residence for such as prefer a great city. The society for a man of letters, or who has any scientific pursuit, cannot be exceeded. The intercourse between such men and the great, which, if it is not upon an equal footing, ought never to exist at all, is reflict. As you read, bear in mind the differing interpretations and how each section supports or detracts from the two interpretations. spectable. Persons of the highest rank pay an attention to science and literature, and emulate the character they confer. I should pity the man who expected, without other advantages of a very different nature, to be well received in a brilliant circle at London because he was a fellow of the Royal Society. But this would not be the case with a member of the Academy of Sciences at Paris; he is sure of a good reception everywhere. Perhaps this contrast depends in a great measure on the difference of the governments of the two countries. Politics are too much attended to in England to allow a due respect to be paid to anything else; and should the French establish a freer government, academicians will not be held in such estimation when rivalled in the public esteem by the orators who hold forth liberty and property in a free parliament.
Condorcet Affirms the Inevitability of Progress
Antoine Nicolas de Condorcet
(1794)
The aim of the book that I have undertaken to write, and what it will prove, is that man by using reason and facts will attain perfection. Nature has set no limits to the perfection of the human faculties. The perfectibility of mankind is truly indefinite; and the progress of this perfectibility, henceforth to be free of all hindrances, will last as long as the globe on which nature has placed us. Doubtless this progress will be more or less rapid, but it will never retrograde, at least as long as the globe occupies its present place in the system of the universe; and unless the general laws that govern this system bring to pass a universal cataclysm, or such changes as will prevent man from maintaining his existence, from using his faculties, and from finding his needed resources. …
Since the period when alphabetical writing flourished in Greece the history of mankind has been linked to the condition of man of our time in the most enlightened countries of Europe by an unbroken chain of facts and observations. The picture of the march and progress of the human mind is now revealed as being truly historical. Philosophy no longer has to guess, no longer has to advance hypothetical theories. It now suffices to assemble and to arrange the facts, and to show the truths that arise from their connection and from their totality. …
If man can predict with almost complete certainty those phenomena whose laws he knows; and if, when he does not know these laws, he can, on the basis of his experience in the past, predict future events with assurance why then should it be regarded as chimerical to trace with a fair degree of accuracy the picture of man’s future on the basis of his history? The sole foundation for belief in the natural sciences is the principle that universal laws, known or unknown, which regulate the universe are necessary and constant. Why then should this principle be less true for the development of the intellectual and moral faculties of man than it is for the other operations of nature? Finally, since beliefs, based on past experience under like conditions, constitute the only rule according to which the wisest men act, why then forbid the philosopher to support his beliefs on the same foundations, as long as he does not attribute to them a certainty not warranted by the number, the constancy, and the accuracy of his observations. …
A Russian Serf Explains the Facts of Life to an Enlightened Russian Nobleman
Alexander Radishchev
(1790)
A few steps from the road I saw a peasant ploughing a field. The weather was hot. I looked at my watch. It was twenty minutes before one. I had set out on Saturday. It was now Sunday. The ploughing peasant, of course, belonged to a landed proprietor, who would not let him pay [dues in money or kind (obrok)]. The peasant was ploughing very carefully. The field, of course, was not part of his master’s land. He turned the plough with astonishing ease.
“God help you,” I said, walking up to the ploughman, who, without stopping, was finishing the furrow he had started. “God help you,” I repeated.
“Thank you, sir,” the ploughman said to me, shaking the earth off the ploughshare and transferring it to a new furrow.
“You must be a Dissenter [Old Believer], since you plough on a Sunday.”
“No, sir, I make the true sign of the cross,” he said, showing me the three fingers together. “And God is merciful and does not bid us starve to death, so long as we have strength and a family.”
“Have you no time to work during the week, then, and can you not have any rest on Sundays, in the hottest part of the day, at that?”
“In a week, sir, there are six days, and we go six times a week to work on the master’s fields; in the evening, if the weather is good, we haul to the master’s house the hay that is left in the woods; and on holidays the women and girls go walking in the woods, looking for mushrooms and berries. God grant,” he continued, making the sign of the cross, “that it rains this evening. If you have peasants of your own, sir, they are praying to God for the same thing.”
“My friend, I have no peasants, and so nobody curses me. Do you have a large family?”
“Three sons and three daughters. The eldest is nine years old.”
“But how do you manage to get food enough, if you have only the holidays free?”
“Not only the holidays: the nights are ours, too. If a fellow isn’t lazy, he won’t starve to death. You see, one horse is resting; and when this one gets tired, I’ll take the other; so the work gets done.”
“Do you work the same way for your master?”
“No, sir, it would be a sin to work the same way. On his fields there are a hundred hands for one mouth, while I have two for seven mouths: you can figure it out for yourself. No matter how hard you work for the master, no one will thank you for it. The master will not pay our head [soul] tax; but, though he doesn’t pay it, he doesn’t demand one sheep, one hen, or any linen or butter the less. The peasants are much better off where the landlord lets them pay a commutation tax [obrok] without the interference of the steward. It is true that sometimes even good masters take more than three rubles a man; but even that’s better than having to work on the master’s fields. Nowadays it’s getting to be the custom to let [lease] villages to [noble] tenants, as they call it. But we call it putting our heads in a noose. A landless tenant skins us peasants alive; even the best ones don’t leave us any time for ourselves. In the winter he won’t let us do any carting of goods and won’t let us go into town to work; all our work has to be for him, because he pays our head tax. It is an invention of the Devil to turn your peasants over to work for a stranger. You can make a complaint against a bad steward, but to whom can you complain against a bad tenant?”
“My friend, you are mistaken; the laws forbid them to torture people.”
“Torture? That’s true; but all the same, sir, you would not want to be in my hide.” Meanwhile the ploughman hitched up the other horse to the plough and bade me good-bye as he began a new furrow.
The words of this peasant awakened in me a multitude of thoughts. I thought especially of the inequality of treatment within the peasant class. I compared the [state] peasants with the [proprietary] peasants. They both live in villages; but the former pay a fixed sum, while the latter must be prepared to pay whatever their master demands. The former are judged by their equals; the latter are dead to the law, except, perhaps, in criminal cases. A member of society becomes known to the government protecting him, only when he breaks the social bonds, when he becomes a criminal! This thought made my blood boil.
The Federalist Explains the Necessity for the Separation of Government Power
James Madison
(1788)
To what expedient then shall we finally resort for maintaining in practice the necessary partition of power among the several departments, as laid down in the constitution? The only answer that can be given is, that as all these exterior provisions are found to be inadequate, the defect must be supplied, by so contriving the interior structure of the government, as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places. …
… [T]he great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department, the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional right of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
This policy of supplying by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power; where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other; that the private interest of every individual, may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the state.
The Third Estate Speaks: The Cahier de Doleances of the Carcassonne
Commissioners of Third Estate of the Carcassonne Elect Oral District to the Estates General
(1789)
The third estate of the electoral district of Carcassonne, desiring to give to a beloved monarch, and one so worthy of our affection, the most unmistakable proof of its love and respect, of its gratitude and fidelity, desiring to cooperate with the whole nation in repairing the successive misfortunes which have overwhelmed it, and with the hope of reviving once more its ancient glory, declares that the happiness of the nation must, in their opinion, depend upon that of its king, upon the stability of the monarchy, and upon the preservation of the orders which compose it and of the fundamental laws which govern it.
Considering, too, that a holy respect for religion, morality, civil liberty, and the rights of property, a speedy return to true principles, a careful selection and due measure in the matter of the taxes, a strict proportionality in their assessment, a persistent economy in government expenditures, and indispensable reforms in all branches of the administration, are the best and perhaps the only means of perpetuating the existence of the monarchy;
The third estate of the electoral district of Carcassonne very humbly petitions his Majesty to take into consideration these several matters, weigh them in his wisdom, and permit his people to enjoy, as soon as may be, fresh proofs of that benevolence which he has never ceased to exhibit toward them and which is dictated by his affection for them.
In view of the obligation imposed by his Majesty’s command that the third estate of this district should confide to his paternal ear the causes of the ills which afflict them and the means by which they may be remedied or moderated, they believe that they are fulfilling the duties of faithful subjects and zealous citizens in submitting to the consideration of the nation, and to the sentiments of justice and affection which his Majesty entertains for his subjects, the following:
1. Public worship should be confined to the Roman Catholic apostolic religion, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship; its extension should be promoted and the most efficient measures taken to reestablish the discipline of the Church and increase its prestige.
2. Nevertheless the civil rights of those of the king’s subjects who are not Catholics should be confirmed, and they should be admitted to positions and offices in the public administration, without however extending this privilege–which reason and humanity alike demand for them–to judicial or police functions or to those of public instruction.
3. The nation should consider some means of abolishing the annates and all other dues paid to the holy see, to the prejudice and against the protests of the whole French people. …
[The holding of multiple church positions should be prohibited, monasteries reduced in numbers, and holidays suppressed or decreased.]
7. The rights which have just been restored to the nation should be consecrated as fundamental principles of the monarchy, and their perpetual and unalterable enjoyment should be assured by a solemn law, which should so define the rights both of the monarch and of the people that their violation shall hereafter be impossible.
8. Among these rights the following should be especially noted: the nation should hereafter be subject only to such laws and taxes as it shall itself freely ratify.
9. The meetings of the Estates General of the kingdom should be fixed for definite periods, and the subsidies judged necessary for the support of the state and the public service should be voted for no longer a period than to the close of the year in which the next meeting of the Estates General is to occur.
10. In order to assure to the third estate the influence to which it is entitled in view of the number of its members, the amount of its contributions to the public treasury, and the manifold interests which it has to defend or promote in the national assemblies, its votes in the assembly should be taken and counted by head.
11. No order, corporation, or individual citizen may lay claim to any pecuniary exemptions. … All taxes should be assessed on the same system throughout the nation.
12. The due exacted from commoners holding fiefs should be abolished, and also the general or particular regulations which exclude members of the third estate from certain positions, offices, and ranks which have hitherto been bestowed on nobles either for life or hereditarily. A law should be passed declaring members of the third estate qualified to fill all such offices for which they are judged to be personally fitted.
13. Since individual liberty is intimately associated with national liberty, his Majesty is hereby petitioned not to permit that it be hereafter interfered with by arbitrary orders for imprisonment. …
14. Freedom should be granted also to the press, which should however be subjected, by means of strict regulations, to the principles of religion, morality, and public decency. …
60. The third estate of the district of Carcassonne places its trust, for the rest, in the zeal, patriotism, honor, and probity of its deputies in the National Assembly in all matters which may accord with the beneficent views of his Majesty, the welfare of the kingdom, the union of the three estates, and the public peace.
A Royalist Perspective on The Opening of the Estates General
Madame Jeanne Louis Genet de Campan
(1789)
The Estates General opened May 4 [1789]. For the last time the queen appeared in royal magnificence. … The first session of the Estates was held next day. The king delivered his address with assurance and dignity. The queen told me that he gave the matter much attention, and rehearsed his speech frequently in order to be quite master of the intonations of his voice. His Majesty gave public indications of his attachment and deference for the queen, who was applauded; but it was easy to see that the applause was really meant for the king alone.
From the very early sessions it was clear that Mirabeau would prove very dangerous to the government. It is alleged that he revealed at this time to the king, and more particularly to the queen, a part of the plans he had in mind, and the conditions upon which he would abandon them. He had already exhibited the weapons with which his eloquence and audacity furnished him, in order that he might open negotiations with the party he proposed to attack. This man played at revolution in order to gain a fortune. The queen told me at this time that he asked for an embassy,–Constantinople, if I remember rightly. He was refused with that proper contempt which vice inspires, but which policy would doubtless best have disguised, if the future could have been foreseen.
The general enthusiasm which prevailed during the early sessions of the Assembly, the discussions among the deputies of the third estate and nobility, and even of the clergy, filled their Majesties and those attached to the cause of monarchy with increasing alarm. … The deputies of the third estate arrived at Versailles with the deepest prejudices against the court. The wicked sayings of Paris never fail to spread throughout the provinces. The deputies believed that the king indulged in the pleasures of the table to a shameful excess. They were persuaded that the queen exhausted the treasury of the state to gratify the most unreasonable luxury.
Almost all wished to visit the Little Trianon.[1] The extreme simplicity of this pleasure house did not correspond with their ideas. Some insisted that they be shown even the smallest closets, on the ground that some richly furnished apartments were being concealed from them. At last they designated one which they declared was said to be decorated throughout with diamonds and twisted columns set with sapphires and rubies. The queen could not get these silly ideas out of her head and told the king about them. He thought from the description of the room furnished to the guards in the Trianon, that the deputies had in mind the decoration of imitation diamonds in the theater at Fontainebleau constructed in Louis XV’s reign.
[1] A simple little pleasure house in a secluded part of the gardens at Versailles, much beloved by the queen.
An English Commentator Reports on the Opening of the Estates General
Arthur Young
(1789)
The king, court, nobility, clergy, army, and parliament [parlements] are nearly in the same situation. All these consider with equal dread the ideas of liberty now afloat, except the first, who, for reasons obvious to those who know his character, troubles himself little, even with circumstances that concern his power the most intimately. …
The business going forward at present in the pamphlet shops of Paris is incredible. I went to the Palais Royal to see what new things were published, and to procure a catalogue of all. Every hour produces something new. Thirteen came out to-day, sixteen yesterday, and ninety-two last week.
Nineteen-twentieths of these productions are in favor of liberty, and commonly violent against the clergy and the nobility. I have to-day bespoke many of this description that have reputation; but inquiring for such as had appeared on the other side of the question, to my astonishment I find there are but two or three that have merit enough to be known.
But the coffee-houses in the Palais Royal present yet more singular and astonishing spectacles: they are not only crowded within, but other expectant crowds are at the doors and windows, listening a gorge deploye [with gaping mouths] to certain orators, who from chairs or tables harangue each his little audience. The eagerness with which they are heard, and the thunder of applause they receive for every sentiment of more than common hardiness or violence against the present government, cannot easily be imagined. I am all amazement at the ministry permitting such nests and hotbeds of sedition and revolt, which disseminate amongst the people every hour principles that by and by must be opposed with vigor; and therefore it seems little short of madness to allow the propagation at present.
Everything conspires to render the present period in France critical. The want of bread is terrible; accounts arrive every moment from the provinces of riots and disturbances, and calling in the military to preserve the peace of the markets. …
June 15. This has been a rich day, and such a one as ten years ago none could believe would ever arrive in France; a very important debate being expected on what, in our House of Commons, would be termed the state of the nation. My friend, Monsieur Lazowski, and myself were at Versailles at eight in the morning. We went immediately to the hall of the states to secure good seats in the gallery; we found some deputies already there, and a pretty numerous audience collected. The room is too large; none but stentorian lungs or the finest, clearest voices can be heard. However, the very size of the apartment, which admits two thousand people, gave a dignity to the scene. It was indeed an interesting one. The spectacle of the representatives of twenty-five millions of people, just emerging from the evils of two hundred years of arbitrary power, and rising to the blessings of a freer constitution, assembled with open doors under the eye of the public, was framed to call into animated feelings every latent spark, every emotion of a liberal bosom; to banish whatever ideas might intrude of their being a people too often hostile to my own country, and to dwell with pleasure on the glorious idea of happiness to a great nation.
Monsieur l’Abbe Sieyes opened the debate. He is one of the most zealous sticklers for the popular cause; carries his ideas not to a regulation of the present government, which he thinks too bad to be regulated at all, but wishes to see it absolutely overturned,–being in fact a violent republican: this is the character he commonly bears, and in his pamphlets he seems pretty much to justify such an idea. He speaks ungracefully and uneloquently, but logically,–or rather reads so, for he read his speech, which was prepared. His motion, or rather string of motions, was to declare themselves the representatives known and verified of the French nation, admitting the right of all absent deputies [the nobility and clergy] to be received among them on the verification of their powers.
Monsieur de Mirabeau spoke without notes for near an hour, with a warmth, animation, and eloquence that entitles him to the reputation of an undoubted orator. He opposed the words “known” and “verified,” in the proposition of Abbe Sieyes, with great force of reasoning, and proposed in lieu that they should declare themselves simply Representatives du peuple Francais [Representatives of the French People]; that no veto should exist against their resolves in any other assembly; that all [existing] taxes are illegal, but should be granted during the present sessions of the states, and no longer; that the debt of the king should become the debt of the nation, and be secured on funds accordingly. Monsieur de Mirabeau was well heard, and his proposition much applauded.
In regard to their general method of proceeding, there are two circumstances in which they are very deficient. The spectators in the galleries are allowed to interfere in the debates by clapping their hands, and other noisy expressions of approbation: this is grossly indecent; it is also dangerous; for, if they are permitted to express approbation, they are, by parity of reason, allowed expressions of dissent, and they may hiss as well as clap; which it is said they have sometimes done: this would be to overrule the debate and influence the deliberations.
Another circumstance is the want of order among themselves. More than once to-day there were a hundred members on their legs at a time, and Monsieur Bailly* absolutely without power to keep order.
[1] The presiding officer
“What Is the Third Estate?”
Abbe Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes
(1789)
What is necessary that a nation should subsist and prosper? Individual effort and public functions.
All individual efforts may be included in four classes: 1. Since the earth and the waters furnish crude products for the needs of man, the first class, in logical sequence, will be that of all families which devote themselves to agricultural labor. 2. Between the first sale of products and their consumption or use, a new manipulation, more or less repeated, adds to these products a second value more or less composite. In this manner human industry succeeds in perfecting the gifts of nature, and the crude product increases two-fold, ten-fold, one hundred-fold in value. Such are the efforts of the second class. 3. Between production and consumption, as well as between the various stages of production, a group of intermediary agents establish themselves, useful both to producers and consumers; these are the merchants and brokers: the brokers who, comparing incessantly the demands of time and place, speculate upon the profit of retention and transportation; merchants who are charged with distribution, in the last analysis, either at wholesale or at retail. This species of utility characterizes the third class. 4. Outside of these three classes of productive and useful citizens, who are occupied with real objects of consumption and use, there is also need in a society of a series of efforts and pains, whose objects are directly useful or agreeable to the individual. This fourth class embraces all those who stand between the most distinguished and liberal professions and the less esteemed services of domestics.
Such are the efforts which sustain society. Who puts them forth? The Third Estate.
Public functions may be classified equally well, in the present state of affairs, under four recognized heads; the sword, the robe, the church and the administration. It would be superfluous to take them up one by one, for the purpose of showing that everywhere the Third Estate attends to nineteen-twentieths of them, with this distinction; that it is laden with all that which is really painful, with all the burdens which the privileged classes refuse to carry. Do we give the Third Estate credit for this? That this might come about, it would be necessary that the Third Estate should refuse to fill these places, or that it should be less ready to exercise their functions. The facts are well known. Meanwhile they have dared to impose a prohibition upon the order of the Third Estate. They have said to it: “Whatever may be your services, whatever may be your abilities, you shall go thus far; you may not pass beyond!” Certain rare exceptions, properly regarded, are but a mockery, and the terms which are indulged in on such occasions, one insult the more.
If this exclusion is a social crime against the Third Estate; if it is a veritable act of hostility, could it perhaps be said that it is useful to the public weal? Alas! who is ignorant of the effects of monopoly? If it discourages those whom it rejects, is it not well known that it tends to render less able those whom it favors? Is it not understood that every employment from which free competition is removed, becomes dearer and less effective?
In setting aside any function whatsoever to serve as an appanage for a distinct class among citizens, is it not to be observed that it is no longer the man alone who does the work that it is necessary to reward, but all the unemployed members of that same caste, and also the entire families of those who are employed as well as those who are not? Is it not to be remarked that since the government has become the patrimony of a particular class, it has been distended beyond all measure; places have been created, not on account of the necessities of the governed, but in the interests of the governing, etc., etc.? Has not attention been called to the fact that this order of things, which is basely and–I even presume to say–beastly respectable with us, when we find it in reading the History of Ancient Egypt or the accounts of Voyages to the Indies,[1] is despicable, monstrous, destructive of all industry, the enemy of social progress; above all degrading to the human race in general, and particularly intolerable to Europeans, etc., etc.? But I must leave these considerations, which, if they increase the importance of the subject and throw light upon it, perhaps, along with the new light, slacken our progress.
It suffices here to have made it clear that the pretended utility of a privileged order for the public service is nothing more than a chimera; that with it all that which is burdensome in this service is performed by the Third Estate; that without it the superior places would be infinitely better filled; that they naturally ought to be the lot and the recompense of ability and recognized services, and that if privileged persons have come to usurp all the lucrative and honorable posts, it is a hateful injustice to the rank and file of citizens and at the same time a treason to the public weal.
Who then shall dare to say that the Third Estate has not within itself all that is necessary for the information of a complete nation? It is the strong and robust man who has one arm still shackled. If the privileged order should be abolished, the nation would be nothing less, but something more. Therefore, what is the Third Estate? Everything; but an everything shackled and oppressed. What would it be without the privileged order? Everything, but an everything free and flourishing. Nothing can succeed without it, everything would be infinitely better without the others.
It is not sufficient to show that privileged persons, far from being useful to the nation, cannot but enfeeble and injure it; it is necessary to prove further that the noble order does not enter at all into the social organization; that it may indeed be a burden upon the nation, but that it cannot of itself constitute a nation.
In the first place, it is not possible in the number of all the elementary parts of a nation to find a place for thecaste of nobles. I know that there are individuals in great number whom infirmities, incapacity, incurable laziness, or the weight of bad habits render strangers to the labors of society. The exception and the abuse are everywhere found beside the rule. But it will be admitted that the less there are of these abuses, the better it will be for the State. The worst possible arrangement of all would be where not alone isolated individuals, but a whole class of citizens should take pride in remaining motionless in the midst of the general movement, and should consume the best part of the product without bearing any part in its production. Such a class is surely estranged to the nation by its indolence.
The noble order is not less estranged from the generality of us by its civil and political prerogatives.
What is a nation? A body of associates, living under a common law, and represented by the same legislature, etc.
Is it not evident that the noble order has privileges and expenditures which it dares to call its rights, but which are apart from the rights of the great body of citizens? It departs there from the common order, from the common law. So its civil rights make of it an isolated people in the midst of the great nation. This is trulyimperium in imperio [a state within the state].
In regard to its political rights, these also it exercises apart. It has its special representatives, which are not charged with securing the interests of the people. The body of its deputies sit apart; and when it is assembled in the same hall with the deputies of simple citizens, it is nonetheless true that its representation is essentially distinct and separate: it is a stranger to the nation, in the first place, by its origin, since its commission is not derived from the people; then by its object, which consists of defending not the general, but the particular interest.
The Third Estate embraces then all that which belongs to the nation; and all that which is not the Third Estate, cannot be regarded as being of the nation. What is the Third Estate? It is the whole.
[1] The reference here is to a widely read book of the time describing the caste system in India.
The Taking of the Bastille and Its Aftermath: An English Perspective
Edward Rigby
(1789)
July 14. A Canadian Frenchman, whom we found in the crowd and who spoke good English, was the first who intimated to us that it had been resolved to attack the Bastille. We smiled at the gentleman, and suggested the improbability of undisciplined citizens taking a citadel which had held out against the most experienced troops in Europe; little thinking it would be actually in the hands of the people before night. From the commencement of the struggle on Sunday evening there had been scarcely any time in which the firing of guns had not been heard in all quarters of the city, and, as this was principally produced by exercising the citizens in the use of the musket, in trying cannon, etc., it excited, except at first, but little alarm. Another sound equally incessant was produced by the ringing of bells to call together the inhabitants in different parts of the city. These joint sounds being constantly iterated, the additional noise produced by the attack on the Bastille was so little distinguished that I doubt not it had begun a considerable time, and even been completed, before it was known to many thousands of the inhabitants as well as to ourselves.
We ran to the end of the Rue St. Honore. We here soon perceived an immense crowd proceeding towards the Palais Royal with acceleration of an extraordinary kind, but which sufficiently indicated a joyful event, and, as it approached we saw a flag, some large keys, and a paper elevated on a pole above the crowd, in which was inscribed “La Bastille est prise et les portes sont ouvertes.” ["The Bastille is taken and the gates are open."] The intelligence of this extraordinary event thus communicated, produced an impression upon the crowd really indescribable. Asudden burst of the most frantic joy instantaneously took place; every possible mode in which the most rapturous feelings of joy could be expressed, were everywhere exhibited. Shouts and shrieks, leaping and embracing, laughter and tears, every sound and every gesture, including even what approached to nervous and hysterical affection, manifested, among the promiscuous crowd, such an instantaneous and unanimous emotion of extreme gladness as I should suppose was never before experienced by human beings. …
The crowd passed on to the Palais Royal, and in a few minutes another succeeded. Its approach was also announced by loud and triumphant acclamations, but, as it came nearer, we soon perceived a different character, as though bearing additional testimony to the fact reported by the first crowd, the impression by it on the people was of a very different kind. Adeep and hollow murmur at once pervaded them, their countenances expressing amazement mingled with alarm. We could not at first explain these circumstances; but as we pressed more to the centre of the crowd we suddenly partook of the general sensation, for we then, and not till then, perceived two bloody heads raised on pikes, which were said to be the heads of the Marquis de Launay, Governor of the Bastille, and of Monsieur Flesselles, Prevot des Marchands. It was a chilling and a horrid sight! An idea of savageness and ferocity was impressed on the spectators, and instantly checked those emotions of joy which had before prevailed. Many others, as well as ourselves, shocked and disgusted at this scene, retired immediately from the streets. …
The night approached; the crowd without continued agitated. Reports of a meditated attack upon the city that night by a formidable army under the command of the Count d’Artois and the Marechal Broglie were in circulation, and gained such credit as to induce the inhabitants to take measures for opposing them. Trees were cut down and thrown across the principal approaches to the city; the streets were impaved, and the stones carried to the tops of houses which fronted the streets through which the troops might pass (for the fate of Pyrrhus was not unknown to the French) and the windows in most parts of the city were illuminated. The night passed with various indications of alarm; guns were firing continually; the tocsin sounded unceasingly; groups of agitated citizens passed hastily along, and parties of the Milice Bourgeoise[citizens' militia] (for such was the name already assumed by those who had taken arms the day before) paraded the streets. …
I went (July 15) and was led by the sound of an approaching crowd towards the end of the Rue St. Honore, and there I witnessed a most affecting spectacle. The Bastille had been scarcely entered and the opposition subdued, when an eager search began to find out and liberate every unhappy captive immured within its walls. Two wretched victims of the detestable tyranny of the old Government had just been discovered and taken from some of the most obscure dungeons of this horrid castle, and were at this time conducted by the crowd to the Palais Royal. One of these was a little feeble old man, I could not learn his history; he exhibited an appearance of childishness and fatuity; he tottered as he walked, and his countenance exhibited little more than the smile of an idiot. … The other was a tall and rather robust old man; his countenance and whole figure interesting in the highest degree; he walked upright, with a firm and steady gait; his hands were folded and turned upwards, he looked but little at the crowd; the character of his face seemed a mixture of surprise and alarm, for he knew not whither they were leading him, he knew not what fate awaited him; his face was directed towards the sky, but his eyes were but little open. … He had a remarkably high forehead, which, with the crown of his head, was completely bald; but he had a very long beard, and on the back of his head the hair was unusually abundant. … His dress was an old greasy reddish tunic; the colour and the form of the garb were probably some indication of what his rank had been; for we afterwards learned that he was a Count d’Auche, that he had been a major of cavalry, and a young man of some talent, and that the offence for which he had sustained this long imprisonment had been his having written a pamphlet against the Jesuits. Every one who witnessed this scene probably felt as I did, an emotion which partook of horror and detestation of the Government which could so obdurately as well as unjustly expose human beings to such sufferings; and of pity for the miserable individuals before us. …
It had been reported that the King was to come to Paris on the Thursday (July 16), and great crowds filled the streets through which it was expected he would pass: but his coming did not take place till the Friday (July 17). We were very desirous of witnessing the spectacle of the monarch thus, I might almost say, led captive. The spectacle was very interesting, though not from the artificial circumstances which have usually given distinction to royal processions. The impression made on the spectator was not the effect of any adventitious splendour of costly robes or glittering ornaments–the appearance of the King was simple, if not humble; the man was no longer concealed in the dazzling radiance of the sovereign. … The streets were lined with the armed bourgeois, three deep–forming a line, as we were assured, of several miles extent. The procession began to pass the place where we were at a quarter past three. The first who appeared were the city officers and the police guards; some women followed them, carrying green branches of trees which were fancifully decorated; then more officers; then the Prevot des Marchands and different members of the city magistracy. Many of the armed bourgeois followed on horseback; then some of the King’s officers, some on horseback and some on foot; then followed the whole body of the Etats Generaux [Estates General] on foot, the noblesse, clergy, and Tiers-Etats [Third Estate], each in their peculiar dresses. That of the noblesse was very beautiful; they wore a peculiar kind of hat with large white feathers, and many of them were tall, elegant young men. The clergy, especially the bishops and some of the higher orders, were most superbly dressed; many of them in lawn dresses, with pink scarfs and massive crosses of gold hanging before them. The dress of the Tiers-Etats was very ordinary, even worse than that of the inferior order of gownsmen at the English universities. More of the King’s officers followed; then the King in a large plain coach with eight horses. After this more bourgeois; then another coach and eight horses with other officers of state; than an immense number of the bourgeois, there having been, it was said, two hundred thousand of them in arms. The countenance of the King was little marked with sensibility, and his general appearance by no means indicated alarm. He was accustomed to throw his head very much back on his shoulders, which, by obliging him to look upwards, gave a kind of stupid character to his countenance by increasing the apparent breadth of his face, by preventing that variation of expression which is produced by looking about. He received neither marks of applause nor insult from the populace, unless their silence could be construed into a negative sort of disrespect. Nor were any insults shown to the noblesse or clergy, except in the instance of the Archbishop of Paris, a very tall thin man. He was very much hissed, the popular clamour having been excited against him by a story circulated of his having encouraged the King to use strong measures against the people, and of his attempting to make an impression on the people by a superstitious exposure of a crucifix. He looked a good deal agitated, and whether he had a leaden eye or not I know not, but it certainly loved the ground. The warm and enthusiastic applause of the people was reserved for the Tiers-Etat. … Vivent les Tiers-Etats! Vive la Liberte! ["Long live the Third Estate! Long live liberty!] were loudly iterated as they passed. …
On the Saturday (July 18) we visited more of the public places, but the most interesting object, and which attracted the greatest number of spectators, was the Bastille. We found two hundred workmen busily employed in the destruction of this castle of despotism. We saw the battlements tumble down amidst the applauding shouts of the people. I observed a number of artists taking drawings of what from this time was to have no existence but on paper. …
And this reminds me of our having a second time seen the other prisoner, the feeble old man. He was placed conspicuously at a window opposite the house where we saw the King pass, and at that time he was brought forward and made to wave his hat, having a three coloured cockade on it.
Popular Revolution: The Women of Paris March on Versailles
Joseph Weber et al.
(1789)
The March to Versailles
(a) On Sunday, October 4, the people resorted to acts of violence in the public promenades against officers of the army and other individuals who were pointed out to them as aristocrats. There was in Paris an extreme agitation. The symptoms of a violent insurrection were alarmingly manifest in the evening. Monday, the fifth, as early as morning, one saw women, a species of furies, running the streets, crying out that there was no bread at the baker’s. They were soon joined by a considerable number of men in the Place de l’Hotel de Ville. Their first operation was to hang on a lamp-post a baker accused of having sold bread under weight. This man was saved by M. De Gouvion, a major of the national guard. These maniacs wanted to get into the town hall; there they turned the papers in some of the offices topsy-turvy, threatening to set fire to them; but they were prevented from executing their project. They loaded the most atrocious insults on MM. Bailly, de La Fayette, and the members of the commune; and this circumstance proves better than any amount of reasoning that the authorities who then governed Paris had no connection with the insurgents who directed this disorder.
(b) [Maillard] was occupied with a crowd of women … he took away their torches, and nearly lost his life in thus opposing their project. He told them that they could go in a deputation to the commune to demand justice and present their situation, which was that all demanded bread. But they replied that the commune was made up of bad citizens, all deserving to be hanged to the lamp-post, MM. Bailly and La Fayette first of all … these women would not listen to reason, and after having put in ruin the Hotel de Ville, they wanted to go to the National Assembly to find out what had been decreed previous to this day of the fifth of October. … [Maillard secured] a drum at the door of the Hotel de Ville, where the women had already assembled in great numbers. Detachments of them departed for various districts to recruit other women, to whom they gave rendezvous at the Place Louis XV. Maillard saw several men place themselves at their head, and make to them harangues calculated to excite sedition … they took the route to Versailles, having before them eight or ten drummers. The women at that time might have numbered six or seven thousand.
At Versailles
(c) They [the mob of women] consented to do what he [Maillard] wished. In consequence the cannons were placed behind them and the said women were invited to sing Vive Henri IV! while entering Versailles and to cry “Long live the King!” This they ceaselessly did in the midst of the people of the city, who awaited them, crying, “Long live our Parisiennes!” They arrived at the door of the National Assembly. …
After some debating among these women, fifteen were found to enter with him to the bar of the National Assembly. … He asked the president, M. Mounier, for permission to speak. This being accorded him, he said that two or three persons whom they had encountered on the way, and who were riding in a carriage from the court, had told him that an abbe attached to the Assembly had given a miller two hundred livres to stop making flour, and had promised him a like sum every week. The National Assembly vigorously demanded his name, but Maillard was unable to give it. … The Assembly still persisting in its desire to know the name of the man denounced, M. de Robespierre, deputy from Artois, took the floor and said that … the Abbe Gregoire could throw some light on the subject. … Maillard then asked for the floor and said it was also essential that they end the disorder and uncertainty which had spread through the capital upon the arrival of the regiment of Flanders in Versailles. This regiment should be sent away because the citizens feared that they would start a revolution. M. Mounier replied that they would inform the king of this in the evening when he returned from the hunt, which was where he was said to be.
(d) Maillard and the women who accompanied him appeared to be drunk. “Where is our Comte de Mirabeau?” these women asked repeatedly. “We want to see our Comte de Mirabeau!” Some of them showed a piece of black and moldy bread and added, “We will make the Austrian [Marie Antoinette] swallow it and we will cut her throat.” The number of women gradually increased. They entered pell-mell into the seats of the deputies and carried on loud conversations with those in the tribunes. Some surrounded the desk of the secretaries, others the chair of the president. They obliged the president and several of the deputies to receive their grimy and unpleasant kisses.
(e) After the return of the king to the palace, several gardes du corps [members of the palace guard] and other persons in service at the court, who had been searching for the king in all directions, found themselves in the grand avenue in the midst of these brigands of both sexes, and were assailed with insults and musket shots. Several balls fired at them struck the walls of the hall of the National Assembly.
The insults and indignities, together with the musket shots fired by the first column of brigands, had given just cause for uneasiness at the court. The king’s guard, the regiment of Flanders, and the national guard of Versailles were ordered to take to arms. The guards at the gate closed the grills, and the king’s guards, stationed outside, received orders not to touch their sabers or pistols, and to avoid everything that might irritate the people. The gardes du corps conformed to this order with such resignation that they could have been peaceably massacred one after the other if only their enemies had dared to attempt it.
(f) A deputation of eight women was introduced into the palace. They were conducted to M. de Saint-Priest, the minister of Paris, of whom they demanded bread. “When you had only one king,” dryly replied Saint-Priest, “you did not lack for bread; now that you have twelve hundred, go ask them for it.” The women were then admitted to the council room; they repeated to the king the request they had proffered to M. de Saint-Priest. “You should know my benevolence,” replied the king. “I am going to order that all the bread in Versailles be brought and given to you.” This response appeared to satisfy these women. Most of them were there in good faith, knowing nothing of the projects of the conspirators. Forcibly dragged to Versailles, they had had it dinned into their ears that the people were dying of hunger and that the only means of ending the famine was to address themselves to the king and the National Assembly. They believed they were fulfilling the purpose of their expedition in obtaining a decree on sustenance from the Assembly, and having it sanctioned by the king. These women, enchanted with the way they had been received, left the council room, crying, “Long live the King! Long live the gardes du corps! “
(g) The people, who had given quarter to the gardes du corps, did not, for all that, lose sight of the principal object of their enterprise. They demanded, with shrieks, that the king come to Paris; they said that if the royal family would come to Paris to live there would be no lack of provisions. M. de La Fayette seconded this desire with all his might in the council which was then held in the presence of Their Majesties. Finally, the king, fatigued, solicited, and pressed by all, gave his word that he would depart at midday. This promise flew from mouth to mouth; the acclamations of the people and a fusillade of musketry were the results.
His Majesty appeared then for the second time on the balcony to confirm to the people the promise he had just given to M. de La Fayette. At this second appearance, the joy of the populace was unrestrained. Avoice demanded “the queen on the balcony.” This princess, who was never greater nor more magnanimous than at moments when danger was most imminent, unhesitatingly presented herself on the balcony, holding M. le Dauphin by one hand and Madame Royale by the other. At that a voice cried out, “No children!” The queen, by a backward movement of her arms, pushed the children back into the room, and remained alone on the balcony, folding her hands on her breast, with a countenance showing calmness, nobility, and dignity impossible to describe, and seemed thus to wait for death. This act of resignation astonished the assassins so much and inspired so much admiration in the coarse people that a general clapping of hands and cries of “Bravo! Long live the queen!” repeated on all sides, disconcerted the malevolent. I saw, however, one of these madmen aim at the queen, and his neighbor knock down the barrel of the musket with a blow of his hand, nearly massacring this brigand who was doubtless one of those who had made the irruption of the morning.
The Return to Paris
(h) One saw first the mass of the Parisian troops file by. Each soldier carried a loaf on the end of his bayonet. Then came the fishwives, drunk with fury, joy and wine, holding branches of trees ornamented with ribbons, sitting astride the cannon, mounted on the horses of the gardes du corps, and wearing their hats. Some disported cuirasses before and behind, and others were armed with sabers and muskets. They were accompanied by the multitude of brigands and Paris laborers. … They halted from time to time to fire new salvos, while the fishwives descended from their horses and cannon to march around the carriage of the king. They embraced the soldiers and roared out songs to the refrain of “Here is the baker, the baker’s wife, and the baker’s little boy!” The horror of a cold, somber, rainy day; the infamous militia splattering through the mud; the harpies, monsters with human faces; the captive monarch and his family ignominiously dragged along surrounded by guards; all formed such a frightful spectacle, such a mixture of shame and anguish, that to this very day I cannot think of it without my senses being completely overwhelmed.
At times the queen was in a state of passive endurance difficult to describe. Her son was on her knees; he suffered hunger and asked for food. Unable to fulfill his desires, Marie Antoinette pressed him to her heart, weeping. She exhorted him to suffer in silence. The young prince became resigned. …
(i) As soon as the royal family entered the Hotel de Ville, the king had to listen to two harangues by M. Bailly, and to denunciations against his ministers. Then an official report of the sitting was drawn up and publicly read by M. Bailly. But as it cited some words of the king’s discourse inexactly, the queen interrupted him with the presence of mind which was one of the fine traits of her character. He had forgotten one of the most touching parts of the discourse of the king. The queen recalled to him gracefully that His Majesty had said, “I have relied upon the attachment and fidelity of my people, and have placed myself in the midst of my subjects with complete confidence.” …
After this the family re-entered the carriage in the midst of acclamations and betook themselves, with a part of the national guard, to the palace of the Tuileries. Monsieur and Madame went to the Luxembourg.
(j) The Comte de Mirabeau announced [to the Assembly] that the king was about to depart for Paris. In eagerness to hold their sessions in the midst of the tumult of the capital, they declared themselves inseparable from the monarch, and carried to him this declaration as a proof of their zeal for his interests. In reality, it was an express approbation of the violation of his liberty.
The Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen
National Assembly of France
(1789)
The representatives of the French people, organized as a National Assembly, believing that the ignorance, neglect, or contempt of the rights of man are the sole cause of public calamities and of the corruption of governments, have determined to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of man, in order that this declaration, being constantly before all the members of the social body, shall remind them continually of their rights and duties; in order that the acts of the legislative power, as well as those of the executive power, may be compared at any moment with the objects and purposes of all political institutions and may thus be more respected; and, lastly, in order that the grievances of the citizens, based hereafter upon simple and incontestable principles, shall tend to the maintenance of the constitution and redound to the happiness of all. Therefore the National Assembly recognizes and proclaims, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man and of the citizen:
ARTICLE 1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.
2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.
3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.
4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.
5. Law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society. Nothing may be prevented which is not forbidden by law, and no one may be forced to do anything not provided for by law.
6. Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its formation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations, according to their abilities, and without distinction except that of their virtues and talents.
7. No person shall be accused, arrested, or imprisoned except in the cases and according to the forms prescribed by law. Any one soliciting, transmitting, executing, or causing to be executed, any arbitrary order, shall be punished. But any citizen summoned or arrested in virtue of the law shall submit without delay, as resistance constitutes an offense.
8. The law shall provide for such punishments only as are strictly and obviously necessary, and no one shall suffer punishment except it be legally inflicted in virtue of a law passed and promulgated before the commission of the offense.
9. As all persons are held innocent until they shall have been declared guilty, if arrest shall be deemed indispensable, all harshness not essential to the securing of the prisoner’s person shall be severely repressed by law.
10. No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.
11. The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.
12. The security of the rights of man and of the citizen requires public military forces. These forces are, therefore, established for the good of all and not for the personal advantage of those to whom they shall be intrusted.
13. A common contribution is essential for the maintenance of the public forces and for the cost of administration. This should be equitably distributed among all the citizens in proportion to their means.
14. All the citizens have a right to decide, either personally or by their representatives, as to the necessity of the public contribution; to grant this freely; to know to what uses it is put; and to fix the proportion, the mode of assessment and of collection and the duration of the taxes.
15. Society has the right to require of every public agent an account of his administration.
16. A society in which the observance of the law is not assured, nor the separation of powers defined, has no constitution at all.
17. Since property is an inviolable and sacred right, no one shall be deprived thereof except where public necessity, legally determined, shall clearly demand it, and then only on condition that the owner shall have been previously and equitably indemnified.
Revolutionary Paris One Year After 1789
William Wellesley-Pole, Third Earl of Mornington
(1790)
You are well able to judge how strange the contrast must be between Paris governed, and Paris governing; but it is so strange in so many ways, that I own I find great difficulty in attempting to answer your question of what strikes me most, for I am quite perplexed by the number and variety of ridiculous and absurd things, which I hear and see everywhere, and every day. The common people appear to me to be exactly as gay as I remember them, though it is undoubtedly true that the greater part of them is starving for want of employment, especially the tradesmen; and notwithstanding they all talk the highest language in favour of the Revolution, they laugh at the National Assembly without scruple, and say they had rather have Aristocratical Louis, than Democratical Assignats. The streets are crowded with newsmen and hawkers, crying about libels of all sorts from morning till night, exactly in the manner you must have observed in Dublin; nothing is too indecent or abusive. There being an end of the police, it is not possible to imagine any kind of bawdy print that is not publicly stuck up in the Palais Royal, and on the Boulevards: the Attorney General’s blood would boil at the sight of such audacious bawdery. The object seems to be everywhere to mark a contempt for all former regulations. At the spectacle, they have introduced monks and nuns and crucifixes on the stage; and the actors are violently applauded, merely for wearing these forbidden garments. The parterre is more riotous than twenty English upper galleries put together; a few nights ago Richard Coeur de Lion was acted, and a woman of fashion was absolutely forced to leave the house, because she clapped with too much violence while the famous song of O Richard, O mon roi! was singing; a hundred fellows started up together roaring a bas la femme en eventail blanc ["down with the woman with the white fan": Marie Antoinette], and would not suffer the actors to proceed till this Aristocrate left the house. … Nothing can be more tiresome than all their new plays and operas; they are a heap of hackneyed public sentiments on general topics of the rights of men and duties of Kings, just like Sheridan’s grand paragraphs in the Morning Post [a London newspaper]: these are applauded to the skies. I do not know whether you have heard that many of the Petits Maitres [young gentlemen], in order to show their attachment to the Democracy, have sacrificed their curls, toupees, and queues: [i.e., their powdered wigs]; some of them go about with cropped locks like English farmers without any powder, and others wear little black scratch wigs, both these fashions are called Tetes a la Romaine ["Roman heads"], which is a comical name for such folly. I must not forget that I have seen several wear gold earrings with their black scratches. … I understand from everybody whom I have seen that nothing can be more changed than the whole of their manners. The Democrates out of the Assembly are very few indeed among the people of any distinction, and theAristocrates are melancholy and miserable to the last degree; this makes the society at Paris very gloomy; the number of deserted houses is immense, and if it were not for the Deputies, the Ambassadors, and some refugees from Brussels, there would be scarcely a gentleman’s coach to be seen in the streets. You have certainly been informed of the principles of the two clubs, the Enragees, whose name is easily understood, and the Quatre Vingt Neuf, the latter is something like our armed neutrality … ; for this club acting together, can give a majority either to the cote gauche or droite[1] in the Assembly. … I have never been at this club of 1789, although they admit English members of Parliament, because I understand nothing is done publicly excepting the recital of speeches and motions intended for the Assembly; and with these I have been sufficiently tired at the Assembly itself. I have been there several times, and it is not possible to imagine so strange a scene; the confusion at times surpasses all that ever has been known since government appeared in the world. … They have no regular forms of debate on ordinary business; some speak from their seats, some from the floor, some from the table, and some from the tribunes or desks; … they speak without preparation, and I thought many of them acquitted themselves well enough in that way, where only a few sentences were to be delivered; but on these occasions the riot is so great that it is very difficult to collect what is said. I am certain that I have seen above a hundred in the act of addressing the Assembly together, all persisting to speak, and as many more replying in different parts of the House, sentence by sentence; then the President claps his hands on both ears and roars order, as if he was calling a coach; sometimes he is quite driven to despair; he beats his table, his breast; … wringing his hands is quite a common action, and I really believe he swears. … At last he seizes a favourable moment of quiet, either to put the question or to name who ought to speak; then five hundred reclamations all at once renew the confusion, which seldom ends till the performers are completely hoarse, and obliged to give way to a fresh set. On great occasions the speakers deliver their speeches from the tribune, and these are always written speeches, or so generally, that I believe Mirabeau and Maury and Barnave are the only exceptions; and even these often read their speeches. Nothing can be more fatiguing than these readings, which entirely destroy all the spirit and interest of debate. … I heard Mirabeau and Maury both speak a few sentences in the midst of one of the riots I have mentioned, and I preferred Maury, whose manner is bold and unaffected, and his voice very fine; Mirabeau appeared to me to be full of affectation, and he has a bad voice, but he is the most admired speaker. There are four galleries which contain above twice the number admitted into the gallery in England, and here a most extraordinary scene is exhibited; for the galleries approve and disapprove by groaning and clapping, exactly as if the whole was a spectacle. … While the orators are reading their speeches, the Assembly frequently shows a most singular degree of patience such as I am certain the English House of Commons is not capable of. … Dulness and monotony are borne in perfect silence; and during such speeches, the President generally amuses himself with reading some pamphlets or newspapers. … I forgot to mention one circumstance that had a most comical effect. The Huissiers ["sergeants at arms"] of the Assembly walk up and down the room during times of great tumult, bellowing silence as loud as they can hollow, and endeavouring to persuade the disorderly orators to sit down.
I went to Court this morning at the Tuilleries, and a most gloomy Court it was; many of the young people of the first fashion and rank wear mourning always for economy. … The King seemed well, but I thought his manner evidently humbled since I was introduced to him before; he now bows to everybody, which was not a Bourbon fashion before the Revolution. The Queen looked very ill; the Dauphin was with her, and she appeared anxious to shew him. They say here that he is her shield; she never stirs out without him.
[1] The left or the right. The custom of grouping the more liberal or radical members on the left and the more conservative ones on the right, from which comes the designation of “left wing” or “right wing” in modern politics, dates from the French Revolution.
The Political Situation in Paris
George Hammond
(1791)
There is one point upon which all parties seem to be agreed–that the restoration of the ancient form of government is become totally impracticable, from any quarter or by any means whatsoever. The three descriptions of persons in the Kingdom, the most interested in the event, are the Sovereign, the Nobility, and the Clergy; but it is evident that their exertions alone, unaided by foreign Powers, are absolutely inadequate to the accomplishment of it. That loyalty and attachment to their Sovereign, which were formerly the characteristics of this nation, exist no longer. The mental imbecility of the present King, and the profligacy of some branches of the royal family, have implanted contempt and aversion so deeply in the bulk of the people that his present melancholy state of captivity and humiliation, so far from creating a spirit of indignation against those who have usurped his authority, has afforded a subject of ridicule and triumph to a great majority of the nation. In regard to the nobility, their dispersion, their want of concert, of pecuniary resources and of a leader, but chiefly the circumstances of their estates being at the mercy of their enemies, all concur to prevent them from forming or carrying into execution any enterprize of much magnitude and moment. The respect that used to be paid to the character and functions of the clergy has long been dwindling away, and the influence which that body derived from their great territorial possessions, now act[s] as an instrument against them. Not only inasmuch as their estates have been wrested from them, but also as the individuals who have purchased those estates under the national faith are now materially interested in protecting them, by every means, against any invasion of their newly acquired rights, and the possibility of their ever reverting to their original possessors. With respect to the prospect of any external interference, you, Sir, are better able to judge of that than I can be. I am, however, firmly persuaded that no serious apprehensions on that head are entertained here. The ruling party, indeed, do not rely on the three millions of men (now trained to arms) alone–they assert they have a more effectual pledge for the non-intervention of foreign Powers, in possessing the persons of the King, and of such of the Aristocratical party as have not chosen to expatriate themselves, both of whom they would not scruple to deliver up to the fury of an exasperated populace on the first appearance of a foreign invasion. …
There is no assertion of Mr. [Edmund] Burke’s more true than this–that the French have shown themselves much more skilful in destroying than in erecting. As I am convinced that no man in this country, even at this moment, has any clear notion of the new order of things that is to arise in the place of the old, it is therefore needless to enter into any discussion of the numerous speculative theories that now swarm in the nation, which have no other foundation than the heated imaginations of their fabricators.
No party in the National Assembly seems to be actuated by an adherence to a regular well-defined system, which is, I think, pretty clearly proved by the contradictory decrees that are every day issuing out to answer the emergency of the moment. And even if there was a system, there does not appear to be any man of abilities so transcendent, or of patriotism so unsuspected, as to be capable of giving direction and energy to the movements of any compact concentrated body of individuals. This is a circumstance which separates the French Revolution from every preceding one in any other country, and renders it impossible to discern a clue to the present and future operations of that body, in whom all authority is at present centered. …
In the meantime they avoid rendering themselves obnoxious and unpopular, by throwing the execution of everything that is either odious or absurd in their own numerous decrees on the King and his ministers. They have stripped royalty of everything that could make it either respectable or amiable, and by perpetually separating the function from the person of the monarch, they insensibly confound him in the general mass of citizens. Indeed their affectation is carried to so ridiculous a pitch, that I am rather surprised that we do not hear of the pouvoir executif’s [executive power] looking out of the window, or going to bed to its wife.
In the midst of all this wretched scene of political confusion, it is strongly suspected that several members of the National Assembly have enriched themselves by stock-jobbing and other arts, and Mirabeau in particular. That arch-patriot is now living in great magnificence, and indulges his ruling passion for buying up valuable books with unexampled profusion.
As you may have been perhaps surprised that the late discussion of the question of Regency should have appeared to be a matter of such urgency, I think it necessary to remark that the King’s health, not from extreme sensibility, but from want of exercise, and from indulging too freely in the pleasures of the table, has suffered so much that it is not expected his Majesty can survive many years.
I must not omit to mention two circumstances that have struck me greatly in my present residence in this capital–the tranquillity which now appears to subsist in it, and the little interruption that the newly-created paper money has had to encounter in its circulation. Excepting a greater number of men in military uniforms parading the streets, all the common occupations of life proceed as smoothly and regularly as if no event of consequence had occurred, and the public amusements are followed with as much avidity as in the most quiet and flourishing periods of the monarchy. In regard to the Assignats, although they are now at a discount of 7 per cent and are expected to fall lower, no person seems to murmur at taking them in payment, or to express any doubts of their validity.
A French Woman Broadens the Revolution: Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen
Olympe de Gouges
(1791)
The mothers, daughters, and sisters, representatives of the nation, demand to be constituted a national assembly. Considering that ignorance, disregard of or contempt for the rights of women are the only causes of public misfortune and of governmental corruption, they have resolved to set forth in a solemn declaration, the natural, inalienable and sacred rights of woman. …
1. Woman is born free and remains equal in rights to man. …
3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation, which is none other than the union of Woman and Man. …
4. Liberty and Justice consist of rendering to persons those things that belong to them; thus, the exercise of woman’s natural rights is limited only by the perpetual tyranny with which man opposes her; these limits must be changed according to the laws of nature and reason. …
10. No one should be punished for their opinions. Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she should likewise have the right to speak in public, provided that her demonstrations do not disrupt public order as established by law.
Newspaper Reportage on Parisian Reaction to the King’s Flight to Varennes
Louis-Marie Prudhomme
(1791)
It was not until ten o’clock in the morning that the municipal government announced, by firing a cannon thrice, the unexpected event of the day. But for three hours the news had already been passing from mouth to mouth and was circulating in all quarters of the city. During these three hours many outrages might have been committed. The king had gone. This news produced a moment of anxiety, and everybody ran in a crowd to the palace of the Tuileries to see if it were true; but every one turned almost immediately to the hall where the National Assembly met, declaring that their king was in there and that Louis XVI might go where he pleased.
Then the people became curious to visit the apartments vacated by the royal family; they traversed them all, and we questioned the sentinels we found there, “Where, and how, could he have escaped? How could this fat royal person, who complained of the meanness of his lodging, manage to make himself invisible to the sentries,–he whose girth would stop up any passage?” The soldiers of the guard had nothing to say to this. We insisted: “This flight is not natural; your commanders must have been in the plot … for while you were at your post Louis XVI left his without your knowing it and yet passing close to you.” These reflections, which naturally suggested themselves, account for the reception which made Lafayette pale when he appeared in the Place de Greve and passed along the quays. He took refuge in the National Assembly, where he made some confessions that did little to restore him to popular favor.
Far from being “famished for a glimpse of the king,” the people proved, by the way in which they took the escape of Louis XVI, that they were sick of the throne and tired of paying for it. If they had known, moreover, that Louis XVI, in his message, which was just then being read in the National Assembly, complained “that he had not been able to find in the palace of the Tuileries the most simple conveniences of life,” the people might have been roused to some excess; but they knew their own strength and did not permit themselves any of those little exhibitions of vengeance which are natural to irritated weakness.
They contented themselves with making sport, in their own way, of royalty and of the man who was invested with it. The portrait of the king was taken down from its place of honor and hung on the door. A fruit woman took possession of Antoinette’s bed and used it to display her cherries, saying, “It’s the nation’s turn now to be comfortable.” A young girl refused to let them put the queen’s bonnet on her head and trampled on it with indignation and contempt. They had more respect for the dauphin’s study,–but we should blush to report the titles of the books which his mother had selected.
The streets and public squares offered a spectacle of another kind. The national force deployed itself everywhere in an imposing manner. The brave Santerre alone enrolled two thousand pikemen in this faubourg.These were not the “active” citizens and the royal bluecoats, that were enjoying the honors of the celebration. The woolen caps reappeared and eclipsed the bearskins. The women contested with the men the duty of guarding the city gates, saying, “It was the women who brought the king to Paris and the men who let him escape.” But do not boast too loudly, ladies; it was not much of a present, after all.
The prevailing spirit was apathy in regard to kings in general and contempt for Louis XVI in particular. This showed itself in the least details. On the Place de Greve the people broke up a bust of Louis XVI, which was illuminated by that celebrated lantern which had been a source of terror to the enemies of the Revolution. When will the people execute justice upon all these bronze kings, monuments of our idolatry? In the Rue St. Honore they forced a dealer to sacrifice a plaster head which somewhat resembled Louis XVI. In another shop they contented themselves with putting a paper band over his eyes. The words “king,” “queen,” “royal,” “Bourbon,” “Louis,” “court,” “Monsieur,” “the king’s brother,” were effaced wherever they were found on pictures or on the signs over shops and stores.
L’Ami du peuple (Friend of the People) denounces the Moderate Royalists
Jean-Paul Marat
(1791)
O credulous Parisians! can you be duped by these shameful deceits and cowardly impostures? See if their aim in massacring the patriots was not to annihilate your clubs! Even while the massacre was going on, the emissaries of Mottier [Lafayette] were running about the streets mixing with the groups of people and loudly accusing the fraternal societies and the club of the Cordeliers of causing the misfortunes. The same evening the club of the Cordeliers, wishing to come together, found the doors of their place of meeting nailed up. Two pieces of artillery barred the entrance to the Fraternal Society, and only those conscript fathers who were sold to the court were permitted to enter the Jacobin Club, by means of their deputy’s cards.
Not satisfied with annihilating the patriotic associations, these scoundrels violate the liberty of the press, annihilate the Declaration of Rights–the rights of nature. Cowardly citizens, can you hear this without trembling? They declare the oppressed, who, in order to escape their tyranny, would make a weapon of his despair and counsel the massacre of his oppressors, a disturber of the public peace. They declare every citizen a disturber of the public peace who cries, in an uprising, to the ferocious satellites to lower or lay down their arms, thus metamorphosing into crimes the very humanity of peaceful citizens, the cries of terror and natural self-defense.
Infamous legislators, vile scoundrels, monsters satiated with gold and blood, privileged brigands who traffic with the monarch, with our fortunes, our rights, our liberty, and our lives! You thought to strike terror into the hearts of patriotic writers and paralyze them with fright at the sight of the punishments you inflict. I flatter myself that they will not soften. As for The Friend of the People, you know that for a long time your decrees directed against the Declaration of Rights have been waste paper to him. Could he but rally at his call two thousand determined men to save the country, he would proceed at their head to tear out the heart of the infernal Mottier in the midst of his battalions of slaves. He would burn the monarch and his minions in his palace, and impale you on your seats and bury you in the burning ruins of your lair.
Royal Ambivalence: Louis XVI’s Secret Appeal to the Prussian King
Louis XVI
(1791)
Paris, December 3, 1791
My Brother:
I have learned through M. du Moustier of the interest which your Majesty has expressed not only in my person but also in the welfare of my kingdom. In giving me these proofs, the attitude of your Majesty has, in all cases where your interest might prove advantageous to my people, excited my lively appreciation. I confidently take advantage of it at this time when, in spite of the fact that I have accepted the new constitution, seditious leaders are openly exhibiting their purpose of entirely destroying the remnants of the monarchy. I have just addressed myself to the emperor, the empress of Russia, and to the kings of Spain and Sweden; I am suggesting to them the idea of a congress of the chief powers of Europe, supported by an armed force, as the best means of checking seditious parties, of establishing a more desirable order of things, and of preventing the evil which afflicts us from reaching the other states of Europe.
I trust that your Majesty will approve my ideas, and that you will maintain the most absolute secrecy about the proposition I am making to you. You will easily understand that the circumstances in which I find myself force me to observe the greatest caution. That is why no one but the baron of Breteuil is informed of my plans, and your Majesty may therefore communicate to him anything you wish. …
Your good brother,
Louis
An English Traveler Describes a New Paris in the Summer of 1792
Richard Twiss
(1792)
In every one of the towns between Calais and Paris a full-grown tree (generally a poplar) has been planted in the market place, with many of its boughs and leaves; these last being withered, it makes but a dismal appearance; on the top of this tree or pole is a red woollen or cotton night-cap, which is called the Cap of Liberty, with streamers about the pole, or red, blue and white ribbands. I saw several statues of saints, both within and without the churches (and in Paris likewise) with similar caps, and several crucifixes with the national cockade of ribbands tied to the left arm of the image on the cross, but not one with the cockade in its proper place; the reason of which I know not. …
The churches in Paris are not much frequented on the week-days, at present; I found a few old women on their knees in some of them, hearing mass; and, at the same time, at the other end of one of these churches commissaries were sitting and entering the names of volunteers for the army. The iron rails in the churches which part the choir from the nave, and also those which encompass chapels and tombs, are all ordered to be converted into heads for pikes. …
Hitherto cockades of silk had been worn, the aristocrats wore such as were of a paler blue and red than those worn by the democrats, and the former were even distinguished by their carriages, on which a cloud was painted upon the arms, which entirely obliterated them (of these I saw above thirty in the evening promenade in the Bois de Boulogne ), but on the 30th of July, every person was compelled by the people to wear a linen cockade, without any distinction in the red and blue colours. …
I went once to Versailles; there is hardly anything in the palace but the bare walls, a very few of the lookingglasses, tapestry, and large pictures remaining, as it has now been near two years uninhabited. I crossed the great canal on foot; there was not a drop of water in it….
I went several times to the National Assembly; the Tribunes, or Galleries (of which there are three) entered warmly, by applauses and by murmurs and hisses, into the affairs which were treated of. …
All the coats of arms which formerly decorated the gates of Hotels are taken away, and even seals are at present engraven with cyphers only. The Chevaliers de St. Louis still continue to wear the cross, or the ribband, at the buttonhole; all other orders of knighthood are abolished. No liveries are worn by servants, that badge of slavery is likewise abolished; and also all corporation companies, as well as every other monopolizing society, and there are no longer any Royal tobacco or salt shops. …
Books of all sorts are printed without any approbation or privilege. Many are exposed on stalls, which are very improper for the public eye. One of them was called the Private Life of the Queen, in two volumes, with obscene prints. The book itself is contemptible and disgusting, and might as well have been called, the Woman of Pleasure. Of books of this sort I saw above thirty, with plates. Another was a subject not fit even to be mentioned. I read a small pamphlet, entitled ” Le Christ-Roi, or a Parallel of the Sufferings of Louis XVI etc.” I can say nothing in favor of it. …
The common people are in general much better clothed than they were before the Revolution, which may be ascribed to their not being so grievously taxed as they were. … All those ornaments, which three years ago were worn of silver, are now of gold. All the women of lower class, even those who sit behind green-stalls, etc., wear gold earrings, with large drops, some of which cost two or three louis, and necklaces of the same. Many of the men wear plain gold earrings: those worn by officers and other gentlemen are usually as large as a half-crown piece. Even children of two years old have small gold drops in their ears. The general dress of the women is white linen and muslin gowns, large caps which cover all their hair, excepting just a small triangular piece over the forehead, pomatumed, or rather plaistered and powdered, without any hats; neither do they wear any stays, but only corsets (waistcoats or jumps). Tight lacing is not known here, nor yet high and narrow heeled shoes. Because many of the ladies cidevant of quality[1] have emigrated or ran away, and those which remain in Paris keep within doors, I saw no face that was painted, excepting on the stage. Most of the men wear coats made like great-coats, or in other words, long great-coats without any coat; this in fine weather and in the middle of summer made them appear to me like invalides. There is hardly any possibility of distinguishing the rank of either man or woman by their dress at present, or rather, there are no ranks to distinguish. The nation in general is much improved in cleanliness, and even in politeness. The French no longer look on every Englishman as a lord, but as their equal. There are no beggars to be seen about the streets in Paris, and when the chaise stopped for fresh horses, only two or three old and infirm people surrounded it and solicited charity, whereas formerly the beggars used to assemble in hundreds. I did not see a single pair of sabots(wooden-shoes) in France this time. The table of the peasants is also better supplied than it was before the revolution. …
Before the 10th [of August] I saw several dancing parties of the Poissardes and sansculottes in the beer-houses, on the Quai des Ormes and the Quai St.Paul, and have played the favourite and animating air of ca ira,on the fiddle, to eight couple of dancers: the ceiling of these rooms (which open into the street) is not above ten feet high, and on this ceiling (which is generally white washed) are the numbers 1, 2, to 8, in black, and the same in red, which mark the places where the ladies and gentlemen are to stand. When the dance was concluded, I requested the ladies to salute me (m’embrasser) which they did, by gently touching my cheek with their lips. …
I saw many thousands of these men [National Guard] from my windows, on the way to the Tuileries, early onthe Friday morning [August 10th]; their march was at the rate of perhaps five miles an hour, without running or looking aside; and this was the pace they used when they carried heads upon pikes, and when they were in pursuit of important business, rushing along the streets like a torrent, and attending wholly and solely to the object they had in view. On such occasions, when I saw them approaching, I turned into some cross street till they were passed, not that I had anything to apprehend, but the being swept along with the crowd, and perhaps trampled upon. I cannot express what I felt on seeing such immense bodies of men so vigorously actuated by the same principle. I also saw many thousands of volunteers going to join the armies at the frontiers, marching along the Boulevards, almost at the same pace, accompanied as far as Barriersby their women, who were carrying their muskets for them; some with large sausages, pieces of cold meat, and loaves of bread, stuck on the bayonets, and all laughing, or singing ca ira [a famous revolutionary song].
[1] That is, aristocratic women
A National Guardsman Recounts the Revolutionary Journee of August 10, 1792
Anonymous
(1792)
Paris–11 August 1792–Year 4 of Liberty
We are all tired out, doubtless less from spending two nights under arms than from heartache. Men’s spirits were stirred after the unfortunate decree which whitewashed Lafayette. Nevertheless, we had a quiet enough evening; a group of federes from Marseille gaily chanted patriotic songs in the Beaucaire cafe, the refreshment room of the National Assembly. It was rumoured “Tonight the tocsin will ring, the alarm drum will be beaten. All the faubourgs will burst into insurrection, supported by 6,000 federes.” At 11 o’clock we go home, at the same instant as the drums call us back to arms. We speed from our quarters and our battalion, headed by two pieces of artillery, marches to the palace. Hardly have we reached the garden of the Tuileries than we hear the alarm cannon. The alarm drum resounds through all the streets of Paris. People run for arms from all over the place. Soon the public squares, the new bridge, the main thoroughfares, are covered with troops. The National Assembly, which had finished its debate early, was recalled to its duties. It only knew of some of the preparations which had been made for the journee [uprising] of 10 August. First the commandant of the palace wishes to hold the mayor a hostage there, then he sends him to the mayor’s office. The people fear a display of his talents! In the general council of the Commune it is decreed that, according to the wishes of the forty-eight sections, it is no longer necessary to recognise the constituted authorities if dethronement is not immediately announced and new municipal bodies, keeping Petion and Manuel [2] at their head, entrusted with popular authority. However, the faubourgs [subdivisions of the city] organised themselves into an army and placed in their centre Bretons, Marseillais and Bordelais, and all the other federes. More than 20,000 men march across Paris, bristling with pikes and bayonets. Santerre had been obliged to take command of them. The National Assembly are told that the army has broken into the palace. All hearts are frozen. Discussion is provoked again by the question of the safety of the king, when it is learned that Louis XVI seeks refuge in the bosom of the Assembly.
Forty-eight members are sent to the palace. The royal family places itself in the middle of the deputation. The people fling bitter reproaches at the king and accuse him of being the author of his troubles. Hardly was the king safe than the noise of cannon-fire increased. The Breton federes beat a tattoo. Some officers suggested retreat to the commander of the Swiss guards. But he seemed prepared and soon, by a clever tactic, captured the artillery which the National Guard held in the courtyard. These guns, now turned on the people, fire and strike them down. But soon the conflict is intensified everywhere. The Swiss, surrounded, overpowered, stricken, then run out of ammunition. They plea for mercy, but it is impossible to calm the people, furious at Helvetian treachery.
The Swiss were cut to pieces. Some were killed in the state-rooms, others in the garden. Many died on the Champs-Elysees. Heavens! That Liberty should cost Frenchmen blood and tears! How many victims there were among both the People and the National Guard! The total number of dead could run to 2,000. All the Swiss who had been taken prisoner were escorted to the Place de Greve. There they had their brains blown out. They were traitors sacrificed to vengeance. What vengeance! I shivered to the roots of my being. At least 47 heads were cut off. The Greve was littered with corpses, and heads were paraded on the ends of several pikes. The first heads to be severed were those of seven chevaliers du poignard [noblemen], slain at eight o’clock in the morning on the Place Vendome. Many Marseillais perished in the journee of 10 August. Their second-in-command was killed; so was the commander of the Bretons.
The bronze statues in the Place Royale, Place Vendome, Place Louis XIV, Place Louis XV, are thrown to the ground. The Swiss are pursued everywhere. The National Assembly, the department and the municipality are in permanent session. … People are still far from calm and it will be difficult to reestablish order. However, we see peace starting to reappear. The king and his family have passed the night in the porter’s lodging of the National Assembly.
Tonight the National Assembly has decreed [the creation of] the National Convention. The electors are gathered in primary assemblies to select deputies. They only need to be twenty-five years old and have a residence qualification. It appears that the coup of 10 August has forestalled one by the aristocracy. One realizes now that the Swiss are the victims of their credulity, that they hoped for support, but that the rich men who should have fought with them dared not put in an appearance. We have been told that there are 8,000 royalist grenadiers in Paris. These 8,000 citizens seem to have stayed at home. Only one equestrian statue has been preserved in the capital: that of Henri IV.[2]
[1] The incumbent municipal authorities
[2] Henry IV was regarded as the “people’s king,” and his statues and tomb were spared from the destruction visited upon public monuments to other French kings during the Revolution.
Witness to a Slaughter: An English Witness Recounts the September Massacres in Paris
George Munro
(1792)
About one o’clock on Sunday fore-noon [September 4] three signal guns were fired, the Tocsin was rung, and one of the Municipality on horseback proclaimed in different parts of the city, that the enemy was at the gates, Verdun was besieged, and could only hold out a few days. The inhabitants were therefore ordered to assemble in their respective sections, and from thence to march to the Champ de Mars, where they were to select an army of sixty thousand men.
The first part of this proclamation was put in execution, but the second was totally neglected; for I went to the Champ de Mars myself where I only saw M. Pethion, who on finding no one there returned home. During the time the officer of the Municipality was making the proclamation, two others attended at the bar of the National Assembly to acquaint them with the steps that had been taken by the direction of the Conseil de la Commune. The Assembly applauded their conduct, and immediately passed a decree, directing that those who refused their arms to those that wished to serve, or objected serving themselves, should be deemed traitors and worthy of death, that all horses of luxury should be seized for the use of the army, and that those who refused to obey the orders of the present executive power should be punished with death. It concluded by decreeing that twelve members of the National Assembly should be added to the other six that at present compose the executive power. As soon as these decrees were passed, the carriages and horses of gentlemen were seized in the streets (agreeable to the spirit of the decree). Their owners were obliged to walk home, and the horses in general were sent to the Ecole Militaire, and the carriages were put under the care of different guards. The proceedings with the beating of drums, firing of cannon, and the marching up and down of armed men of course created no little agitation in the minds of the people. That however was nothing to the scene of horror that ensued soon after. A party at the instigation of some one or other declared they would not quit Paris, as long as the prisons were filled with Traitors (for they called those so, that were confined in the different Prisons and Churches), who might in the absence of such a number of Citizens rise and not only effect the release of His Majesty, but make an entire counter-revolution. To prevent this, a large body of sans-culottes attended by a number of Marseillais and Brestois, the hired assassins of a Party, proceeded to the Church de Carmes, rue de Vaugirard, where amidst the acclamations of a savage mob they massacred a number of refractory Priests, all the Vicaires de Saint Sulpice, the directors of the Seminaries, and the Doctors of the Sorbonne, with the ci-devant [former] Archbishop of Arles, and a number of others, exceeding in all one hundred and seventy, including those that had been confined there since the tenth. After this they proceeded to the Abbaye, where they massacred a vast number of prisoners, amongst whom were also many respectable characters. These executioners increasing in number, different detachments were sent to the Chatelet, the prison de la Force, de Ste Pelagie, and the prisons of the Conciergerie. At all these places a most horrid massacre took place; none were exempted but debtors and many of these fell victims to the fury of the people. During this sad scene, the more humane, which were but few in number, hurried to the National Assembly to obtain their interference for stopping such melancholy outrages. They immediately decreed that six of their members should go and see if it was possible to prevent such cruelties. With difficulty these members arrived at the Abbaye; when there one of them got upon a chair to harangue the people, but neither he nor the others could make themselves heard, and with some risk, they made their escape. Many of the Municipality attended at the different prisons, and endeavoured to quell the fury of the people, but all in vain; they therefore pro-posed to the mob a plan of establishing a kind of Court of justice in the prisons, for the immediate trial of the remaining offenders. They caught at this, and two of the Municipality with a detachment of the mob, about two on Monday morning, began this strange Court of justice. The gaoler’s list was called for, those that were conpal government, and National Guard took no action to repress the actions of the fined for forging assignats, or theft, with the unhappy people that were any way suspected to be concerned in the affair of the 10th, were in general massacred; this form took place in nearly all the prisons in Paris. But early on Monday morning a detachment with seven pieces of cannon went to attack Bicetre. It is reported that these wretches charged their cannon with small stones and such other things, and fired promiscuously among the prisoners. I cannot however vouch for this; they have however not finished their cruelties there yet, and it is now past six o’clock Tuesday evening. To be convinced of what I could not believe, I made a visit to the prison of the Abbaye about seven o’clock on Monday evening, for the slaughter had not ceased. This prison, which takes its name from an adjoining Abbaye, stands in a narrow street, which was at this time from a variety of lights, as light as day: a single file of men armed with swords, or piques, formed a line of some length, commencing from the prison door. This body might consist of about fifty; these people were either Marseillais, Brestois, or the National Guards of Paris, and when I saw them seemed much fatigued with their horrid work. For besides the irregular massacre that continued till two o’clock on Monday morning, many of them delighted with their strange office continued their services when I left them, which was about nine on Monday evening.
Two of the Municipality were then in the prison with some of the mob distributing their justice. Those they found guilty were seemingly released, but only to be precipitated by the door on a number of piques, and then among the savage cries of vive la nation ["long live the nation!"], to be hacked to pieces by those that had swords and were ready to receive them. After this their dead bodies were dragged by the arms or legs to the Abbaye, which is distant from the prison about two hundred yards; here they were laid up in heaps till carts could carry them away. The kennel was swimming with blood, and a bloody track was traced from the prison to the Abbaye door where they had dragged these unfortunate people.
I was fortunate enough to be present when five men were acquitted. Such a circumstance, a bystander told me, had not happened in the operations of this horrid tribunal; and these inconsistent murderers seemed nearly as much pleased at the acquittal of a prisoner as they were at his condemnation. The Governor of the Invalides happened to be one of those I saw acquitted, the street rung with acclamations of joy, but the old man was so feeble with fear, and suspense, and so overcome with the caresses of his daughter, who was attending to know his fate, that they both sunk lifeless into the arms of some of the spectators, who carried them to the Hospital des Invalides. The same congratulations attended the others that were acquitted and the same those that were condemned. Nothing can exceed the inconsistency of these people. After the general massacre of Sunday night many of the dead bodies were laid on the Pont-neuf to be claimed, a person in the action of stealing a handkerchief from one of the corpses was hacked to pieces on the spot, by the same people who had been guilty of so much cruelty and injustice.
One of the Municipality was fortunate enough for that night to save some of the women, but many of these underwent the same mock trial next day; and the Princess Lamballe, after having been butchered in the most shocking manner, had her head severed from her body, which these monsters carried about, while others dragged her body through many of the streets. It is even said they attempted to carry it to the Queen, but the Guards would not permit that. Mademoiselle de Tourzelles was also reported to have been murdered, but I understand that she and Madame de Ste Brice were saved from the fury of the people, and carried a la section des droits de l’homme. Many other women of family were killed and others escaped. Major Bauchman of the Swiss Guards was beheaded on the Place de Carouzel early on Monday morning. Mr Montmorin, Governor of Fontainebleau and nephew of Mr Montmorin late Minister, who was killed at the Abbaye, had been regularly tried and acquitted on Friday, but not being released was also massacred at the Conciergerie. Monsieur d’Affry was acquitted by the people and escaped. In all it is supposed they have murdered four thousand, some say seven, but I think that exaggerated.
By what I can understand it was late on Sunday evening before Mr Pethion took any steps to prevent the progress of this unexampled outrage, and the National Guards of course made no opposition to such irregularities. The Mayor however at last sent to the Temple the Commandant General of the National Guards, and I am happy to inform you that in the midst of all this confusion, though there was a crowd in the street, yet the court of the Temple was quiet. The Section du Marais has sworn not to permit any violence to be exercised against the prisoners in that place, and the National Assembly have also appointed six of their members as a safe-guard to the sacred persons of Their Majesties, and a number of the Municipality also attend. A motion was made last week to confine Their Majesties in separate apartments; that right was however found to rest with the Municipality, and I have the pleasure of saying that Their Most Christian Majesties still enjoy the comfort of being together, and were, not an hour ago, in perfect good health.
I ask pardon for giving such a detailed account of such uncommon barbarity, which I am sure must be as disagreeable for you to read as it is for me to commit such acts to paper, but they ought to be particularized to the eternal disgrace of a people who pretend to be the most civilized among the nations of Europe.
The French Revolution Becomes a Universal Political Crusade
National Convention
(1792)
The French people to the people of ; brothers and friends:
We have conquered our liberty and we shall maintain it. We offer to bring this inestimable blessing to you, for it has always been rightly ours, and only by a crime have our oppressors robbed us of it. We have driven out your tyrants. Show yourselves free men and we will protect you from their vengeance, their machinations, or their return.
From this moment the French nation proclaims the sovereignty of the people, the suppression of all civil and military authorities which have hitherto governed you and of all that taxes which you bear, under whatever form, the abolition of the tithe, of feudalism, of seigniorial rights and monopolies of every kind, of serfdom, whether real or personal, of hunting and fishing privileges, of the corvee, the salt tax, the tolls and local imposts, and, in general, of all the various kinds of taxes with which you have been loaded by your usurpers; it also proclaims the abolition among you of all noble and ecclesiastical corporations and of all prerogatives and privileges opposed to equality. You are, from this moment, brothers and friends; all are citizens, equal in rights, and all are alike called to govern, to serve, and to defend your country.
The King is Dead, “Vive la Republic!”
Henry Essex Edgeworth de Firmont
(1793)
The unfortunate Louis XVI, foreseeing to what lengths the malice of his enemies was likely to go, and resolved to be prepared at all events, cast his eyes upon me, to assist him in his last moments, if condemned to die. He would not make any application to the ruling party, nor even mention my name without my consent. The message he sent me was touching beyond expression, and worded in a manner which I shall never forget. A King, though in chains, had a right to command, but he commanded not. My attendance was requested merely as a pledge of my attachment for him, and as a favour, which he hoped I would not refuse. But as the service was likely to be attended with some danger for me, he dared not to insist, and only prayed (in case I deemed the danger to be too great) to point out to him a clergyman worthy of his confidence, but less known than I was myself, leaving the person absolutely to my choice. … Being obliged to take my party upon the spot, I resolved to comply with what appeared to be at that moment the call of Almighty God; and committing to His providence all the rest, I made answer to the most unfortunate of Kings, that whether he lived or died, I would be his friend to the last. …
The King finding himself seated in the carriage, where he could neither speak to me nor be spoken to without witness, kept a profound silence. I presented him with my breviary, the only book I had with me, and he seemed to accept it with pleasure: he appeared anxious that I should point out to him the psalms that were most suited to his situation, and he recited them attentively with me. The gend’armes, without speaking, seemed astonished and confounded at the tranquil piety of their monarch, to whom they doubtless never had before approached so near.
The procession lasted almost two hours; the streets were lined with citizens, all armed, some with pikes and some with guns, and the carriage was surrounded by a body of troops, formed of the most desperate people of Paris. As another precaution, they had placed before the horses a number of drums, intended to drown any noise or murmur in favour of the King; but how could they be heard? Nobody appeared either at the doors or windows, and in the street nothing was to be seen, but armed citizens–citizens, all rushing towards the commission of a crime, which perhaps they detested in their hearts.
The carriage proceeded thus in silence to the Place de Louis XV, and stopped in the middle of a large space that had been left round the scaffold: this space was surrounded with cannon, and beyond, an armed multitude extended as far as the eye could reach. As soon as the King perceived that the carriage stopped, he turned and whispered to me, “We are arrived, if I mistake not.” My silence answered that we were. One of the guards came to open the carriage door, and the gend’armes would have jumped out, but the King stopped them, and leaning his arm on my knee, “Gentlemen,” said he, with the tone of majesty, “I recommend to you this good man; take care that after my death no insult be offered to him–I charge you to prevent it.” … As soon as the King had left the carriage, three guards surrounded him, and would have taken off his clothes, but he repulsed them with haughtiness: he undressed himself, untied his neckcloth, opened his shirt, and arranged it himself. The guards, whom the determined countenance of the King had for a moment disconcerted, seemed to recover their audacity. They surrounded him again, and would have seized his hands. “What are you attempting?” said the King, drawing back his hands. “To bind you,” answered the wretches. “To bind me,” said the King, with an indignant air. “No! I shall never consent to that: do what you have been ordered, but you shall never bind me … “
The path leading to the scaffold was extremely rough and difficult to pass; the King was obliged to lean on my arm, and from the slowness with which he proceeded, I feared for a moment that his courage might fail; but what was my astonishment, when arrived at the last step, I felt that he suddenly let go my arm, and I saw him cross with a firm foot the breadth of the whole scaffold; silence, by his look alone, fifteen or twenty drums that were placed opposite to me; and in a voice so loud, that it must have been heard at the Pont Tournant, I heard him pronounce distinctly these memorable words: I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge; I pardon those who have occasioned my death; and I pray to God that the blood you are going to shed may never be visited on France.
He was proceeding, when a man on horseback, in the national uniform, and with a ferocious cry, ordered the drums to beat. Many voices were at the same time heard encouraging the executioners. They seemed reanimated themselves, in seizing with violence the most virtuous of Kings, they dragged him under the axe of the guillotine, which with one stroke severed his head from his body. All this passed in a moment. The youngest of the guards, who seemed about eighteen, immediately seized the head, and shewed it to the people as he walked round the scaffold; he accompanied this monstrous ceremony with the most atrocious and indecent gestures. At first an awful silence prevailed; at length some cries of “Vive la Republique!” were heard. By degrees the voices multiplied, and in less than ten minutes this cry, a thousand times repeated, became the universal shout of the multitude, and every hat was in the air.
Robespierre on Republican Virtue
Maxililien Robespierre
(1794)
We desire an order of things where all base and cruel passions are enchained by the laws, all beneficent and generous feelings awakened by them; where ambition is the desire to deserve glory and to be useful to one’s country; where distinctions arise only from equality itself; where the citizen is sub ject to the magistrate, the magistrate to the people, the people to justice; where the country secures the welfare of each individual, and each individual proudly enjoys the prosperity and glory of his country; where all minds are enlarged by the constant interchange of republican sentiments and by the need of earning the respect of a great people; where industry is an adornment to the liberty that ennobles it, and commerce is the source of public wealth, not simply of monstrous riches for a few families.
We wish to substitute in our country morality for egotism, probity for a mere sense of honour, principle for habit, duty for etiquette, the rule of reason for the tyranny of custom, contempt for vice for contempt for misfortune, pride for insolence, large-mindedness for vanity, the love of glory for the love of money, good men for good company, merit for intrigue, talent for conceit, truth for show, the charm of happiness for the tedium of pleasure, the grandeur of man for the triviality of grand society, a people magnanimous, powerful and happy for a people lovable, frivolous and wretched–that is to say, all the virtues and miracles of the Republic for all the vices and puerilities of the monarchy.
We wish in a word to fulfil the course of nature, to accomplish the destiny of mankind, to make good the promises of philosophy, to absolve Providence from the long reign of tyranny and crime. May France, once illustrious among peoples of slaves, eclipse the glory of all free peoples that have existed, become the model to the nations, the terror of oppressors, the consolation of the oppressed, the ornament of the universe; and in sealing our work with our blood, may we ourselves see at last the dawn of universal felicity gleam before us! That is our ambition. That is our aim.
The Reign of Terror in the Provinces: Lyon
Temporary Committee of Republican Surveillance
(1793)
The goal of the Revolution is the happiness of the people.
Paragraph I: Concerning the Revolutionary Spirit
The Revolution is made for the people; the happiness of the people is its goal; love of the people is the touchstone of the revolutionary spirit.
It is easy to understand that by “the people” we do not mean that class privileged by its riches which has usurped all the pleasures of life and all its assets from society. “The people” is the universality of French citizens; “the people” is above all the immense class of the poor, that class which gives men to the Patrie,defenders to our frontiers, which maintains society by its labors, embellishes it by its talents, which adorns it and honors it by its virtues. The Revolution would be a political and moral monstrosity if its end was to assure the happiness of a few hundred individuals and to consolidate the misery of twenty-four million citizens. …
Republicans, to be worthy of that name, begin by feeling your dignity. Hold high your head with pride and let men read in your eyes that you know who you are and what the Republic is. Do not be mistaken, to be truly republican each citizen must experience within himself a revolution equal to that which has changed the face of France. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in common between the slave of a tyrant and the inhabitant of a free state: the customs of the latter, his principles, his sentiments, his actions must all be new. You were oppressed; you must crush your oppressors. You were the slaves of superstition; you must no longer worship anything except liberty; you must have no other morality than that of nature. You were strangers to military offices; henceforth all Frenchmen are soldiers. You lived in ignorance; to assure the conquest of your rights, you must be instructed. You knew no Patrie [Fatherland], never had its sweet voice echoed in your hearts; today, you must know nothing apart from it; you must see it, hear it, and adore it in everything. The magistrate is vigilant, the farmer sows his fields, the soldier fights, the citizen breathes only for the Patrie! Its sacred image mingles in all his actions, adds to his pleasures, rewards him for his pains. Long live the Republic! Long live the people! There is his rallying cry, the expression of his joy, the solace of his sorrows. Any man to whom this enthusiasm is foreign, who knows other pleasures, other cares than the happiness of the people … any man who doesn’t feel his blood boil at the very name of tyranny, slavery, or opulence; any man who has tears to shed for the enemies of the people, who doesn’t reserve all his compassion for the victims of despotism, and for the martyrs of liberty, all such men who dare to call themselves Republicans have lied against nature and in their hearts. Let them flee the soil of liberty: they will soon be recognized and will water it with their impure blood. The Republic wants only free men within its bosom; it is determined to exterminate all others and to recognize as its children only those who know how to live, fight and die for it. …
Paragraph III: The Revolutionary Tax on the Rich
The expenses of the war must be defrayed, and the costs of the Revolution met. Who will come to the help of the Patrie in its need if it is not the rich? If they are aristocrats, it is just that they should pay for a war to which they and their supporters alone have given rise; if they are patriots, you will be anticipating their desires by asking them to put their riches to the only use fit for Republicans; that is to say, a purpose useful to the Republic. Thus, nothing can excuse you from establishing this tax promptly. No exemptions are necessary; any man who has more than he needs must participate in this extraordinary assistance. This tax must be proportioned to the great needs of the Patrie, so you must begin by deciding in a grand and truly revolutionary manner the sum that each individual must put in common for the public welfare. This isn’t a case for mathematical exactitude nor for the timid scruple which must be employed to apportion the public taxes; it is an extraordinary measure which must exhibit the character of the times which compel it. Operate, then, on a large scale; take all that a citizen has that is unnecessary; for superfluity is an evident and gratuitous violation of the rights of the people. Any man who has more than his needs cannot use it, he can only abuse it; thus, if he is left what is strictly necessary, all the rest belongs to the Republic and to its unfortunate members. …
Paragraph V : The Eradication of Fanaticism
Priests are the sole cause of the misfortunes of France; it is they who for thirteen hundred years have raised, by degrees, the edifice of our slavery and have adorned it with all the sacred baubles which could conceal flaws from the eye of reason. …
First of all, Citizens, relations between God and man are a purely private matter and, to be sincere, have no need of display in worship and the visible monuments of superstition. You will begin by sending to the treasury of the Republic all the vases, all the gold and silver ornaments which may flatter the vanity of priests but which are nothing to the truly religious man and to the Being whom he claims to honour. …
… The Republican has no other divinity than his Patrie, no other idol than liberty. The Republican is essentially religious because he is good, just, and courageous; the patriot honors virtue, respects age, consoles misfortune, comforts indigence and punishes treachery. What better homage for the Divinity! The patriot isn’t foolish enough to claim to worship him by practices useless to humanity and bad for himself; he does not condemn himself to an apparent celibacy in order to give himself up the more freely to debauchery. Worthy son of nature and useful member of society, he gives happiness to a virtuous wife and raises his numerous children according to the severe principles of morality and republicanism. …
Republicans … be on guard, you have great wrongs to expiate; the crimes of the rebellious Lyonnais are yours. … Regain then, and promptly, in liberty’s way, all the ground that you have lost, and win again by your virtues and patriotic efforts the esteem and confidence of France. The National Convention, the representatives of the people, are watching you and your magistrates; the account that they demand of you will be all the stricter because you have faults to be pardoned. And we, who are intermediaries between them and you, we whom they have charged to watch over you and instruct you, we swear that our glance will not leave you for an instant and that we will use with severity all the authority committed to us and that we will punish as treachery what in other circumstances you might have called dilatoriness, weakness or negligence. The time for half-measures and for beating about the bush is past. Help us to strike great blows or you will be the first to feel them. Liberty or death: reflect and choose.
[Signed by the Commission and approved by the deputies on mission, Collot d'Herbois and Fouche, members of the Committee of Public Safety.]
A Sans-CulotteDescribes the Typical Sans-Culotte
Anonymous
(1793)
A sans culotte, you rogues? He is someone who always goes about on foot, who has not got the millions you would all live to have, who has no castles, no valets to wait on him, and who lives simply with his wife and children, if he has any, on the fourth or fifth story. He is useful because he knows how to till a field, to forge iron, to use a saw, to roof a house, to make shoes, and to spill his blood to the last drop for the safety of the Republic. …
In the evening he goes to the assembly of his Section, not powdered and perfumed and nattily booted, in the hope of being noticed by the citizenesses in the galleries, but ready to support sound proposals with all his might and ready to pulverize those which come from the despised faction of politicians.
Finally, a sans culotte always has his sabre well-sharpened, ready to cut off the ears of all opponents of the Revolution.
Economic Realities in Revolutionary Paris: Prices and Wages
George Rude
(1789-1793)
Percentage of Income Spent on Bread by Parisian Workers, 1789(in sous)
Effective Expenditure on Bread as Percentage Daily Daily of Income
Occupation Wage Earnings1 At 9 s. At 14-1/2 s. At 13-1/2 s. At 12 s.
Laborer in Reveillon’s factory 25 s. 15 s. 60 97 90-1/2 80
Builder’s laborer 30 s. 18 s. 50 80 75-1/2 67
Journeyman mason 40 s. 24 s. 37 60 56-1/2 50
Journeyman locksmith, carpenter, etc. 50 s. 30 s. 30 48 45-1/2 40
Sculptor, goldsmith 100 s. 60 s. 15 24 22-1/2 20
1 In computing ‘effective’ earnings, allowance has been made for the numerous unpaid Feast Days of the ancien regime. Here these are assumed to number 111 per year (G. M. Jaffe, Le Mouvement ouvrier a Paris pendant la Revolution francaise , pp. 26-27). Further allowance should also be made for sickness.
Hypothetical Budgets of Parisian Workers, June 1789 and June 1791
(in sous)
Budget of a Builder’s Laborer Budget of a Journeyman Carpenter, or Locksmith ÷ ÷
(wage, 30 s.; effective income, 18 s.) (wage, 50 s.; effective income, 30 s.) ÷ ÷÷÷ June 1789 June 1791 June 1789 June 1791 ÷÷÷ 4 lb. bread 14-1/2 s. 4 lb. bread 8 s. 4 lb. bread 14-1/2 s. 4 lb. bread 8 s. ÷÷÷
Rent 3 s. Rent 3 s. Rent 3 s. Rent 3 s. ÷÷÷
1/2 liter wine 4 s. 1/2 liter wine 5 s. 1 liter wine 8 s. ÷÷÷ ÷÷÷ 1-1/4 lb. meat 2-1/2 s. 1/2 lb. meat 5 s. 1/2 lb. meat 5 s. ÷÷÷ Balance for oil, ÷÷÷ vegetables, ÷÷÷
clothing, etc. 1/2 s. Balance 1/2 s. Balance 2-1/2 s. Balance 6 s. ÷÷÷
÷÷÷
÷÷÷ ÷÷÷
÷÷÷
Total 18 s. 18 s. 30 s. 30 s.
Hypothetical Budgets of Parisian Workers, June 1790 and June 1793 (in sous)
Budget of a Journeyman Carpenter Budget of a Journeyman Locksmith ÷ ÷ ÷÷÷ June 1790 June 1793 June 1790 June 1793 ÷÷÷ (wage, 50 s.; effective (wage, 80 s.; effective (wage, 50 s.; effective (wage, 110 s.; effective ÷÷÷
income, 30 s.) income, 57 s.) income, 30 s.) income, 78 s.) ÷÷÷ ÷÷÷ 4 lb. bread 11 s. 4 lb. bread 12 s. 4 lb. bread 11 s. 4 lb. bread 12 s. ÷÷÷
Rent 3 s. Rent 6 s. Rent 3 s. Rent 6 s. ÷÷÷
1 liter wine 10 s. 1-1/2 liters wine 24 s. 1 liter wine 10 s. 1-1/2 liters wine 24 s. ÷÷÷ ÷÷÷ 1/2 lb. meat 5 s. 1/2 lb. meat 9 s. 1/2 lb. meat 5 s. 1 lb. meat 18 s. ÷÷÷ Balance for vegetables ÷÷÷
oil, clothing, etc. 1 s. Balance 6 s. Balance 1 s. Balance 18 s. ÷÷÷
÷÷÷
÷÷÷ ÷÷÷
÷÷÷
Total 30 s. 57 s. 30 s. 78 s.
The Law of the General Maximum
French National Convention
(1793)
The National Convention, having heard the report of its Commission on the drafting of a law fixing amaximum for essential goods and merchandise, decrees as follows:
Article 1. The articles which the National Convention has judged to be essential, and of which it has believed it should fix the maximum or highest price are: fresh meat, salt meat and bacon, butter, sweet oil, cattle, salt fish, wine, brandy, vinegar, cider, beer, firewood, charcoal, coal, candles, lamp oil, salt, soda, soap, potash, sugar, honey, white paper, hides, iron, cast iron, lead, steel, copper, hemp, flax, wools, fabrics, linen cloth, the raw materials used for manufacture, clogs, shoes, colza and rape, tobacco.
2. Among the articles listed above, the maximum price of first quality firewood, charcoal and coal is the same as in 1790, plus one-twentieth. The law of 19 August on the fixing by departments of the price of firewood, coal and peat is revoked.
The maximum or the highest price of twist tobacco is 20 sous per livre … that of smoking tobacco is 10 sous;that of a livre of salt is two sous; that of soap is 25 sous.
3. The maximum price of all other goods and merchandise listed in article 1 shall be, over the whole extent of the Republic, until September next, their price in 1790 as stated by the market price lists or the current prices in each department, plus one-third, deduction being made for fiscal and other fees to which they were then subject, under whatever name they may have existed.
4. The tables of the maximum or highest price of each of the goods, listed in article 1 shall be drafted by each district administration, posted within a week of the receipt of this law, and sent to the department.
5. The procureur-general-syndic shall, within the following fortnight, forward copies to both the Provisional Executive Council and the National Convention.
6. The Commissaries of the National Convention are charged with dismissing procureurs of communes,procureurs-syndics, and procureurs-generaux-syndics who shall not have fulfilled the arrangements detailed in the foregoing articles within the time prescribed, each so far as his responsibility extends.
7. Everyone who sells or buys the merchandise listed in article 1 above the maximum determined and posted in each department shall pay, jointly and severally, through the municipal police, a fine of double the value of the object sold, payable to the informant. Their names shall be inscribed on the list of suspect persons and they shall be treated as such. The buyer shall not be subject to the above penalty if he denounces the seller’s breach, and each merchant shall be required to have a list bearing the maximum or highest price of his goods conspicuous in his shop.
8. The maximumor highest rate with respect to salaries, wages, manual labour and day-labour in each place shall be fixed, beginning from the publication of this law, until September next, by general and communal councils, at the 1790 rate plus one-half.
9. Municipalities may requisition and punish, with three days detention, as the circumstances require, workmen, manufacturers and various kinds of labourers who refuse their ordinary work without legitimate cause. …
[Articles 10-16 deal with technical, administrative matters.]
17. For the duration of the war, all exportation of essential merchandise or goods is prohibited over every frontier under any name or commission whatever, salt excepted.
18. The above listed articles destined for export and intercepted in contravention [of the law] within two leagues of the frontier on this side, and without a permit from the municipality of the driver’s place [of residence], shall be confiscated with the conveyances, beasts of burden, or vessels transporting them, for the benefit of those who stop them. There shall be a penalty of ten years imprisonment for the contraveners, owners and drivers.
19. So that the crews of neutral or Frenchified ships may not abuse the favour of hospitality by taking away from maritime cities and places victuals and provisions beyond their needs, they shall appear before the municipality which shall cause all that they need to be purchased for them.
20. The present decree shall be despatched by special messenger.
The Last “Political Testament” of a Feminist During the French Revolution
Olympe de Gouges
(1793)
My son, the wealth of the whole world, the universe in servitude at my feet, the daggers of assassins raised at me, nothing can extinguish the love of country that burns in my soul; nothing could make me betray my conscience. Men deranged by passions, what have you done and what incalculable evils are you perpetrating on Paris and on the whole of France? You are risking everything; you flatter yourselves into thinking that it is only a question of a great purge to save the public; let the departments, infused with terror, blindly adopt your horrible measures.
If, by a last effort, I can save the public welfare, I want even my persecutors, as they destroy me by their furor, to be jealous of my kind of death. And if one day French women are pointed out to future generations perhaps my memory will equal that of the Romans. I have predicted it all; I know that my death is inevitable; but it is glorious for a well-intentioned soul, when an ignominious death threatens all good citizens, to die for a dying country!
I will my heart to the nation, my integrity to men (they have need of it). To women, I will my soul; my creative spirit to dramatic artists; my disinterestedness to the ambitious; my philosophy to those who are persecuted; my intelligence to all fanatics; my religion to atheists; my gaiety to women on the decline; and all the poor remains of an honest fortune to my son, if he survives me.
Frenchmen, those are my last words, listen to what I am saying and reach down into the bottom of your hearts: do you recognize the austere virtues and the unselfishness of a republican? Answer me: who has loved and served the nation more–you or I? People, your reign is over if you fail to stop yourselves at the edge of this abyss. You have never been grander or more sublime than in the majestic calm you have kept during this bloody storm. If you can preserve this calm and this august kind of supervision, you will save Paris, the whole of France, and republican government.
The Women of Revolutionary Paris Demand Action from the Convention
Anonymous
(1793)
Citizen legislators: Justly indignant at the endless jobbery which has occurred in the Ministry … we come to demand of you the execution of constitutional laws. We did not accept the principles of the Constitution so that anarchy and the rule of schemers might be prolonged indefinitely. The premeditated war has lasted long enough. It is time for the children of liberty to sacrifice themselves for the Patrie and not for the ambition and pride of a heap of rogues at the head of our armies. Let us see by the dismissal of all nobles that you are not among their defenders. Hurry, and convince all France by your actions that we have not brought the representatives of a great people from all corners of the Republic, with great show, simply to put on a moving performance in the Champ de Mars. Prove that this Constitution, which we have seen accepted, is a reality and will indeed bring about our happiness. It is not sufficient to tell the people that its happiness is drawing near; it must feel its effects. Four years’ experience of misfortune has taught it to mistrust the fine promises made to it endlessly. …
Believe us, legislators, four years of misfortune have taught us enough to be able to discern ambition under the very mask of patriotism; we no longer believe in the virtue of those men who are reduced to praising themselves. More than words is now necessary to convince us that ambition does not reign in your committees. Organize the government along the lines required by the Constitution. In vain do you tell us that this step will bring about the fall of France … we shall see only the fall of the schemers. In a Paris where the laws are strictly observed, do you expect us to believe that the enemies of the Patrie have no official defenders among you? Dismiss all nobles without exception; if there are some men of good faith among them, they will prove it by making a voluntary sacrifice for the happiness of their Patrie.
Don’t be afraid of disorganizing the army; the more talented a general is, the more urgent it is to replace him if he is ill-intentioned. Don’t do patriots the injustice of saying that there aren’t men among them able to command our armies. Let us have some of these fine soldiers whose talents and deserts have been sacrificed to the ambition and pride of that formerly privileged caste. If, under the reign of despotism, their crime won preference, under that of liberty, virtue must sweep it away. You have made a decree according to which all suspects must be arrested; but we ask you, isn’t this law derisory while these very suspects must execute it?
Legislators! Thus is the people mocked! There is the equality which was to be the basis of its happiness; there is its thanks for the countless evils it has suffered so patiently! It will not be said that this people, reduced to despair, was obliged to seek justice for itself; you will render justice by dismissing all guilty administrators, and by creating extraordinary tribunals in a sufficient number so that the people, before leaving for the frontiers, may say: “I am easy about the fate of my wife and children, for I have seen all domestic conspirators perish under the sword of the law.”
Decree these measures, legislators, and the levee en masse, and you will have saved the Patrie!
A Black Revolutionary Leader in Haiti: Toussaint L’Ouverture
Francois Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture
(1797)
The impolitic and incendiary discourse of Vaublanc has not affected the blacks nearly so much as their certainty of the projects which the proprietors of San Domingo are planning: insidious declarations should not have any effect in the eyes of wise legislators who have decreed liberty for the nations. But the attempts on that liberty which the colonists propose are all the more to be feared because it is with the veil of patriotism that they cover their detestable plans. We know that they seek to impose some of them on you by illusory and specious promises, in order to see renewed in this colony its former scenes of horror. Already perfidious emissaries have stepped in among us to ferment the destructive leaven prepared by the hands of liberticides. But they will not succeed. I swear it by all that liberty holds most sacred. My attachment to France, my knowledge of the blacks, make it my duty not to leave you ignorant either of the crimes which they meditate or the oath that we renew, to bury ourselves under the ruins of a country revived by liberty rather than suffer the return of slavery.
It is for you, Citizens Directors, to turn from over our heads the storm which the eternal enemies of our liberty are preparing in the shades of silence. It is for you to enlighten the legislature, it is for you to prevent the enemies of the present system from spreading themselves on our unfortunate shores to sully it with new crimes. Do not allow our brothers, our friends, to be sacrificed to men who wish to reign over the ruins of the human species. But no, your wisdom will enable you to avoid the dangerous snares which our common enemies hold out for you. …
I send you with this letter a declaration which will acquaint you with the unity that exists between the proprietors of San Domingo who are in France, those in the United States, and those who serve under the English banner. You will see there a resolution, unequivocal and carefully constructed, for the restoration of slavery; you will see there that their determination to succeed has led them to envelop themselves in the mantle of liberty in order to strike it more deadly blows. You will see that they are counting heavily on my complacency in lending myself to their perfidious views by my fear for my children. It is not astonishing that these men who sacrifice their country to their interests are unable to conceive how many sacrifices a true love of country can support in a better father than they, since I unhesitatingly base the happiness of my children on that of my country, which they and they alone wish to destroy.
I shall never hesitate between the safety of San Domingo and my personal happiness; but I have nothing to fear. It is to the solicitude of the French Government that I have confided my children. … I would tremble with horror if it was into the hands of the colonists that I had sent them as hostages; but even if it were so, let them know that in punishing them for the fidelity of their father, they would only add one degree more to their barbarism, without any hope of ever making me fail in my duty. … Blind as they are! They cannot see how this odious conduct on their part can become the signal of new disasters and irreparable misfortunes, and that far from making them regain what in their eyes liberty for all has made them lose, they expose themselves to a total ruin and the colony to its inevitable destruction. Do they think that men who have been able to enjoy the blessing of liberty will calmly see it snatched away? They supported their chains only so long as they did not know any condition of life more happy than that of slavery. But to-day when they have left it, if they had a thousand lives they would sacrifice them all rather than be forced into slavery again. But no, the same hand which has broken our chains will not enslave us anew. France will not revoke her principles, she will not withdraw from us the greatest of her benefits. She will protect us against all our enemies; she will not permit her sublime morality to be perverted, those principles which do her most honour to be destroyed, her most beautiful achievement to be degraded, and her Decree of 16 Pluviose which so honors humanity to be revoked. But if, to re-establish slavery in San Domingo, this was done, then I declare to you it would be to attempt the impossible: we have known how to face dangers to obtain our liberty, we shall know how to brave death to maintain it.
This, Citizens Directors, is the morale of the people of San Domingo, those are the principles that they transmit to you by me.
My own you know. It is sufficient to renew, my hand in yours, the oath that I have made, to cease to live before gratitude dies in my heart, before I cease to be faithful to France and to my duty, before the god of liberty is profaned and sullied by the liberticides, before they can snatch from my hands that sword, those arms, which France confided to me for the defence of its rights and those of humanity, for the triumph of liberty and equality.
A Natural Rights Defense of the French Revolution: The Rights of Man
Thomas Paine
(1791)
To George Washington,
President of the United States of America
Sir,
I present you a small treatise in defense of those principles of freedom which your exemplary virtue hath so eminently contributed to establish. That the Rights of Man may become as universal as your benevolence can wish, and that you may enjoy the happiness of seeing the New World regenerate the Old, is the prayer of
Sir,
Your much obliged, and
Obedient humble servant,
Thomas Paine
From the part Mr. Burke took in the American Revolution, it was natural that I should consider him a friend to mankind; and as our acquaintance commenced on that ground, it would have been more agreeable to me to have had cause to continue in that opinion, than to change it.
At the time Mr. Burke made his violent speech last winter in the English Parliament against the French Revolution and the National Assembly, I was in Paris, and had written to him but a short time before, to inform him how prosperously matters were going on. Soon after this, I saw his advertisement of the pamphlet he intended to publish. …
Among the incivilities by which nations or individuals provoke and irritate each other, Mr. Burke’s pamphlet on the French Revolution is an extraordinary instance. Neither the people of France, nor the National Assembly, were troubling themselves about the affairs of England, or the English Parliament; and that Mr. Burke should commence an unprovoked attack upon them, both in Parliament and in public, is a conduct that cannot be pardoned on the score of manners, nor justified on that of policy. …
Not sufficiently content with abusing the National Assembly, a great part of his work is taken up with abusing Dr. Price (one of the best-hearted men that lives), and the two societies in England known by the name of the Revolution Society, and the Society for Constitutional Information.
Dr. Price had preached a sermon on the 4th of November, 1789, being the anniversary of what is called in England the Revolution, which took place in 1688. Mr. Burke, speaking of this sermon, says, “The political divine proceeds dogmatically to assert that, by the principles of the Revolution, the people of England have acquired three fundamental rights:
1. To choose our own governors.
2. To cashier them for misconduct.
3. To frame a government for ourselves.”
Dr. Price does not say that the right to do these things exists in this or in that person, or in this or in that description of persons, but that it exists in the whole;that it is a right resident in the nation. Mr. Burke, on the contrary, denies that such a right exists in the nation, either in whole or in part, or that it exists any where; and, what is still more strange and marvelous, he says, “that the people of England utterly disclaim such a right, and that they will resist the practical assertion of it with their lives and fortunes.”
That men should take up arms, and spend their lives and fortunes, not to maintain their rights, but to maintain they have not rights, is an entirely new species of discovery, and suited to the paradoxical genius of Mr. Burke.
The English Parliament of 1688 did a certain thing, which, for themselves and their constituents, they had a right to do, and which it appeared right should be done: But, in addition to this right, which they possessed by delegation, they set up another right by assumption, that of binding and controlling posterity to the end of time. …
There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the “end of time,” or of commanding forever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore, all such clauses, acts or declarations, by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void.
Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generation which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. …
It was not against Louis XVI, but against the despotic principles of the government, that the nation revolted. These principles had not their origin in him, but in the original establishment, many centuries back; and they were become too deeply rooted to be removed, and the Augean stable of parasites and plunderers too abominably filthy to be cleansed, by anything short of a complete and universal revolution. … There were, if I may so express it, a thousand despotisms to be reformed in France, which had grown up under the hereditary despotism of the monarchy, and became so rooted as to be in a great measure independent of it. …
Not one glance of compassion, not one commiserating reflection, that I can find throughout his book, has he [Burke] bestowed on those who lingered out the most wretched of lives, a life without hope, in the most miserable of prisons.
It is painful to behold a man employing his talents to corrupt himself. Nature has been kinder to Mr. Burke than he is to her. He is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblage of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird. …
More of the citizens fell in this struggle than of their opponents; but four or five persons were seized by the populace, and instantly put to death; the governor of the Bastille, and the mayor of Paris, who was detected in the act of betraying them; and afterwards Foulon, one of the new ministry, and Berthier, his son-in-law, who had accepted the office of intendant of Paris. Their heads were struck upon spikes, and carried about the city; and it is upon this mode of punishment that Mr. Burke builds a great part of his tragic scenes. …
These outrages are not the effect of the principles of the revolution, but of the degraded mind that existed before the revolution, and which the revolution is calculated to reform. Place them then to their proper cause, and take the reproach of them to your own side. …
Mr. Burke, with his usual outrage, abuses the Declaration of the Rights of Man, published by the National Assembly of France, as the basis on which the constitution of France is built. This he calls “paltry and blurred sheets of paper about the rights of man.”
Does Mr. Burke mean to deny that man has any rights? If he does, then he must mean that there are no such things as rights any where, and that he has none himself; for who is there in the world but man? But if Mr. Burke means to admit that man has rights, the question then will be, what are those rights, and how came man by them originally? …
The duty of man is not a wilderness of turnpike gates, through which he is to pass by tickets from one to the other. It is plain and simple, and consists but of two points. His duty to God, which every man must feel, and with respect to his neighbor, to do as he would be done by….
Hitherto we have spoken only (and that but in part) of the natural rights of man. We have now to consider the civil rights of man, and to show how the one originates from the other. Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured. His natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights. …
In casting our eyes over the world, it is extremely easy to distinguish the governments which have arisen out of society, or out of the social compact, from those which have not: but to place this in a clearer light than what a single glance may afford, it will be proper to take a review of the several sources from which the governments have arisen, and on which they have been founded.
They may be all comprehended under three heads. First, superstition. Secondly, power. Thirdly, the common interests of society, and the common rights of man.
The first was a government of priestcraft, the second of conquerors, and the third of reason. …
We have now to review the governments which arise out of society, in contradistinction to those which arose out of superstition and conquest.
It has been thought a considerable advance toward establishing the principles of freedom, to say, that government is a compact between those who govern and those who are governed: but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause, for as a man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governments to form such a compact with.
The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist. … The constitution of a country is not the act of its government, but of the people constituting a government. …
The authority of the present [National] Assembly [of France] is different to what the authority of future assemblies will be. The authority of the present one is to form a constitution; the authority of future assemblies will be to legislate according to the principles and forms prescribed in that constitution; and if experience should hereafter show that alterations, amendments, or additions are necessary, the constitution will point out the mode by which such things shall be done, and not leave it to the discretionary power of the future government. …
The Constitution of France says, that every man who pays a tax of sixty sous per annum (2s. and 6d. English) is an elector. What article will Mr. Burke place against this? Can anything be more limited, and at the same time more capricious, than what the qualifications are in England? …
The French Constitution says, that the number of representatives for any place shall be in a ratio to the number of taxable inhabitants or electors. What article will Mr. Burke place against this? The county of Yorkshire, which contains near a million souls, sends two county members; and so does the county of Rutland, which contains not a hundredth part of that number. …
The French Constitution says, there shall be no game laws; that the farmer on whose land wild game shall be found (for it is by the produce of those lands they are fed) shall have a right to what he can take. That there shall be no monopolies of any kind, that all trades shall be free, and every man free to follow any occupation by which he can procure an honest livelihood, and in any place, town, or city, throughout the nation. What will Mr. Burke say to this? …
The French Constitution says, there shall be no titles; and of consequence, all that class of equivocal generation, which in some countries is called “aristocracy,” and in others “nobility,” is done away, and the peer is exalted intoman.
Titles are but nicknames, and every nickname is a title. The thing is perfectly harmless in itself, but it marks a sort of foppery in the human character which degrades it. …
The French Constitution has reformed the condition of the clergy. It has raised the income of the lower and middle classes, and taken from the higher. None is now less than twelve hundred livres (fifty pounds sterling), nor any higher than about two or three thousand pounds. What will Mr. Burke place against this? …
The French Constitution has abolished tithes, that source of perpetual discontent between the tithe-holder and the parishioner. …
The French Constitution hath abolished or renounced toleration, and intolerance also, and hath established UNIVERSAL RIGHT OF CONSCIENCE. …
Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all law-religions, or religions established by law. Take away the law-establishment, and every religion reassumes its original benignity. In America, a Catholic priest is a good citizen, a good character, and a good neighbor; an Episcopal minister is of the same description: and this proceeds, independently of the men, from there being no law-establishment in America. …
By the French Constitution, the nation is always named before the king. The third article of the Declaration of Rights says, “ The nation is essentially the source (or fountain) of all sovereignty.” Mr. Burke argues, that, in England, a king is the fountain–that he is the fountain of all honor. … In contemplating the French Constitution, we see in it a rational order of things. …
One of the first works of the National Assembly, instead of vindictive proclamations, as has been the case with other governments, published a Declaration of the Rights of Man, as the basis on which the new Constitution was to be built. …
… We see the solemn and majestic spectacle of a nation opening its commission, under the auspices of its Creator, to establish a government; a scene so new, and so transcendently unequalled by any thing in the European world, that the name of a revolution is diminutive of its character, and it rises into a regeneration of man.
What are the present governments of Europe, but a scene of iniquity and oppression? What is that of England? Do not its own inhabitants say? It is a market where every man has his price, and where corruption is common traffic, at the expense of a deluded people? No wonder, then, that the French Revolution is traduced. …
Notwithstanding the nonsense, for it deserves not better name, that Mr. Burke has asserted about hereditary rights, and hereditary succession, and that a nation has not a right to form a government for itself; it happened to fall in his way to give some account of what government is. “Government,” say[s] he, “is a contrivance of human wisdom. ” …
Admitting that government is a contrivance of human wisdomm, it must necessarily follow, that hereditary succession, and hereditary rights (as they are called), can make no part of it, because it is impossible to make wisdom hereditary; and on the other hand, that cannot be a wise contrivance, which in its operation may commit the government of a nation to the wisdom of an idiot. The ground which Mr. Burke now takes, is fatal to every part of his cause. …
What were formerly called revolutions, were little more than a change of persons, or an alteration of local circumstances. … But what we now see in the world, from the revolutions of America and France, is a renovation of the natural order of things, a system of principles as universal as truth and the existence of man, and combining moral with political happiness and national prosperity. …
Government on the old system is an assumption of power for the aggrandizement of itself; on the new, a delegation of power, for the common benefit of society. The former supports itself by keeping up a system of war; the latter promotes a system of peace, as the true means of enriching a nation. The one encourages national prejudices; the other promotes universal society, as the means of universal commerce. The one measures its prosperity, by the quantity of revenue it extorts; the other proves its excellence, by the small quantity of taxes it requires. … The representative system takes society and civilization for its basis; nature, reason, and experience for its guide. …
Never did so great an opportunity offer itself to England, and to all Europe, as is produced by the two revolutions of America and France. By the former, freedom has a national champion in the western world; and by the latter, in Europe. When another nation shall join France, despotism and bad government will scarcely dare to appear. To use a trite expression, the iron is becoming hot all over Europe. The insulted German and the enslaved Spaniard, the Russ and the Pole are beginning to think. The present age will hereafter merit to be called the Age of Reason, and the present generation will appear to the future as the Adam of a new world.
A Feminist Analysis of Natural Law and the Rights of Women
Mary Wollstonecraft
(1792)
My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinatinggraces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists–I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity will soon become objects of contempt.
Dismissing those soft pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind, exquisite sensibility, and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, I wish to shew that elegance is inferior to virtue, that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex.
Youth is the season for love in both sexes; but in those days of thoughtless enjoyment provision should be made for the more important years of life, when reflection takes place of sensation. The woman who has only been taught to please will soon find that her charms are oblique sunbeams and that they cannot have much effect on her husband’s heart when they are seen every day, when the summer is passed and gone. Will she then have sufficient native energy to look into herself for comfort, and cultivate her dormant faculties? or, is it not more rational to expect that she will try to please other men?
Why must the female mind be tainted by coquettish arts to gratify the sensualist and prevent love from subsiding into friendship, or compassionate tenderness, when there are not qualities on which friendship can be built? Let the honest heart shew itself, and reason teach passion to submit to necessity; or, let the dignified pursuit of virtue and knowledge raise the mind above those emotions. …
If then women are not a swarm of ephemeron triflers, why should they be kept in ignorance under the specious name of innocence? … As to the argument respecting the subjection in which the sex has ever been held, it retorts on man. The many have always been enthralled by the few; and monsters, who scarcely have shown any discernment of human excellence, have tyrannized over thousands of their fellow-creatures. … China is not the only country where a living man has been made a God. Men have submitted to superior strength to enjoy with impunity the pleasure of the moment; womenhave only done the same, and therefore till it is proved that the courtier, who servilely resigns the birthright of a man, is not a moral agent, it cannot be demonstrated that woman is essentially inferior to man because she has always been subjugated.
The Napoleonic Code Regulates Gender
Napoleon I
(1804)
Of the Rights and Respective Duties of Husband and Wife
212. Husband and wife mutually owe to each other fidelity, succor, and assistance.
213. The husband owes protection to his wife, the wife obedience to her husband.
214. The wife is obliged to live with her husband, and to follow him wherever he may think proper to dwell; the husband is bound to receive her, and to furnish her with everything necessary for the purposes of life, according to his means and condition.
215. The wife can do no act in law without the authority of her husband. …
Of Causes of Divorce
229. The husband may demand divorce for cause of adultery on the part of his wife.
230. The wife may demand divorce for cause of adultery on the part of her husband, where he shall have kept his concubine in their common house.
Of the Effects of Divorce
298. In the case of divorce allowed at law for cause of adultery, the guilty party can never marry his or her accomplice. The adulterous wife shall be condemned by the same judgment, and upon the requisition of the public ministry, to confinement in a house of correction for a certain period, which shall not be less than three months, nor exceed two years.
The Imperial Catechism Hangs a New Star in God’s Firmament
French Catholic Church
(1806)
Question. What are the duties of Christians toward those who govern them, and what in particular are our duties towards Napoleon I, our emperor?
Answer. Christians owe to the princes who govern them, and we in particular owe to Napoleon I, our emperor, love, respect, obedience, fidelity, military service, and the taxes levied for the preservation and defense of the empire and of his throne. We also owe him fervent prayers for his safety and for the spiritual and temporal prosperity of the state.
Question. Why are we subject to all these duties toward our emperor?
Answer. First, because God, who has created empires and distributes them according to his will, has, by loading our emperor with gifts both in peace and in war, established him as our sovereign and made him the agent of his power and his image upon earth. To honor and serve our emperor is therefore to honor and serve God himself. Secondly, because our Lord Jesus Christ himself, both by his teaching and his example, has taught us what we owe to our sovereign. Even at his very birth he obeyed the edict of Caesar Augustus; he paid the established tax; and while he commanded us to render to God those things which belong to God, he also commanded us to render unto Caesar those things which are Caesar’s.
Question. Are there not special motives which should attach us more closely to Napoleon I, our emperor?
Answer. Yes, for it is he whom God has raised up in trying times to re‘stablish the public worship of the holy religion of our fathers and to be its protector; he has re‘tablished and preserved public order by his profound and active wisdom; he defends the state by his mighty arm; he has become the anointed of the Lord by the consecration which he has received from the sovereign pontiff, head of the Church universal.
Question. What must we think of those who are wanting in their duties toward our emperor?
Answer. According to the apostle Paul, they are resisting the order established by God himself and render themselves worthy of eternal damnation.
Prussia Abolishes Serfdom: The Reform Edict of 1807
Frederick William III
(1807)
We, Frederick William, by the grace of God king of Prussia, etc., etc., hereby make known and proclaim that: Since peace has been established we have been occupied before everything else with the care for the depressed condition of our faithful subjects and the speediest revival and greatest possible improvement in this respect. We have considered that, in face of the prevailing want, the means at our disposal would be insufficient to aid each individual, and even if they were sufficient, we could not hope to accomplish our object; and that, moreover, in accordance with the imperative demands of justice and with the principles of a judicious economic policy, it behooves us to remove every obstacle which has hitherto prevented the individual from attaining such a state of prosperity as he was capable of reaching. We have further considered that the existing restrictions, both on the possession and enjoyment of landed property and on the personal condition of the agricultural laborer, especially interfere with our benevolent purpose and disable a great force which might be applied to the restoration of agriculture,–the former, by their prejudicial influence upon the value of landed property and the credit of the proprietor; the latter, by diminishing the value of labor. We desire, therefore, to reduce both kinds of restrictions so far as the common well-being demands, and we accordingly ordain the following.
1. Every inhabitant of our states is competent, without any limitation on the part of the state, to own or mortgage landed property of every kind. The noble may therefore own not only noble, but also non-noble, citizen and peasant lands of every kind, and the citizen and peasant may possess not only citizen, peasant, and other non-noble, but also noble tracts of land without in any case needing special permission for any acquisition whatever, although henceforth, as before, every change of ownership must be announced to the authorities. All privileges which are possessed by noble over citizen inheritances are entirely abolished. …
2. Every noble is henceforth permitted, without any derogation from his station, to engage in citizen occupation, and every citizen or peasant is allowed to pass from the citizen into the peasant class or from the peasant into the citizen class. …
10. From the date of this ordinance no new relation of serfdom, whether by birth or marriage, or by assuming the position of a serf, or by contract, can be created.
11. With the publication of the present ordinance the existing relations of serfdom of those serfs, with their wives and children, who possess their peasant holdings by inheritance, or in their own right, or by perpetual leases, or of copyhold, shall cease entirely, together with all mutual rights and duties.
12. From Martinmas, one thousand eight hundred and ten (1810), all serfdom shall cease throughout our whole realm. From Martinmas, 1810, there shall be only free persons, as is already the case upon the royal domains in all our provinces,–free persons, however, still subject, as a matter of course, to all obligations which bind them, as free persons, by reason of the possession of an estate or by virtue of a special contract.
To this declaration of our supreme will every one whom it may concern, and in particular our provincial authorities and other officials, are exactly and dutifully to conform, and the present ordinance is to be universally made known.
Napoleon I “Enlightens” Spain
Napoleon I
(1808)
To date from the publication of the present decree, feudal rights are abolished in Spain.
All personal obligations, all exclusive fishing rights and other rights of similar nature on the coast or on rivers and streams, all feudal monopolies ( banalites) of ovens, mills, and inns are suppressed. It shall be free to every one who shall conform to the laws to develop his industry without restraint.
The tribunal of the Inquisition is abolished, as inconsistent with the civil sovereignty and authority.
The property of the Inquisition shall be sequestered and fall to the Spanish state, to serve as security for the bonded debt.
Considering that the members of the various monastic orders have increased to an undue degree and that, although a certain number of them are useful in assisting the ministers of the altar in the administration of the sacraments, the existence of too great a number interferes with the prosperity of the state, we have decreed and do decree as follows:
The number of convents now in existence in Spain shall be reduced to a third of their present number. This reduction shall be accomplished by uniting the members of several convents of the same order into one.
From the publication of the present decree, no one shall be admitted to the novitiate or permitted to take the monastic vow until the number of the religious of both sexes has been reduced to one third of that now in existence. …
All regular ecclesiastics who desire to renounce the monastic life and live as secular ecclesiastics are at liberty to leave their monasteries. …
In view of the fact that the institution which stands most in the way of the internal prosperity of Spain is that of the customs lines separating the provinces, we have decreed and do decree what follows:
To date from January 1 next, the barriers existing between the provinces shall be suppressed. The custom houses shall be removed to the frontiers and there established.
The Grande Armee in Retreat: the Russian Campaign
Benjamin Constant
(1812)
On the 25th of November [1812] there had been thrown across the river temporary bridges made of beams taken from the cabins of the Poles. … At a little after five in the afternoon the beams gave way, not being sufficiently strong; and as it was necessary to wait until the next day, the army again abandoned itself to gloomy forebodings. It was evident that they would have to endure the fire of the enemy all the next day. But there was no longer any choice; for it was only at the end of this night of agony and suffering of every description that the first beams were secured in the river. It is hard to comprehend how men could submit to stand, up to their mouths in water filled with ice, rallying all the strength which nature had given them, added to all that the energy of devotion furnished, and drive piles several feet deep into a miry bed, struggling against the most horrible fatigue, pushing back with their hands enormous blocks of ice which threatened to submerge and sink them. …
The emperor awaited daylight in a poor hut, and in the morning said to Prince Berthier, “Well, Berthier, how do we get out of this?” He was seated in his room, great tears flowing down his cheeks, which were paler than usual and the prince was seated near him. They exchanged words, and the emperor appeared overcome by his grief, leave to the imagination what was passing in his soul.
When the artillery and baggage wagons passed, the bridge was so overweighted that it fell in. Instantly a backward movement took place, which crowded together all the magnitude of stragglers who were advancing in the rear of the artillery, like a flock being herded. Another bridge had been constructed, as if the sad thought had occurred that the first might give way, but the second was narrow and without a railing; nevertheless it seemed at first a very valuable makeshift in such a calamity. But how disasters follow one upon another! The stragglers rushed to the second bridge in crowds. But the artillery, the baggage wagons,–a word, all the army supplies,–had been in front on the first bridge when it broke down. … Now, since it was urgent that the artillery should pass first, it rushed impetuously toward the only road to safety which remained. No one can describe the scene of horror which ensued; for it was literally over a road of trampled human bodies that conveyances of all sorts reached the bridge. On this occasion one could see how much brutality and cold-blooded ferocity can be produced in human minds by the instinct of self-preservation. … As I have said, the bridge had no railing; and crowds of those who forced their way across fell into the river and were engulfed beneath the ice. Others, in the fall, tried to stop themselves by grasping the planks of the bridge, and remained suspended over the abyss until, their hands crushed by the wheels of the vehicles, they lost their grasp and went to join their comrades as the waves closed over them. Entire caissons with drivers and horses were precipitated into the water. …
Officers harnessed themselves to sleds to carry some of their companions who were rendered helpless by their wounds. They wrapped these unfortunates as warmly as possible, cheered them from time to time with a glass of brandy when they could procure it, and lavished upon them the most touching attention. There were many who behaved in this unselfish manner, of whose names we are ignorant; and how few returned to enjoy in their own country the remembrance of the most heroic deeds of their lives!
On the 29th the emperor quitted the banks of the Beretina and we slept at Kamen, where his Majesty occupied a poor wooden building which the icy air penetrated from all sides through the windows, for nearly all the glass was broken. We closed the openings as well as we could with bundles of hay. A short distance from us, in a large lot, were penned up the wretched Russian prisoners whom the army drove before it. I had much difficulty in comprehending the delusion of victory which our poor soldiers still kept up by dragging after them this wretched luxury of prisoners, who could only be an added burden, as they required constant surveillance. When the conquerors are dying of famine, what becomes of the conquered? These poor Russians, exhausted by marches and hunger, nearly all perished that night. …
[Napoleon secretly decided to leave his stricken army and return to France as quickly as possible.] The emperor left in the night. By daybreak the army had learned the news, and the impression it made cannot be depicted. Discouragement was at its height, and many soldiers cursed the emperor and reproached him for abandoning them.
This night, the 6th [of December], the cold increased greatly. Its severity may be imagined, as birds were found on the ground frozen stiff. Soldiers seated themselves with their heads in their hands and bodies bent forward in order thus to feel less the emptiness of their stomachs. … Everything had failed us. Long before reaching Wilna [Vilnius, today in Lithuania], the horses being dead, we received orders to burn our carriages and all their contents.
Constitutional Monarchy in France, Again
Louis XVIII
(1814)
Louis by the Grace of God, King of France and Navarre–to all those to whom these presents come, salutation. Divine Providence in recalling us to our estates after a long absence has imposed grave responsibilities upon us. Peace was the first necessity of our subjects, and we have unceasingly occupied ourselves with this. That peace, so essential to France and to the rest of Europe has been signed. A constitutional charter was demanded by the existing condition of the kingdom, we promised this and now publish it. We have taken into consideration the fact that although the whole authority in France resides in the person of the king, our predecessors have not hesitated to modify the exercise of this in accordance with the differences of the times. It was thus that the communes owed their enfranchisement to Louis the Fat, the confirmation and extension of their rights to Saint Louis and Philip the Fair, and that the judicial system was established and developed by the laws of Louis XI, Henry II, and Charles IX. It was in this way finally that Louis XIV regulated almost every portion of the public administration by various ordinances which have never been surpassed in wisdom. We, like the kings our predecessors, have had to consider the effects of the ever increasing progress of knowledge, the new relations which this progress has introduced into society, the direction given to the public mind during half a century and the serious troubles resulting therefrom. We have perceived that the wish of our subjects for a constitutional charter was the expression of a real need, but in yielding to this wish we have taken every precaution that this charter should be worthy of us and of the people whom we are proud to rule. Able men taken from the first bodies of the state were added to the commissioners of our council to elaborate this important work. While we recognize that the expectations of enlightened Europe ought to be gratified by a free monarchical constitution, we have had to remember that our first duty toward our peoples was to preserve for their own interest the rights and prerogatives of our crown. We hope that, taught by experience, they may be convinced that the supreme authority can alone give to institutions which it establishes the power, permanence and dignity with which it is itself clothed. That, consequently, when the wisdom of kings freely harmonizes with the wish of the peoples, a constitutional charter may long endure, but that when concessions are snatched with violence from a weak government, public liberty is not less endangered than the throne itself.
We have sought the principles of the constitutional charter in the French character and in the venerable monuments of past centuries. Thus we perceived in the revival of the peerage a truly national institution which binds memories to hope, by uniting ancient and modern times. We have replaced by the chamber of deputies, those ancient assemblies of the March Field and May Field, and those chambers of the third estate which so often exhibited at once proof of their zeal for the interests of the people, and fidelity and respect for the authority of kings. In thus endeavoring to renew the chain of time which fatal excesses had broken, we effaced from our memory, as we would we might blot out from history, all the evils which have afflicted the country during our absence. Happy to find ourselves again in the bosom of our great family, we could only respond to the love of which we receive so many testimonies by uttering words of peace and consolation. The dearest wish of our heart is that all the French may live like brothers, and that no bitter memory should ever trouble the security which ought to follow the solemn act which we grant them to-day.
Confident in our intentions, strong in our conscience, we engage ourselves before the assembly which listens to us to be faithful to this Constitutional Charter, with the intention of swearing to maintain it with added solemnity before the altars of Him who weighs in the same balance kings and nations.
For these reasons we have voluntarily and by the free exercise of our royal authority granted and do grant, concede and accord, as well for us as for our successors forever, the Constitutional Charter as follows: …
Primary Sources – Unit Ten – The Revolution in Energy & Industry
The Economist Assesses the Transformation of Britain
James Wilson
(1851)
Perhaps the best way of realizing … the actual progress of the last half-century would be to fancy ourselves suddenly transferred to the year 1800, with all our habits, expectations, requirements, and standard of living formed upon the luxuries and appliances collected round us in 1850. In the first year of the century we should find ourselves eating bread at 1s. 10 1/2d. the quartern [four pound] loaf, and those who could not afford this price driven to short commons, to entire abstinence, or to some miserable substitute. We should find ourselves grumbling at heavy taxes laid on nearly all the necessaries and luxuries of life … receiving our Edinburgh letters in London a week after they were written, and paying thirteen pencehalfpenny for them when delivered, exchanging the instantaneous telegraph for the slow and costly express by chaise and pair; … and relapsing from the blaze of light which gas now pours along our streets, into a perilous and uncomfortable darkness made visible by a few wretched oil lamps scattered at distant intervals.
But these would by no means comprise the sum total, nor the worst part, of the descent into barbarism. We should find our criminal law in a state worthy of Draco; executions taking place by the dozen; the stealing of five shillings punishable and punished as severely as rape or murder; slavery and the slave trade flourishing in their palmiest atrocity. We should find the liberty of the subject at the lowest ebb; freedom of discussion and writing always in fear and frequently in jeopardy; religious rights trampled under foot; Catholics, slaves and not citizens; Dissenters still disabled and despised. Parliament was unreformed; public jobbing flagrant and shameless; gentlemen drank a bottle where they now drink a glass, and measured their capacity by their cups; and the temperance medal was a thing undreamed of. Finally, thepeople in those days were little thought of, where they are now the main topic of discourse and statesmanship; steamboats were unknown, and a voyage to America occupied eight weeks instead of ten days; and while in 1850, a population of nearly 30,000,000 paid £50,000,000 of taxes, in 1801 a population of 15,000,000 paid no less than £63,000,000.
We have ample means of showing by indisputable facts that wealth has been diffused as well as increased during the period under review; that so far from “the rich having become richer and the poor poorer,” as is so often and so inconsiderately asserted, the middle classes have advanced faster than the great, and the command over the comforts and luxuries of life, even among peasants and artisans, is far greater now than at any former period. …
In the first place let us look at the savings banks, which are entirely the growth of this century, the first having been established about 1806, and which are confined to the savings of the peasant and artisan class, of domestic servants, and of the humbler portion of the middle class. …
Let us now collect together a few facts showing the increase in the consumption of those articles of necessity, or luxury, which are used indiscriminately among all classes.
We have no means of comparing the amount of butchers’ meat consumed now with that consumed at the beginning of the century, but the price we know has fallen from 5s.8d. to 3s.4d. a stone. … During the latter part of the 18th century rye and barley bread were very extensively used in many parts of England, the former being … the habitual food of one-seventh of the population; it is now unknown, except in Durham, while the use of wheaten bread is almost universal among the poorer classes.
In the use of coffee, tea, and sugar also, a marked advance has taken place. …
The truth is, that the relief to the population generally, and to the working classes especially, which has been given by the remission of taxation, has been something quite unprecedented. … If a poor man is content to live, as wise and great men have often thought it well to live, in health and comfort, but with strict frugality … he may escape taxation almost entirely. …
In no one point is the half-century we have just closed more distinguished from its predecessors than in the share of PUBLIC ATTENTION AND SYMPATHY WHICH THE CONDITION OF THE POORER CLASSES HAS OBTAINED. Formerly the lower orders were regarded, even by the kindly disposed, simply as hewers of wood and drawers of water. … The idea of studying them, of raising them, of investigating into the operation of the causes which affected them for good or evil, had scarcely taken rise. There was kindness, there was charity, there was sympathy toward the poor as individuals, but not any interest in their conditions as a class. We are far from considering the multiplication of charitable institutions as a … source of unalloyed good to the indigent and industrious of the community, but it at least shows the increase of sympathy towards them on the part of the rich. … In the metropolis alone the charitable institutions reach 491 in number, and have an annual income of £1,765,000. Of those 109 were established in the last, and no less than 294 in the present century.
But a far stronger proof of the general interest now taken in the working classes, is to be found in the various commissions that have of late years been issued to inquire into the state of the people in various occupations. Wherever there was a rumor of an abuse, a tyranny, or an injustice, a representation was made in Parliament, and an investigation immediately took place. We have had a factory commission, a children’s employment commission, a commission to inquire into the condition of those employed in mines and manufactures, and a commission to inquire into the employment of women and children in agriculture. We have had inspectors of mines and inspectors of factories appointed. …
On the novel and extraordinary attention which is now being paid to SANITARY MATTERS we can look with … unmingled satisfaction. … Our progress since 1800 has been far from contemptible. The population is less crowded than it was, and roomier dwellings are constantly in process of erection. The average number of individuals in a house which was 5.67 in 1801 had fallen to 5.44 in 1841; and the census which is to be taken this year, will, we have no doubt, show a still further diminution. … Many removable causes of premature death yet remain, but the four or five years which the last half-century has added to the average duration of life are a hopeful earnest of what may yet be done to prolong it, now that the subject has awakened public interest, and that administrative exertions are conducted under the guidance of scientific skill.
We hope we [have] succeeded in satisfying those who [have] followed our facts and figures that the national advance in wealth and all the material appliances of civilization … has not been turned solely to the benefit of the more favored children of fortune, but that all classes of the community, the humbler as well as the richer, have participated in the blessings of the change. Indeed, it scarcely could be otherwise. The cheapness of the necessaries and of the commoner, and therefore more indispensable comforts of daily life, must redound more especially to the advantage of those whose income is most exclusively devoted to the purchase of those needful articles. Areduction in the price of bread, meat, coffee, sugar, and calico, affects the comforts of the poor man far more immediately and extensively than that of the rich or the easy classes. … The only way in which our conclusion could be shown to be erroneous, would be by proving that the wages of labor had fallen to an equal or a greater ratio; but this, it is well known, is far from having been generally the case. … While unquestionably wages have fallen considerably in a few departments of industry, this fall has been confined to those departments in which a change in the machinery employed has taken place, and in which the artisans have obstinately refused to accommodate themselves to the new state of things, and have continued to overstock an impoverished and doomed employment, as in the case of plain hand-loom weaving; or to those where senseless strikeshave introduced supernumerary hands or new mechanism into the trade, as in the cases of coarse cotton spinners and of the London tailors; or to those where the easiness and collateral conveniences of the occupation have attracted to it excessive numbers, as in the case of needlework. In these branches wages have undoubtedly fallen, and the hours of work have become in some instances longer; but the general tendency in most departments of industry has been the reverse;–a desire for shorter hours has been of late rapidly spreading. The hours of labor in factories have been reduced for adults from 74 to 60 a week, and for children from 72 to 40, shops are beginning to be closed much earlier, and great, and in some cases already successful, efforts are making to secure a weekly half-holiday for the generality of tradespeople. All these, where not pursued by illegitimate means, are steps in the right direction. …
[He praises the development of steam ocean transport.] But this advance is nothing compared to that which has taken place in LOCOMOTION BY LAND within the last twenty years. It is here that our progress has been most stupendous–surpassing all previous steps since the creation of the human race. … At the period at which we write, the whole of England is traversed by almost countless railways in every direction. … In 1850, [the normal speed of transportation] is habitually forty miles an hour, and seventy for those who like it. We have reached in a single bound from the speed of a horse’s canter, to the utmost speed comparable with the known strength and coherence of brass and iron.
Now, who have specially benefited by this vast invention? The rich, whose horses and carriages carried them in comfort over the known world?–the middle classes to whom stage coaches and mails were an accessible mode of conveyance?–or the poor, whom the cost of locomotion condemned often to an almost vegetable existence? Clearly the latter. The railroad is the Magna Charter [sic] of their motive freedom. How few among the last generation ever stirred beyond their own village? How few among the present will die without visiting London? …
But even the rapid augmentation of our locomotive speed shrinks into nothing when compared to that which has taken place in the last five years in the transmission of intelligence. … In 1850, for a sum varying from 5s. to 12s. 6d., any private individual may send a message or summon a friend [by telegraph], the distance of many hundred miles in a space of time reckoned by seconds rather than by minutes. …
Economists as we are, we should be little satisfied with even these signs of astounding progress … were there not ample reason to believe that a corresponding improvement has taken place in EDUCATION, SOCIAL MORALS, AND PUBLIC PRINCIPLE. …
When we remember that it is only within our own recollection that the propriety or wisdom of educating the lower orders at all was seriously and very generally questioned; that before 1800 the only provision for popular instruction was to be found in grammar and other endowed schools (the funds for the support of a large proportion of which had been scandalously jobbed away or misapplied), together with a few dame schools in towns, and a few squires’ and ladies’ schools in the rural districts; and that now not only is the paramount necessity of general education universally insisted upon, but every sect vies with every other in the number and excellence of its schools; that even pauper schools are systematically good; that even ragged schools for the most desolate and depraved of our town population have been established with great success in many localities … that Lancasterian schools, national schools, model schools, and normal schools, are all the product of this century; that a committee on education now forms a recognized department of the government; and finally, that Parliament, which in 1833 could with difficulty be persuaded to vote £20,000 for educational purposes in aid of private munificence, now votes liberally and ungrudgingly £150,000 a year:–when we remember all those things, we shall scarcely be disposed to deem our national progress under this head unsatisfactory or slow.
The general tone of morals in the middle and higher classes has unquestionably become much higher and purer in the last generation. Language which was common in our fathers’ days would not be tolerated now. A higher sense, both of duty and of decency, has taken possession of all ranks. … Debt, which used to be considered as an indispensable characteristic of a man of fashion, is now almost everywhere scouted as disreputable; and reckless extravagance is no longer regarded as an indication of cleverness and spirit. … Laborhas ceased to be looked down upon–exertion is no longer regarded as derogatory, nor a life of languid indolence as the supreme felicity. The bees are more considered than the butterflies of society; wealth is valued less as an exemption from toil, than as a call to effort, and an instrument of influence and power; the duties of property are, far less than formerly, forgotten in its rights; if the poor do not yet work less, the rich certainly work more. …
The third point to which we wish to draw attention, is the marked improvement which has taken place in one generation in habits of temperance, especially among the upper circles. Within the memory of men still in middle life, excess in wine was the rule, not the exception; few left the dinner-table without having taken more than was good for them; many got drunk every day. …Now, intemperance is as disreputable as any other kind of low debauchery, and, except in Ireland and at the universities, a drunken gentleman is one of the rarest sights in society. …
On no account has this country greater ground for self-congratulation than on the vast improvement which is observable in the CHARACTER and tone of feeling among PUBLIC MEN. … Statesmen have now learned to feel not merely that they are playing a noble game … but that they are called upon to guide a glorious vessel through fluctuating shoals, and sunken rocks, and storms of terrific violence … the greatest nation that ever stood in the vanguard of civilization and of freedom. …
Manchester Becomes a Thriving Industrial City
John Aikin
(1795)
No exertions of the masters or workmen could have answered the demands of trade without the introduction of spinning machines.
These were first used by the country people on a confined scale, twelve spindles being thought a great matter; while the awkward posture required to spin on them was discouraging to grown up people, who saw with surprise children from nine to twelve years of age manage them with dexterity, whereby plenty was brought into families formerly overburthened with children, and the poor weavers were delivered from the bondage in which they had lain from the insolence of spinners. …
The improvements kept increasing, till the capital engines for twist were perfected, by which thousands of spindles are put in motion by a water wheel, and managed mostly by children, without confusion and with less waste of cotton than by the former methods. But the carding and slubbing preparatory to twisting required a greater range of invention. The first attempts were in carding engines, which are very curious, and now brought to a great degree of perfection; and an engine has been contrived for converting the carded wool to slubbing, by drawing it to about the thickness of candlewick preparatory to throwing it into twist. …
These machines exhibit in their construction an aggregate of clock-maker’s work and machinery most wonderful to behold. The cotton to be spun is introduced through three sets of rollers, so governed by the clock-work, that the set which first receives the cotton makes so many revolutions than the next in order, and these more than the last which feed the spindles, that it is drawn out considerably in passing through the rollers; being lastly received by spindles, which have every one on the bobbin a fly like that of a flax wheel; …
Upon these machines twist is made of any fineness proper for warps; but as it is drawn length way of the staple, it was not so proper for weft; wherefore on the introduction of fine callicoes and muslins, mules were invented, having a name expressive of their species, being a mixed machinery between jennies and the machines for twisting, and adapted to spin weft as fine as could be desired. …
These mules carry often to a hundred and fifty spindles, and can be set to draw weft to an exact fineness up to 150 hanks in the pound, of which muslin has been made, which for a while had a prompt sale; but the flimsiness of its fabric has brought the finer sorts into discredit, and a stagnation of trade damped the sale of the rest. …
The prodigious extension of the several branches of the Manchester manufactures has likewise greatly increased the business of several trades and manufactures connected with or dependent upon them. The making of paper at mills in the vicinity has been brought to great perfection, and now includes all kinds, from the strongest parcelling paper to the finest writing sorts, and that on which banker’s bills are printed. To the ironmongers shops, which are greatly increased of late, are generally annexed smithies, where many articles are made, even to nails. A considerable iron foundry is established in Salford, in which are cast most of the articles wanted in Manchester and its neighborhood, consisting chiefly of large cast wheels for the cotton machines; cylinders, boilers, and pipes for steam engines; cast ovens, and grates of all sizes. This work belongs to Batemen and Sharrard, gen[tle]men every way qualified for so great an undertaking. Mr. Sharrard is a very ingenious and able engineer, who has improved upon and brought the steam engine to great perfection. …
The tin-plate workers have found additional employment in furnishing many articles for spinning machines; as have also the braziers in casting wheels for the motion-work of the rollers used in them; and the clock-makers in cutting them. Harness-makers have been much employed in making bands for carding engines, and large wheels for the first operation of drawing out the cardings, whereby the consumption of strong curried leather has been much increased. …
Within the last twenty or thirty years the vast increase of foreign trade has caused many of the Manchester manufacturers to travel abroad, and agents or partners to be fixed for a considerable time on the continent, as well as foreigners to reside at Manchester. And the town has now in every respect assumed the style and manners of one of the commercial capitals of Europe. …
Yorkshire Luddites Threaten the Owner of a Mechanized Factory
Ned Ludd
(1811-1812)
Sir,
Information has just been given in, that you are a holder of those detestable Shearing Frames, and I was desired by my men to write to you, and give you fair warning to pull them down, and for that purpose I desire that you will understand I am now writing to you, you will take notice that if they are not taken down by the end of next week, I shall detach one of my lieutenants with at least 300 men to destroy them, and further more take notice that if you give us the trouble of coming thus far, we will increase your misfortunes by burning your buildings down to ashes. … We hope for assistance from the French Emperor in shaking off the Yoke of the Rottenest, wickedest and most Tyrannical Government that ever existed. … We will never lay down our arms till the House of Commons passes an act to put down all the machinery hurtfull [sic] to the Commonality and repeal that to the Frame Breakers. …
Signed by the General of the Army of Redressers,
Ned Ludd, Clerk
Malthus Predicts Gloomy Prospects for the Human Condition
Robert Malthus
(1798)
I have read some of the speculations on the perfectibility of man and of society with great pleasure. I have been warmed and delighted with the enchanting picture which they hold forth. I ardently wish for such happy improvements. But I see great, and, to my understanding, unconquerable difficulties in the way to them. These difficulties it is my present purpose to state; declaring, at the same time, that so far from exulting in them, as a cause of triumphing over the friends of innovation, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see them completely removed. …
I think I may fairly make two postulata.
First, That food is necessary to the existence of man.
Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state. …
Assuming, then, my postulata as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.
Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.
By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal.
This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall some where; and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind. …
The ultimate check to population appears then to be a want of food arising necessarily from the different ratios according to which population and food increase. But this ultimate check is never the immediate check, except in cases of actual famine.
The immediate check may be stated to consist in all those customs, and all those diseases which seem to be generated by a scarcity of the means of subsistence; and all those causes, independent of this scarcity, whether of a moral or physical nature, which tend prematurely to weaken and destroy the human frame.
In every country some of these checks are, with more or less force, in constant operation; yet, notwithstanding their general prevalence, there are few states in which there is not a constant effort in the population to increase beyond the means of subsistence. This constant effort as constantly tends to subject the lower classes of society to distress, and to prevent any great permanent melioration of their condition.
These effects, in the present state of society, seem to be produced in the following manner. We will suppose the means of subsistence in any country just equal to the easy support of its inhabitants. The constant effort toward population, which is found to act even in the most vicious societies, increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased. The food, therefore, which before supported eleven millions, must now be divided among eleven millions and a half. The poor consequently must live much worse, and many of them be reduced to severe distress. The number of laborers also being above the proportion of work in the market, the price of labor must tend to fall, while the price of provisions would at the same time tend to rise. The laborer therefore must do more work to earn the same as he did before. During this season of distress, the discouragements to marriage and the difficulty of rearing a family are so great, that the progress of population is retarded. In the meantime, the cheapness of labor, the plenty of laborers, and the necessity of an increased industry among them, encourage cultivators to employ more labor upon their land, to turn up fresh soil, and to manure and improve more completely what is already in tillage, till ultimately the means of subsistence may become in the same proportion to the population as at the period from which we set out. The situation of the laborer being then again tolerably comfortable, the restraints to population are in some degree loosened; and, after a short period, the same retrograde and progressive movements, with respect to happiness, are repeated. …
Life Among the Laboring Poor: A Cotton Spinner’s Wife Tells Her Tale
Parliament (1833)
Her husband is a fine spinner, at Mr. ——, where he has been from 1816, has five children. Her eldest daughter, now going on fourteen, has been her father’s piecer for three years. At her present age, her labor is worth 4 s. 6d. a week, and has been worth as much for these last four months; before, it was worth less. At present her husband’s earnings and her daughter’s together amount to about 25 s. a week–at least she sees no more than 25 s. a week; and before his daughter could piece for him, and when he had to pay for a piecer in her stead, he only brought home 19 s. or 20s. a week.
Rent of house, 3s. 6d. a week.
Breakfast is generally porridge, bread and milk, lined with flour or oatmeal. On Sunday, a sup of tea and bread and butter.–Dinner, on week days, potatoes and bacon, and bread, which is generally white. On a Sunday, a little flesh meat; no butter, egg, or pudding.–Tea-time, every day, tea, and bread and butter; nothing extra on Sunday at tea.–Supper, oatmeal porridge and milk; sometimes potatoes and milk. Sunday, sometimes a little bread and cheese for supper: never have this on week days. Now and then buys eggs when they are as low as a halfpenny apiece, and fries them to bacon.
They never taste any other vegetables than potatoes; never use any beer or spirits; now and then may take a gill of beer when ill, which costs a penny. Perhaps she and her husband may have two gills a week. Her husband never drinks any beer or spirits that she knows of beyond this. The house consists of four rooms, two on each floor; the furniture consists of two beds in the same room, one for themselves, the other for the children; have four chairs, one table in the house, boxes to put clothes in, no chest of drawers, two pans and a tea kettle for boiling, a gridiron and frying-pan, half-a-dozen large and small plates, four pair of knives and forks, several pewter spoons. They subscribe 1d.a week for each child to a funeral society for the children. Two of the children go to school at 3d. a week each: they are taught reading for this, but not writing. Have a few books, such as a Bible, hymn-book, and several small books that the children have got as prizes at the Sunday School. Four children go to Stott’s Sunday School.
QUESTION. Does your daughter, who pieces for her father, seem much fatigued when she comes home at night?
ANSWER. No, she does not seem much fatigued. She is coming of an age that perhaps she may be. She has a good appetite. Hears her complain of headache sometimes; does not hear her complain of not sleeping
Q. Do you think that people in your own way of life, spinners and such like, and their families, are better off than yourselves, or worse off, or just about the same?
A. Well, some’s better, some’s worse, some’s the same. It is according to their work–whether they work upon fine or coarse work.
Q. I want to know whether the most are like off to yourselves. Now, at Mr. — mill, are most of the parents of children as well off, or better off, than yourself?
A. Well, they are most of them at his mill as well off as we ourselves, because it is one of the best mills in the town. There is not many better than his.
In answer to questions concerning herself, she said she should be forty years old on Whitsun Monday: that at fourteen years old she began frame-tenting, and worked at it for two years every day, from six in the morning till eight in the evening–sometimes from half-past five in the morning. She then went to stretching, at which she worked till twenty-five years old: at that she worked fourteen hours a day regularly every day. At twenty-five years old she married, and has staid at home ever since. Her father was a bleacher, her mother a spinner. Has eight brothers and sisters; but can’t give no idea whether her brothers and sisters are bigger or less than her parents, because her mother took them all away to America when she was a child.
Q. Should you say you were as healthy a woman now, as if you had not been a frame tenter or a stretcher?
A. Well, I don’t know but what I am. I have not my health very well at present. I do not know that work injured it.
Q. How many different mills were you in when you were young?
A. In four mills. Has heard different language at some from others; some very bad, some very well. A child may pick up much bad in mills. Better to put a child in a mill than let it run in the streets; it won’t get as much harm in a mill.
Q. Do girls run a chance of being bad by living in mills; in short, to be unchaste?
A. I can’t say. I never see’d nothing of bad wherever I worked. It is according to their own endeavors a good deal.
Consumption by the week, of different articles, by her husband, her self, and five children.
£s . d .
Butter, 1 1/2 lb, at 10d.0 1 3
Tea, 1 1/2 oz. 0 0 4-1/2
Bread she makes herself: buys 24 lb. of flour–flour, barm, salt, and baking, cost 0 4 6
Half a peck of oatmeal 0 0 6-1/2
Bacon, 1 1/2 lb. 0 0 9
Potatoes, two score a week, at 8d. a score 0 1 4
Milk, a quart a day, at 3d. a quart 0 1 9
Flesh meat on Sunday, about a pound 0 0 7
Sugar, 1 1/2 lb. a week, at 6d.0 0 9
Pepper, mustard, salt, and extras, say 0 0 3
Soap and candles 0 1 0
Coals 01 6
Rent 03 6
£0 18 1
Alleged total of weekly income £1 5 0
Deduct foregoing expenses 0 18 1
Leaves for clothing, sickness of seven persons, £0 6 11
schooling, etc. a surplus of
A Factory Owner with a Social Conscience Robert Owen (1815)
The immediate effects of this manufacturing phenomenon were a rapid increase of the wealth, industry, population, and political influence of the British Empire; and by the aid of which it has been enabled to contend for five-and-twenty years against the most formidable military andimmoral power [France] that the world perhaps ever contained.
These important results, however, great as they really are, have not been obtained without accompanying evils of such a magnitude as to raise a doubt whether the latter do not preponderate over the former.
Hitherto, legislators have appeared to regard manufactures, only in one point of view, as a source of national wealth.
The other mighty consequences which proceed from extended manufactures when left to their natural progress, have never yet engaged the attention of any legislature. Yet the political and moral effects to which we allude, well deserve to occupy the best faculties of the greatest and the wisest statesmen.
The general diffusion of manufactures throughout a country generates a new character in its inhabitants; and as this character is formed upon a principle quite unfavorable to individual or general happiness, it will produce the most lamentable and permanent evils, unless its tendency be counteracted by legislative interference and direction. …
The acquisition of wealth, and the desire which it naturally creates for a continued increase, have introduced a fondness for essentially injurious luxuries among a numerous class of individuals who formerly never thought of them, and they have also generated a disposition which strongly impels its possessors to sacrifice the best feelings of human nature to this love of accumulation. To succeed in this career, the industry of the lower orders, from whose labor this wealth is now drawn, has been carried by new competitors striving against those of longer standing, to a point of real oppression, reducing them by successive changes, as the spirit of competition increased and the ease of acquiring wealth diminished, to a state more wretched than can be imagined by those who have not attentively observed the changes as they have gradually occurred. In consequence, they are at present in a situation infinitely more degraded and miserable than they were before the introduction of these manufactories, upon the success of which their bare subsistence now depends. …
The effects of this principle of gain, unrestrained, are still more lamentable on the working classes, those who are employed in the operative parts of the manufactures; for most of these branches are more or less unfavorable to the health and morals of adults. Yet parents do not hesitate to sacrifice the well-being of their children by putting them to occupations by which the constitution of their minds and bodies is rendered greatly inferior to what it might and ought to be under a system of common foresight and humanity. …
The children now find they must labor incessantly for their bare subsistence: they have not been used to innocent, healthy, and rational amusements; they are not permitted the requisite time, if they had been previously accustomed to enjoy them. They know not what relaxation means, except by the actual cessation from labor. They are surrounded by others similarly circumstanced with themselves; and thus passing on from childhood to youth, they become gradually initiated, the young men in particular, but often the young females also, in the seductive pleasures of the pot-house and inebriation: for which their daily hard labor, want of better habits, and the general vacuity of their minds, tend to prepare them. …
The employer regards the employed as mere instruments of gain, while these acquire a gross ferocity of character, which, if legislative measures shall not be judiciously devised to prevent its increase, and ameliorate the condition of this class, will sooner or later plunge the country into a formidable and perhaps inextricable state of danger.
The “Iron Law of Wages” Is Forged David Ricardo (1817)
LABOUR, like all other things which are purchased and sold, and which may be increased or diminished in quantity, has its natural and its market price. The natural price of labour is that price which is necessary to enable the labourers, one with another, to subsist and to perpetuate their race, without either increase or diminution.
The power of the labourer to support himself, and the family which may be necessary to keep up the number of labourers, does not depend on the quantity of money which he may receive for wages, but on the quantity of food, necessaries, and conveniences become essential to him from habit, which that money will purchase. The natural price of labour, therefore, depends on the price of the food, necessaries, and conveniences required for the support of the labourer and his family. With a rise in the price of food and necessaries, the natural price of labour will rise; with the fall in their price, the natural price of labour will fall.
With the progress of society the natural price of labour has always a tendency to rise, because one of the principal commodities by which its natural price is regulated, has a tendency to become dearer, from the greater difficulty of producing it. As, however, the improvements in agriculture, the discovery of new markets, whence provisions may be imported, may for a time counteract the tendency to a rise in the price of necessaries, and may even occasion their natural price to fall, so will the same causes produce the correspondent effects on the natural price of labour.
The natural price of all commodities, excepting raw produce and labour, has a tendency to fall, in the progress of wealth and population; for though, on one hand, they are enhanced in real value, from the rise in the natural price of the raw material of which they are made, this is more than counterbalanced by the improvements in machinery, by the better division and distribution of labour, and by the increasing skill, both in science and art, of the producers.
The market price of labour is the price which is really paid for it, from the natural operation of the proportion of the supply to the demand; labour is dear when it is scarce, and cheap when it is plentiful. However much the market price of labour may deviate from its natural price, it has, like commodities, a tendency to conform to it.
It is when the market price of labour exceeds its natural price, that the condition of the labourer is flourishing and happy, that he has it in his power to command a greater proportion of the necessaries and enjoyments of life, and therefore to rear a healthy and numerous family. When, however, by the encouragement which high wages give to the increase of population, the number of labourers is increased, wages again fall to their natural price, and indeed from a reaction sometimes fall below it.
When the market price of labour is below its natural price, the condition of the labourers is most wretched: then poverty deprives them of those comforts which custom renders absolute necessaries. It is only after their privations have reduced their number, or the demand for labour has increased, that the market price of labour will rise to its natural price, and that the labourer will have the moderate comforts which the natural rate of wages will afford.
Notwithstanding the tendency of wages to conform to their natural rate, their market rate may, in an improving society, for an indefinite period, be constantly above it; for no sooner may the impulse, which an increased capital gives to a new demand for labour be obeyed, than another increase of capital may produce the same effect; and thus, if the increase of capital be gradual and constant, the demand for labour may give a continued stimulus to an increase of people.
The Economist Assesses the Transformation of Britain
James Wilson
(1851)
Perhaps the best way of realizing … the actual progress of the last half-century would be to fancy ourselves suddenly transferred to the year 1800, with all our habits, expectations, requirements, and standard of living formed upon the luxuries and appliances collected round us in 1850. In the first year of the century we should find ourselves eating bread at 1s. 10 1/2d. the quartern [four pound] loaf, and those who could not afford this price driven to short commons, to entire abstinence, or to some miserable substitute. We should find ourselves grumbling at heavy taxes laid on nearly all the necessaries and luxuries of life … receiving our Edinburgh letters in London a week after they were written, and paying thirteen pencehalfpenny for them when delivered, exchanging the instantaneous telegraph for the slow and costly express by chaise and pair; … and relapsing from the blaze of light which gas now pours along our streets, into a perilous and uncomfortable darkness made visible by a few wretched oil lamps scattered at distant intervals.
But these would by no means comprise the sum total, nor the worst part, of the descent into barbarism. We should find our criminal law in a state worthy of Draco; executions taking place by the dozen; the stealing of five shillings punishable and punished as severely as rape or murder; slavery and the slave trade flourishing in their palmiest atrocity. We should find the liberty of the subject at the lowest ebb; freedom of discussion and writing always in fear and frequently in jeopardy; religious rights trampled under foot; Catholics, slaves and not citizens; Dissenters still disabled and despised. Parliament was unreformed; public jobbing flagrant and shameless; gentlemen drank a bottle where they now drink a glass, and measured their capacity by their cups; and the temperance medal was a thing undreamed of. Finally, thepeople in those days were little thought of, where they are now the main topic of discourse and statesmanship; steamboats were unknown, and a voyage to America occupied eight weeks instead of ten days; and while in 1850, a population of nearly 30,000,000 paid £50,000,000 of taxes, in 1801 a population of 15,000,000 paid no less than £63,000,000.
We have ample means of showing by indisputable facts that wealth has been diffused as well as increased during the period under review; that so far from “the rich having become richer and the poor poorer,” as is so often and so inconsiderately asserted, the middle classes have advanced faster than the great, and the command over the comforts and luxuries of life, even among peasants and artisans, is far greater now than at any former period. …
In the first place let us look at the savings banks, which are entirely the growth of this century, the first having been established about 1806, and which are confined to the savings of the peasant and artisan class, of domestic servants, and of the humbler portion of the middle class. …
Let us now collect together a few facts showing the increase in the consumption of those articles of necessity, or luxury, which are used indiscriminately among all classes.
We have no means of comparing the amount of butchers’ meat consumed now with that consumed at the beginning of the century, but the price we know has fallen from 5s.8d. to 3s.4d. a stone. … During the latter part of the 18th century rye and barley bread were very extensively used in many parts of England, the former being … the habitual food of one-seventh of the population; it is now unknown, except in Durham, while the use of wheaten bread is almost universal among the poorer classes.
In the use of coffee, tea, and sugar also, a marked advance has taken place. …
The truth is, that the relief to the population generally, and to the working classes especially, which has been given by the remission of taxation, has been something quite unprecedented. … If a poor man is content to live, as wise and great men have often thought it well to live, in health and comfort, but with strict frugality … he may escape taxation almost entirely. …
In no one point is the half-century we have just closed more distinguished from its predecessors than in the share of PUBLIC ATTENTION AND SYMPATHY WHICH THE CONDITION OF THE POORER CLASSES HAS OBTAINED. Formerly the lower orders were regarded, even by the kindly disposed, simply as hewers of wood and drawers of water. … The idea of studying them, of raising them, of investigating into the operation of the causes which affected them for good or evil, had scarcely taken rise. There was kindness, there was charity, there was sympathy toward the poor as individuals, but not any interest in their conditions as a class. We are far from considering the multiplication of charitable institutions as a … source of unalloyed good to the indigent and industrious of the community, but it at least shows the increase of sympathy towards them on the part of the rich. … In the metropolis alone the charitable institutions reach 491 in number, and have an annual income of £1,765,000. Of those 109 were established in the last, and no less than 294 in the present century.
But a far stronger proof of the general interest now taken in the working classes, is to be found in the various commissions that have of late years been issued to inquire into the state of the people in various occupations. Wherever there was a rumor of an abuse, a tyranny, or an injustice, a representation was made in Parliament, and an investigation immediately took place. We have had a factory commission, a children’s employment commission, a commission to inquire into the condition of those employed in mines and manufactures, and a commission to inquire into the employment of women and children in agriculture. We have had inspectors of mines and inspectors of factories appointed. …
On the novel and extraordinary attention which is now being paid to SANITARY MATTERS we can look with … unmingled satisfaction. … Our progress since 1800 has been far from contemptible. The population is less crowded than it was, and roomier dwellings are constantly in process of erection. The average number of individuals in a house which was 5.67 in 1801 had fallen to 5.44 in 1841; and the census which is to be taken this year, will, we have no doubt, show a still further diminution. … Many removable causes of premature death yet remain, but the four or five years which the last half-century has added to the average duration of life are a hopeful earnest of what may yet be done to prolong it, now that the subject has awakened public interest, and that administrative exertions are conducted under the guidance of scientific skill.
We hope we [have] succeeded in satisfying those who [have] followed our facts and figures that the national advance in wealth and all the material appliances of civilization … has not been turned solely to the benefit of the more favored children of fortune, but that all classes of the community, the humbler as well as the richer, have participated in the blessings of the change. Indeed, it scarcely could be otherwise. The cheapness of the necessaries and of the commoner, and therefore more indispensable comforts of daily life, must redound more especially to the advantage of those whose income is most exclusively devoted to the purchase of those needful articles. Areduction in the price of bread, meat, coffee, sugar, and calico, affects the comforts of the poor man far more immediately and extensively than that of the rich or the easy classes. … The only way in which our conclusion could be shown to be erroneous, would be by proving that the wages of labor had fallen to an equal or a greater ratio; but this, it is well known, is far from having been generally the case. … While unquestionably wages have fallen considerably in a few departments of industry, this fall has been confined to those departments in which a change in the machinery employed has taken place, and in which the artisans have obstinately refused to accommodate themselves to the new state of things, and have continued to overstock an impoverished and doomed employment, as in the case of plain hand-loom weaving; or to those where senseless strikeshave introduced supernumerary hands or new mechanism into the trade, as in the cases of coarse cotton spinners and of the London tailors; or to those where the easiness and collateral conveniences of the occupation have attracted to it excessive numbers, as in the case of needlework. In these branches wages have undoubtedly fallen, and the hours of work have become in some instances longer; but the general tendency in most departments of industry has been the reverse;–a desire for shorter hours has been of late rapidly spreading. The hours of labor in factories have been reduced for adults from 74 to 60 a week, and for children from 72 to 40, shops are beginning to be closed much earlier, and great, and in some cases already successful, efforts are making to secure a weekly half-holiday for the generality of tradespeople. All these, where not pursued by illegitimate means, are steps in the right direction. …
[He praises the development of steam ocean transport.] But this advance is nothing compared to that which has taken place in LOCOMOTION BY LAND within the last twenty years. It is here that our progress has been most stupendous–surpassing all previous steps since the creation of the human race. … At the period at which we write, the whole of England is traversed by almost countless railways in every direction. … In 1850, [the normal speed of transportation] is habitually forty miles an hour, and seventy for those who like it. We have reached in a single bound from the speed of a horse’s canter, to the utmost speed comparable with the known strength and coherence of brass and iron.
Now, who have specially benefited by this vast invention? The rich, whose horses and carriages carried them in comfort over the known world?–the middle classes to whom stage coaches and mails were an accessible mode of conveyance?–or the poor, whom the cost of locomotion condemned often to an almost vegetable existence? Clearly the latter. The railroad is the Magna Charter [sic] of their motive freedom. How few among the last generation ever stirred beyond their own village? How few among the present will die without visiting London? …
But even the rapid augmentation of our locomotive speed shrinks into nothing when compared to that which has taken place in the last five years in the transmission of intelligence. … In 1850, for a sum varying from 5s. to 12s. 6d., any private individual may send a message or summon a friend [by telegraph], the distance of many hundred miles in a space of time reckoned by seconds rather than by minutes. …
Economists as we are, we should be little satisfied with even these signs of astounding progress … were there not ample reason to believe that a corresponding improvement has taken place in EDUCATION, SOCIAL MORALS, AND PUBLIC PRINCIPLE. …
When we remember that it is only within our own recollection that the propriety or wisdom of educating the lower orders at all was seriously and very generally questioned; that before 1800 the only provision for popular instruction was to be found in grammar and other endowed schools (the funds for the support of a large proportion of which had been scandalously jobbed away or misapplied), together with a few dame schools in towns, and a few squires’ and ladies’ schools in the rural districts; and that now not only is the paramount necessity of general education universally insisted upon, but every sect vies with every other in the number and excellence of its schools; that even pauper schools are systematically good; that even ragged schools for the most desolate and depraved of our town population have been established with great success in many localities … that Lancasterian schools, national schools, model schools, and normal schools, are all the product of this century; that a committee on education now forms a recognized department of the government; and finally, that Parliament, which in 1833 could with difficulty be persuaded to vote £20,000 for educational purposes in aid of private munificence, now votes liberally and ungrudgingly £150,000 a year:–when we remember all those things, we shall scarcely be disposed to deem our national progress under this head unsatisfactory or slow.
The general tone of morals in the middle and higher classes has unquestionably become much higher and purer in the last generation. Language which was common in our fathers’ days would not be tolerated now. A higher sense, both of duty and of decency, has taken possession of all ranks. … Debt, which used to be considered as an indispensable characteristic of a man of fashion, is now almost everywhere scouted as disreputable; and reckless extravagance is no longer regarded as an indication of cleverness and spirit. … Laborhas ceased to be looked down upon–exertion is no longer regarded as derogatory, nor a life of languid indolence as the supreme felicity. The bees are more considered than the butterflies of society; wealth is valued less as an exemption from toil, than as a call to effort, and an instrument of influence and power; the duties of property are, far less than formerly, forgotten in its rights; if the poor do not yet work less, the rich certainly work more. …
The third point to which we wish to draw attention, is the marked improvement which has taken place in one generation in habits of temperance, especially among the upper circles. Within the memory of men still in middle life, excess in wine was the rule, not the exception; few left the dinner-table without having taken more than was good for them; many got drunk every day. …Now, intemperance is as disreputable as any other kind of low debauchery, and, except in Ireland and at the universities, a drunken gentleman is one of the rarest sights in society. …
On no account has this country greater ground for self-congratulation than on the vast improvement which is observable in the CHARACTER and tone of feeling among PUBLIC MEN. … Statesmen have now learned to feel not merely that they are playing a noble game … but that they are called upon to guide a glorious vessel through fluctuating shoals, and sunken rocks, and storms of terrific violence … the greatest nation that ever stood in the vanguard of civilization and of freedom. …
Manchester Becomes a Thriving Industrial City
John Aikin
(1795)
No exertions of the masters or workmen could have answered the demands of trade without the introduction of spinning machines.
These were first used by the country people on a confined scale, twelve spindles being thought a great matter; while the awkward posture required to spin on them was discouraging to grown up people, who saw with surprise children from nine to twelve years of age manage them with dexterity, whereby plenty was brought into families formerly overburthened with children, and the poor weavers were delivered from the bondage in which they had lain from the insolence of spinners. …
The improvements kept increasing, till the capital engines for twist were perfected, by which thousands of spindles are put in motion by a water wheel, and managed mostly by children, without confusion and with less waste of cotton than by the former methods. But the carding and slubbing preparatory to twisting required a greater range of invention. The first attempts were in carding engines, which are very curious, and now brought to a great degree of perfection; and an engine has been contrived for converting the carded wool to slubbing, by drawing it to about the thickness of candlewick preparatory to throwing it into twist. …
These machines exhibit in their construction an aggregate of clock-maker’s work and machinery most wonderful to behold. The cotton to be spun is introduced through three sets of rollers, so governed by the clock-work, that the set which first receives the cotton makes so many revolutions than the next in order, and these more than the last which feed the spindles, that it is drawn out considerably in passing through the rollers; being lastly received by spindles, which have every one on the bobbin a fly like that of a flax wheel; …
Upon these machines twist is made of any fineness proper for warps; but as it is drawn length way of the staple, it was not so proper for weft; wherefore on the introduction of fine callicoes and muslins, mules were invented, having a name expressive of their species, being a mixed machinery between jennies and the machines for twisting, and adapted to spin weft as fine as could be desired. …
These mules carry often to a hundred and fifty spindles, and can be set to draw weft to an exact fineness up to 150 hanks in the pound, of which muslin has been made, which for a while had a prompt sale; but the flimsiness of its fabric has brought the finer sorts into discredit, and a stagnation of trade damped the sale of the rest. …
The prodigious extension of the several branches of the Manchester manufactures has likewise greatly increased the business of several trades and manufactures connected with or dependent upon them. The making of paper at mills in the vicinity has been brought to great perfection, and now includes all kinds, from the strongest parcelling paper to the finest writing sorts, and that on which banker’s bills are printed. To the ironmongers shops, which are greatly increased of late, are generally annexed smithies, where many articles are made, even to nails. A considerable iron foundry is established in Salford, in which are cast most of the articles wanted in Manchester and its neighborhood, consisting chiefly of large cast wheels for the cotton machines; cylinders, boilers, and pipes for steam engines; cast ovens, and grates of all sizes. This work belongs to Batemen and Sharrard, gen[tle]men every way qualified for so great an undertaking. Mr. Sharrard is a very ingenious and able engineer, who has improved upon and brought the steam engine to great perfection. …
The tin-plate workers have found additional employment in furnishing many articles for spinning machines; as have also the braziers in casting wheels for the motion-work of the rollers used in them; and the clock-makers in cutting them. Harness-makers have been much employed in making bands for carding engines, and large wheels for the first operation of drawing out the cardings, whereby the consumption of strong curried leather has been much increased. …
Within the last twenty or thirty years the vast increase of foreign trade has caused many of the Manchester manufacturers to travel abroad, and agents or partners to be fixed for a considerable time on the continent, as well as foreigners to reside at Manchester. And the town has now in every respect assumed the style and manners of one of the commercial capitals of Europe. …
Yorkshire Luddites Threaten the Owner of a Mechanized Factory
Ned Ludd
(1811-1812)
Sir,
Information has just been given in, that you are a holder of those detestable Shearing Frames, and I was desired by my men to write to you, and give you fair warning to pull them down, and for that purpose I desire that you will understand I am now writing to you, you will take notice that if they are not taken down by the end of next week, I shall detach one of my lieutenants with at least 300 men to destroy them, and further more take notice that if you give us the trouble of coming thus far, we will increase your misfortunes by burning your buildings down to ashes. … We hope for assistance from the French Emperor in shaking off the Yoke of the Rottenest, wickedest and most Tyrannical Government that ever existed. … We will never lay down our arms till the House of Commons passes an act to put down all the machinery hurtfull [sic] to the Commonality and repeal that to the Frame Breakers. …
Signed by the General of the Army of Redressers,
Ned Ludd, Clerk
Malthus Predicts Gloomy Prospects for the Human Condition
Robert Malthus
(1798)
I have read some of the speculations on the perfectibility of man and of society with great pleasure. I have been warmed and delighted with the enchanting picture which they hold forth. I ardently wish for such happy improvements. But I see great, and, to my understanding, unconquerable difficulties in the way to them. These difficulties it is my present purpose to state; declaring, at the same time, that so far from exulting in them, as a cause of triumphing over the friends of innovation, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see them completely removed. …
I think I may fairly make two postulata.
First, That food is necessary to the existence of man.
Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state. …
Assuming, then, my postulata as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.
Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.
By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal.
This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall some where; and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind. …
The ultimate check to population appears then to be a want of food arising necessarily from the different ratios according to which population and food increase. But this ultimate check is never the immediate check, except in cases of actual famine.
The immediate check may be stated to consist in all those customs, and all those diseases which seem to be generated by a scarcity of the means of subsistence; and all those causes, independent of this scarcity, whether of a moral or physical nature, which tend prematurely to weaken and destroy the human frame.
In every country some of these checks are, with more or less force, in constant operation; yet, notwithstanding their general prevalence, there are few states in which there is not a constant effort in the population to increase beyond the means of subsistence. This constant effort as constantly tends to subject the lower classes of society to distress, and to prevent any great permanent melioration of their condition.
These effects, in the present state of society, seem to be produced in the following manner. We will suppose the means of subsistence in any country just equal to the easy support of its inhabitants. The constant effort toward population, which is found to act even in the most vicious societies, increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased. The food, therefore, which before supported eleven millions, must now be divided among eleven millions and a half. The poor consequently must live much worse, and many of them be reduced to severe distress. The number of laborers also being above the proportion of work in the market, the price of labor must tend to fall, while the price of provisions would at the same time tend to rise. The laborer therefore must do more work to earn the same as he did before. During this season of distress, the discouragements to marriage and the difficulty of rearing a family are so great, that the progress of population is retarded. In the meantime, the cheapness of labor, the plenty of laborers, and the necessity of an increased industry among them, encourage cultivators to employ more labor upon their land, to turn up fresh soil, and to manure and improve more completely what is already in tillage, till ultimately the means of subsistence may become in the same proportion to the population as at the period from which we set out. The situation of the laborer being then again tolerably comfortable, the restraints to population are in some degree loosened; and, after a short period, the same retrograde and progressive movements, with respect to happiness, are repeated. …
Life Among the Laboring Poor: A Cotton Spinner’s Wife Tells Her Tale
Parliament (1833)
Her husband is a fine spinner, at Mr. ——, where he has been from 1816, has five children. Her eldest daughter, now going on fourteen, has been her father’s piecer for three years. At her present age, her labor is worth 4 s. 6d. a week, and has been worth as much for these last four months; before, it was worth less. At present her husband’s earnings and her daughter’s together amount to about 25 s. a week–at least she sees no more than 25 s. a week; and before his daughter could piece for him, and when he had to pay for a piecer in her stead, he only brought home 19 s. or 20s. a week.
Rent of house, 3s. 6d. a week.
Breakfast is generally porridge, bread and milk, lined with flour or oatmeal. On Sunday, a sup of tea and bread and butter.–Dinner, on week days, potatoes and bacon, and bread, which is generally white. On a Sunday, a little flesh meat; no butter, egg, or pudding.–Tea-time, every day, tea, and bread and butter; nothing extra on Sunday at tea.–Supper, oatmeal porridge and milk; sometimes potatoes and milk. Sunday, sometimes a little bread and cheese for supper: never have this on week days. Now and then buys eggs when they are as low as a halfpenny apiece, and fries them to bacon.
They never taste any other vegetables than potatoes; never use any beer or spirits; now and then may take a gill of beer when ill, which costs a penny. Perhaps she and her husband may have two gills a week. Her husband never drinks any beer or spirits that she knows of beyond this. The house consists of four rooms, two on each floor; the furniture consists of two beds in the same room, one for themselves, the other for the children; have four chairs, one table in the house, boxes to put clothes in, no chest of drawers, two pans and a tea kettle for boiling, a gridiron and frying-pan, half-a-dozen large and small plates, four pair of knives and forks, several pewter spoons. They subscribe 1d.a week for each child to a funeral society for the children. Two of the children go to school at 3d. a week each: they are taught reading for this, but not writing. Have a few books, such as a Bible, hymn-book, and several small books that the children have got as prizes at the Sunday School. Four children go to Stott’s Sunday School.
QUESTION. Does your daughter, who pieces for her father, seem much fatigued when she comes home at night?
ANSWER. No, she does not seem much fatigued. She is coming of an age that perhaps she may be. She has a good appetite. Hears her complain of headache sometimes; does not hear her complain of not sleeping
Q. Do you think that people in your own way of life, spinners and such like, and their families, are better off than yourselves, or worse off, or just about the same?
A. Well, some’s better, some’s worse, some’s the same. It is according to their work–whether they work upon fine or coarse work.
Q. I want to know whether the most are like off to yourselves. Now, at Mr. — mill, are most of the parents of children as well off, or better off, than yourself?
A. Well, they are most of them at his mill as well off as we ourselves, because it is one of the best mills in the town. There is not many better than his.
In answer to questions concerning herself, she said she should be forty years old on Whitsun Monday: that at fourteen years old she began frame-tenting, and worked at it for two years every day, from six in the morning till eight in the evening–sometimes from half-past five in the morning. She then went to stretching, at which she worked till twenty-five years old: at that she worked fourteen hours a day regularly every day. At twenty-five years old she married, and has staid at home ever since. Her father was a bleacher, her mother a spinner. Has eight brothers and sisters; but can’t give no idea whether her brothers and sisters are bigger or less than her parents, because her mother took them all away to America when she was a child.
Q. Should you say you were as healthy a woman now, as if you had not been a frame tenter or a stretcher?
A. Well, I don’t know but what I am. I have not my health very well at present. I do not know that work injured it.
Q. How many different mills were you in when you were young?
A. In four mills. Has heard different language at some from others; some very bad, some very well. A child may pick up much bad in mills. Better to put a child in a mill than let it run in the streets; it won’t get as much harm in a mill.
Q. Do girls run a chance of being bad by living in mills; in short, to be unchaste?
A. I can’t say. I never see’d nothing of bad wherever I worked. It is according to their own endeavors a good deal.
Consumption by the week, of different articles, by her husband, her self, and five children.
£s . d .
Butter, 1 1/2 lb, at 10d.0 1 3
Tea, 1 1/2 oz. 0 0 4-1/2
Bread she makes herself: buys 24 lb. of flour–flour, barm, salt, and baking, cost 0 4 6
Half a peck of oatmeal 0 0 6-1/2
Bacon, 1 1/2 lb. 0 0 9
Potatoes, two score a week, at 8d. a score 0 1 4
Milk, a quart a day, at 3d. a quart 0 1 9
Flesh meat on Sunday, about a pound 0 0 7
Sugar, 1 1/2 lb. a week, at 6d.0 0 9
Pepper, mustard, salt, and extras, say 0 0 3
Soap and candles 0 1 0
Coals 01 6
Rent 03 6
£0 18 1
Alleged total of weekly income £1 5 0
Deduct foregoing expenses 0 18 1
Leaves for clothing, sickness of seven persons, £0 6 11
schooling, etc. a surplus of
A Factory Owner with a Social Conscience Robert Owen (1815)
The immediate effects of this manufacturing phenomenon were a rapid increase of the wealth, industry, population, and political influence of the British Empire; and by the aid of which it has been enabled to contend for five-and-twenty years against the most formidable military andimmoral power [France] that the world perhaps ever contained.
These important results, however, great as they really are, have not been obtained without accompanying evils of such a magnitude as to raise a doubt whether the latter do not preponderate over the former.
Hitherto, legislators have appeared to regard manufactures, only in one point of view, as a source of national wealth.
The other mighty consequences which proceed from extended manufactures when left to their natural progress, have never yet engaged the attention of any legislature. Yet the political and moral effects to which we allude, well deserve to occupy the best faculties of the greatest and the wisest statesmen.
The general diffusion of manufactures throughout a country generates a new character in its inhabitants; and as this character is formed upon a principle quite unfavorable to individual or general happiness, it will produce the most lamentable and permanent evils, unless its tendency be counteracted by legislative interference and direction. …
The acquisition of wealth, and the desire which it naturally creates for a continued increase, have introduced a fondness for essentially injurious luxuries among a numerous class of individuals who formerly never thought of them, and they have also generated a disposition which strongly impels its possessors to sacrifice the best feelings of human nature to this love of accumulation. To succeed in this career, the industry of the lower orders, from whose labor this wealth is now drawn, has been carried by new competitors striving against those of longer standing, to a point of real oppression, reducing them by successive changes, as the spirit of competition increased and the ease of acquiring wealth diminished, to a state more wretched than can be imagined by those who have not attentively observed the changes as they have gradually occurred. In consequence, they are at present in a situation infinitely more degraded and miserable than they were before the introduction of these manufactories, upon the success of which their bare subsistence now depends. …
The effects of this principle of gain, unrestrained, are still more lamentable on the working classes, those who are employed in the operative parts of the manufactures; for most of these branches are more or less unfavorable to the health and morals of adults. Yet parents do not hesitate to sacrifice the well-being of their children by putting them to occupations by which the constitution of their minds and bodies is rendered greatly inferior to what it might and ought to be under a system of common foresight and humanity. …
The children now find they must labor incessantly for their bare subsistence: they have not been used to innocent, healthy, and rational amusements; they are not permitted the requisite time, if they had been previously accustomed to enjoy them. They know not what relaxation means, except by the actual cessation from labor. They are surrounded by others similarly circumstanced with themselves; and thus passing on from childhood to youth, they become gradually initiated, the young men in particular, but often the young females also, in the seductive pleasures of the pot-house and inebriation: for which their daily hard labor, want of better habits, and the general vacuity of their minds, tend to prepare them. …
The employer regards the employed as mere instruments of gain, while these acquire a gross ferocity of character, which, if legislative measures shall not be judiciously devised to prevent its increase, and ameliorate the condition of this class, will sooner or later plunge the country into a formidable and perhaps inextricable state of danger.
The “Iron Law of Wages” Is Forged David Ricardo (1817)
LABOUR, like all other things which are purchased and sold, and which may be increased or diminished in quantity, has its natural and its market price. The natural price of labour is that price which is necessary to enable the labourers, one with another, to subsist and to perpetuate their race, without either increase or diminution.
The power of the labourer to support himself, and the family which may be necessary to keep up the number of labourers, does not depend on the quantity of money which he may receive for wages, but on the quantity of food, necessaries, and conveniences become essential to him from habit, which that money will purchase. The natural price of labour, therefore, depends on the price of the food, necessaries, and conveniences required for the support of the labourer and his family. With a rise in the price of food and necessaries, the natural price of labour will rise; with the fall in their price, the natural price of labour will fall.
With the progress of society the natural price of labour has always a tendency to rise, because one of the principal commodities by which its natural price is regulated, has a tendency to become dearer, from the greater difficulty of producing it. As, however, the improvements in agriculture, the discovery of new markets, whence provisions may be imported, may for a time counteract the tendency to a rise in the price of necessaries, and may even occasion their natural price to fall, so will the same causes produce the correspondent effects on the natural price of labour.
The natural price of all commodities, excepting raw produce and labour, has a tendency to fall, in the progress of wealth and population; for though, on one hand, they are enhanced in real value, from the rise in the natural price of the raw material of which they are made, this is more than counterbalanced by the improvements in machinery, by the better division and distribution of labour, and by the increasing skill, both in science and art, of the producers.
The market price of labour is the price which is really paid for it, from the natural operation of the proportion of the supply to the demand; labour is dear when it is scarce, and cheap when it is plentiful. However much the market price of labour may deviate from its natural price, it has, like commodities, a tendency to conform to it.
It is when the market price of labour exceeds its natural price, that the condition of the labourer is flourishing and happy, that he has it in his power to command a greater proportion of the necessaries and enjoyments of life, and therefore to rear a healthy and numerous family. When, however, by the encouragement which high wages give to the increase of population, the number of labourers is increased, wages again fall to their natural price, and indeed from a reaction sometimes fall below it.
When the market price of labour is below its natural price, the condition of the labourers is most wretched: then poverty deprives them of those comforts which custom renders absolute necessaries. It is only after their privations have reduced their number, or the demand for labour has increased, that the market price of labour will rise to its natural price, and that the labourer will have the moderate comforts which the natural rate of wages will afford.
Notwithstanding the tendency of wages to conform to their natural rate, their market rate may, in an improving society, for an indefinite period, be constantly above it; for no sooner may the impulse, which an increased capital gives to a new demand for labour be obeyed, than another increase of capital may produce the same effect; and thus, if the increase of capital be gradual and constant, the demand for labour may give a continued stimulus to an increase of people.
Primary Sources – Unit Eleven – Ideologies and Upheavals, 1815-1850
Power Politics According to the Scriptures: The Holy Alliance
Francis I, Frederick William III, and Alexander I
(1815)
Their majesties, the Emperor of Austria, the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Russia, in view of the great events which the last three years have brought to pass in Europe and in view especially of the benefits which it has pleased Divine Providence to confer upon those states whose governments have placed their confidence and their hope in Him alone, having reached the profound conviction that the policy of the powers, in their mutual relations, ought to be guided by the sublime truths taught by the eternal religion of God our Savior, solemnly declare that the present act has no other aim than to manifest to the world their unchangeable determination to adopt no other rule of conduct, either in the government of their respective countries or in their political relations with other governments, than the precepts of that holy religion, the precepts of justice, charity and peace. These, far from being applicable exclusively to private life, ought on the contrary directly to control the resolutions of princes and to guide their steps as the sole means of establishing human institutions and of remedying their imperfections. Hence their majesties have agreed upon the following articles:
ARTICLE I.–Conformably to the words of Holy Scripture which command all men to look upon each other as brothers, the three contracting monarchs will continue united by the bonds of a true and indissoluble fraternity and, regarding themselves as compatriots, they shall lend aid and assistance to each other on all occasions and in all places, viewing themselves, in their relations to their subjects and to their armies, as fathers of families, they shall direct them in the same spirit of fraternity by which they are animated for the protection of religion, peace and justice.
ARTICLE II.–Hence the sole principle of conduct, be it between the said government or their subjects, shall be that of rendering mutual service, and testifying by unceasing good-will, the mutual affection with which they should be animated. Considering themselves all as members of one great Christian nation, the three allied princes look upon themselves as delegates of Providence called upon to govern three branches of the same family, viz: Austria, Russia and Prussia. They thus confess that the Christian nation, of which they and their people form a part, has in reality no other sovereign than He alone to whom belongs by right the power, for in Him alone are to be found all the treasures of love, of knowledge and of infinite wisdom, that is to say God, our Divine Saviour Jesus Christ, the word of the Most High, the word of life. Their majesties recommend, therefore, to their peoples, as the sole means of enjoying that peace which springs from a good conscience and is alone enduring, to fortify themselves each day in the principles and practice of those duties which the Divine Saviour has taught to men.
ARTICLE III.–All those powers who wish solemnly to make avowal of the sacred principles which have dictated the present act, and who would recognize how important it is to the happiness of nations, too long agitated, that these truths should hereafter exercise upon human destiny all the influence belonging to them, shall be received into this Holy Alliance with as much cordiality as affection.
Engrossed in three copies and signed at Paris, year of grace, 1815, September 14/26.
FRANCIS,
Signed FREDERICK WILLIAM,
ALEXANDER.
A Crackdown on German Nationalists: The Carlsbad Decrees
The German Confederation (1819)
1. A special representative of the ruler of each state shall be appointed for each university with appropriate instructions and extended powers, and who shall reside in the place where the university is situated. …
The function of this agent shall be to see to the strictest enforcement of existing laws and disciplinary regulations; to observe carefully the spirit which is shown by the instructors in the university in their public lectures and regular courses, and, without directly interfering in scientific matters or in the methods of teaching, to give a salutary direction to the instruction, having in view the future attitude of the students. Lastly, they shall devote unceasing attention to everything that may promote morality, good order and outward propriety among the students. …
2. The confederated governments mutually pledge themselves to remove from the universities or other public educational institutions all teachers who, by obvious deviation from their duty or by exceeding the limits of their functions, or by the abuse of their legitimate influence over the youthful minds, or by propagating harmful doctrines hostile to the public order or subversive of existing governmental institutions, shall have unmistakably proved their unfitness for the important office intrusted to them. …
No teacher who shall have been removed in this manner shall be again appointed to a position in any public institution of learning in another state of the Union.
3. Those laws which have for a long period been directed against secret and unauthorized societies in the universities, shall be strictly enforced. These laws apply especially to that association established some years since under the name Universal Students’ Union (Allgemeine Burschenschaft), since the very conception of the society implies the utterly unallowable plan of permanent fellowship and constant communication between the various universities. The duty of especial watchfulness in this matter should be impressed upon the special agents of the government.
The governments mutually agree that such persons as shall, after the publication of the present decree, be shown to have remained in secret or unauthorized associations or shall have entered such associations, shall not be admitted to any public office.
4. No student, who shall be expelled from a university by a decision of the University Senate, which was ratified or prompted by the agent of the government, or who shall have left the institution in order to escape expulsion, shall be received in any other university. Nor, in general, shall any student be admitted to another university without a satisfactory certificate of his good conduct at the university he has left.
A German Philosopher Asserts Chauvinistic Nationalism Johann Fichte (ca. 1810)
Further, if I should use in speaking to the German, instead of the words Popularity (Popularitat) and Liberality (Liberalitat), the expressions ‘striving for favour among the great mob’ and ‘not having the mind of a slave,’ which is how those words must be literally translated, he would at first not obtain the clear and lively sensual image such as the Roman of old days certainly obtained. The latter saw every day with his own eyes the flexible politeness of an ambitious candidate to all and sundry, and saw outbursts of the slave-mind also; and those words represented these things to him in a living fashion. The change in the form of government and the introduction of Christianity took away even from the Roman of later days these sights and shows; and then, too, his own language was beginning to die away to a great extent in his own mouth, this being more especially due to Christianity, which was alien to him and which he could neither ward off nor incorporate with himself. How could this language, already half dead in its own home, have been transmitted alive to a foreign people? And how should it now be capable of transmission to us Germans? Further, with regard to the sensual image of a mental thing that lies in both those expressions, there is in Popularity even at the very beginning something base, which became perverted to a virtue in the mouth of the nation, owing to their corruption and their constitution. The German never falls into this perversion so long as it is presented to him in his own language. But when Liberality is translated by saying that a man has not ‘the soul of a slave,’ or, to bring it into accordance with modern custom, ‘a lackey’s way of thinking,’ he answers once more that when this is said it means very little too.
… Now supposing that what those … foreign words must really be intended to mean, if they mean anything at all, had been expressed to the German in his own words and in his own circle of sensual images as follows: … Leutseligkeit (condescension or affability), and Edelmut (noble-mindedness), he would have understood us; but the base associations we have named could never have been slipped into those designations. In the range of German speech a wrapping-up in incomprehensibility and darkness of the kind mentioned arises either from clumsiness or evil design; it can be avoided, and the means always ready to hand is to translate into right and true German. But in the Romance languages this incomprehensibility is natural and primitive and there is no means of avoiding it, for [those using] these languages are not in possession of any living language at all by which they might examine the dead one, and if one looks at the matter closely, are entirely without a mother tongue.
A Warning About the Dangers of German Nationalism Heinrich Heine (ca. 1830)
Christianity has to a certain degree moderated that brutal lust of battle, such as we find it among the ancient Germanic races who fought, not to destroy, nor yet to conquer, but merely from a fierce demoniac love of battle itself; but it could not altogether eradicate it. And when once that restraining talisman, the cross, is broken, then the smouldering ferocity of those ancient warriors will again blaze up; then again will be heard the deadly clang of that frantic Berserker wrath, of which the Norse poets say and sing so much. That talisman is rotten with decay, and the day will surely come when it will crumble and fall. Then the ancient stone gods will arise from out the ashes of dismantled ruins, and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes; and finally Thor, with his colossal hammer, will leap up and with it shatter into fragments the Gothic cathedrals. … . Smile not at my advice as the counsel of a visionary warning you against Kantians, Fichteans and natural philosophers. Scoff not at the dreamer who expects in the material world a revolution similar to that which has already taken place in the domain of thought. The thought goes before the deed, as the lightning precedes the thunder. True, the German thunder is German, is rather awkward, and comes rolling along rather tardily; but come it surely will, and when ye once hear a crash the like of which in the world’s history was never heard before, then know that the German thunderbolt has reached its mark. At this crash the eagles will fall dead in mid-air, and the lions in Africa’s most distant deserts will cower and sneak into their most royal dens. A drama will be enacted in Germany in comparison with which the French Revolution will appear a harmless idyl.
… That hour will come. As on the raised benches of an amphitheatre the nations will group themselves around Germany to behold the great tournament. … Ye have more to fear from emancipated Germany than from the whole Holy Alliance, with all its Croats and Cossacks.
Young Italy: A Dream of Republican and National Unity Giuseppe Mazzini (1832)
LIBERTY–EQUALITY–HUMANITY–INDEPENDENCE–UNITY
Young Italy is a brotherhood of Italians who believe in a law of progress and duty, and are convinced that Italy is destined to become one nation, convinced also that she possesses sufficient strength within herself to become one, and that the ill success of her former efforts is to be attributed not to the weakness, but to the misdirection of the revolutionary elements within her,–that the secret force lies in constancy and unity of effort. They join this association with the firm intention of consecrating both thought and action to the great aim of reconstituting Italy as one independent sovereign nation of free men and equals. …
The aim of the association is revolution; but its labors will be essentially educational, both before and after the day of revolution; and it therefore declares the principles upon which the national education should be conducted, and from which alone Italy may hope for safety and regeneration. …
Young Italy is republican and unitarian[1]–republican, because theoretically every nation is destined, by the law of God and humanity, to form a free and equal community of brothers; and the republican government is the only form of government that ensures this future: Because all true sovereignty resides essentially in the nation, the sole progressive and continuous interpreter of the supreme moral law; … because the monarchical element being incapable of sustaining itself alone by the side of the popular element, it necessarily involves the existence of the intermediate element of an aristocracy,–the source of inequality and corruption to the whole nation; because both history and the nature of things teach us that elective monarchy tends to generate anarchy, and hereditary monarchy tends to generate despotism; because, when monarchy is not–as in the Middle Ages–based upon the belief, now extinct, in right divine, it becomes too weak to be a bond of unity and authority in the State; because the inevitable tendency of the series of progressive transformations taking place in Europe is toward the enthronement of the republican principle, and because the inauguration of the monarchical principle in Italy would carry along with it the necessity of a new revolution shortly after.
Our Italian tradition is essentially republican; our great memories are republican; the whole history of our national progress is republican; whereas the introduction of monarchy amongst us was coeval [coincided] with our decay, and consummated our ruin by its constant servility to the foreigner and antagonism to the people as well as to the unity of the nation.
While the populations of the various Italian states would cheerfully unite in the name of a principle which could give no umbrage to local ambition, they would not willingly submit to be governed by one man,–the offspring of one of those States; and their several pretensions would necessarily tend to federalism.
If monarchy were once set up as the aim of the Italian insurrection, it would, by a logical necessity, draw along with it all the obligations of the monarchical system, concessions to foreign courts, trust in and respect for diplomacy, and the repression of that popular element, by which alone our salvation can be achieved. By intrusting the supreme authority to monarchists whose interest it would be to betray us, we should infallibly bring the insurrection to naught. …
Young Italy is unitarian, because, without unity there is no true nation; because, without unity there is no real strength; and Italy, surrounded as she is by powerful, united, and jealous nations, has need of strength above all things; because federalism, by reducing her to the political impotence of Switzerland, would necessarily place her under the influence of one of the neighboring nations; because federalism, by reviving the local rivalries now extinct, would throw Italy back upon the Middle Ages; … because federalism, by destroying the unity of the great Italian family, would strike at the root of the great mission Italy is destined to accomplish for humanity; because Europe is undergoing a progressive series of transformations, which are gradually and irresistibly guiding European society to form itself into vast and united masses; because the entire work of internal civilization in Italy will be seen, if rightly studied, to have been tending for ages toward unity.
The means by which Young Italy proposes to reach its aim are education and insurrection, to be adopted simultaneously and made to harmonize with each other. Education must ever be directed to teach, by example, word, and pen, the necessity of insurrection. Insurrection, whenever it can be realized, must be so conducted as to render it a means of national education. Education, though of necessity secret in Italy, will be public outside of Italy. …
Insurrection, by means of guerrilla bands, is the true method of warfare for all nations desirous of emancipating themselves from a foreign yoke. This method of warfare supplies the want–inevitable at the commencement of the insurrection–of a regular army; it calls the greatest number of elements into the field, and yet may be sustained by the smallest number. It forms the military education of the people and consecrates every foot of the native soil by the memory of some warlike deed. Guerrilla warfare opens a field of activity for every local capacity, forces the enemy into an unaccustomed method of battle, avoids the evil consequences of a great defeat, secures the national war from the risk of treason, and has the advantage of not confining it within any defined and determinate basis of operations. It is invincible, indestructible. The regular army, recruited with all possible solicitude and organized with all possible care, will complete the work begun by the war of insurrection.
All the members of Young Italy will exert themselves to diffuse these principles of insurrection. The association will develop them more fully in its writings, and will explain from time to time the ideas and organization which should govern the period of insurrection.
[1] That is, Italy must not become a mere federation.
The Case for Classical Liberalism James Mill (1820)
Of the laws of nature on which the condition of man depends, that which is attended with the greatest number of consequences is the necessity of labor for obtaining the means of subsistence, as well as the means of the greatest part of our pleasures. This is no doubt the primary cause of government; for if nature had produced spontaneously all the objects which we desire, and in sufficient abundance for the desires of all, there would have been no source of dispute or of injury among men, nor would any man have possessed the means of ever acquiring authority over another.
The results are exceedingly different when nature produces the objects of desire not in sufficient abundance for all. The source of dispute is then exhaustless, and every man has the means of acquiring authority over others in proportion to the quantity of those objects which he is able to possess. In this case the end to be obtained through government as the means, is to make that distribution of the scanty materials of happiness which would insure the greatest sum of it in the members of the community taken altogether, preventing every individual or combination of individuals from interfering with that distribution or making any man to have less than his share.
When it is considered that most of the objects of desire and even the means of subsistence are the product of labor, it is evident that the means of insuring labor must be provided for as the foundation of all. The means for the insuring of labor are of two sorts: the one made out of the matter of evil, the other made out of the matter of good. The first sort is commonly denominated force, and under its application the laborers are slaves. This mode of procuring labor we need not consider, for if the end of government be to produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number, that end cannot be attained by making the greatest number slaves.
The other mode of obtaining labor is by allurement, or the advantage which it brings. To obtain all the objects of desire in the greatest possible quantity, we must obtain labor in the greatest possible quantity; and to obtain labor in the greatest possible quantity, we must raise to the greatest possible height the advantage attached to labor. It is impossible to attach to labor a greater degree of advantage than the whole of the product of labor. Why so? Because if you give more to one man than the produce of his labor, you can do so only by taking it away from the produce of some other man’s labor. The greatest possible happiness of society is therefore attained by insuring to every man the greatest possible quantity of the produce of his labor.
How is this to be accomplished? For it is obvious that every man who has not all the objects of his desire, has inducement to take them from any other man who is weaker than himself: and how is he to be prevented? One mode is sufficiently obvious, and it does not appear that there is any other: the union of a certain number of men to protect one another. The object, it is plain, can best be attained when a great number of men combine and delegate to a small number the power necessary for protecting them all. This is government.
With respect to the end of government, or that for the sake of which it exists, it is not conceived to be necessary on the present occasion that the analysis should be carried any further. What follows is an attempt to analyze the means.
Two things are here to be considered: the power with which the small number are entrusted, and the use which they are to make of it. With respect to the first there is no difficulty. The elements out of which the power of coercing others is fabricated are obvious to all. Of these we shall therefore not lengthen this article by any explanation. All the difficult questions of government relate to the means of restraining those in whose hands are lodged the powers necessary for the protection of all from making a bad use of it.
Whatever would be the temptations under which individuals would lie if there was no government, to take the objects of desire from others weaker than themselves, under the same temptations the members of the government lie, to take the objects of desire from the members of the community, if they are not prevented from doing so. Whatever, then, are the reasons for establishing government, the very same exactly are the reasons for establishing securities that those entrusted with the powers necessary for protecting others, make use of them for that purpose solely, and not for the purpose of taking from the members of the community the objects of desire.
A New Model: Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville (1835)
The equality of conditions leads by a still straighter road to several of the effects which I have here described. When all the privileges of birth and fortune are abolished, when all professions are accessible to all, and a man’s own energies may place him at the top of any one of them, an easy and unbounded career seems open to his ambition, and he will readily persuade himself that he is born to no vulgar destinies. But this is an erroneous notion, which is corrected by daily experience. The same equality which allows every citizen to conceive these lofty hopes, renders all the citizens less able to realize them; it circumscribes their powers on every side, while it gives freer scope to their desires. Not only are they themselves powerless, but they are met at every step by immense obstacles, which they did not at first perceive. They have swept away the privileges of some of their fellow-creatures which stood in their way; but they have opened the door to universal competition: the barrier has changed its shape rather than its position. When men are nearly alike, and all follow the same track, it is very difficult for any one individual to walk quick and cleave a way through the dense throng which surrounds and presses him. This constant strife between the propensities springing from the equality of conditions and the means it supplies to satisfy them, harasses and wearies the mind.
It is possible to conceive men arrived at a degree of freedom which should completely content them; they would then enjoy their independence without anxiety and without impatience. But men will never establish any equality with which they can be contented. Whatever efforts a people may make, they will never succeed in reducing all the conditions of society to a perfect level; and even if they unhappily attained that absolute and complete depression, the inequality of minds would still remain, which, coming directly from the hand of God, will for ever escape the laws of man. However democratic then the social state and the political constitution of a people may be, it is certain that every member of the community will always find out several points about him which command his own position; and we may foresee that his looks will be doggedly fixed in that direction. When inequality of conditions is the common law of society, the most marked inequalities do not strike the eye; when everything is nearly on the same level, the slightest are marked enough to hurt it. Hence the desire of equality always becomes more insatiable in proportion as equality is more complete.
Among democratic nations men easily attain a certain equality of conditions; they can never attain the equality they desire. It perpetually retires from before them, yet without hiding itself from their sight, and in retiring draws them on. At every moment they think they are about to grasp it; it escapes at every moment from their hold. They are near enough to see its charms, but too far off to enjoy them; and before they have fully tasted its delights, they die. …
In democratic ages enjoyments are more intense than in the ages of aristocracy, and especially the number of those who partake in them is larger. But, on the other hand, it must be admitted that man’s hopes and his desires are often blasted, the soul is more stricken and perturbed, and care itself more keen.
German Romanticism is Introduced to France
Mme. Germaine de Stael (1810)
The word romantic has been lately introduced in Germany, to designate that kind of poetry which is derived from the songs of the Troubadours; that which owes its birth to the union of chivalry and Christianity. If we do not admit that the empire of literature has been divided between paganism and Christianity, the north and the south, antiquity and the middle ages, chivalry and the institutions of Greece and Rome, we shall never succeed in forming a philosophical judgment of ancient and of modern taste. …
The new school maintains the same system in the fine arts as in literature, and affirms that Christianity is the source of all modern genius; the writers of this school also characterize, in a new manner, all that in Gothic architecture agrees with the religious sentiments of Christians. It does not follow however from this, that the moderns can and ought to construct Gothic churches; neither art nor nature admit of repetition: it is only of consequence to us, in the present silence of genius, to lay aside the contempt which has been thrown on all the conceptions of the middle ages; it certainly does not suit us to adopt them, but nothing is more injurious to the development of genius, than to consider as barbarous everything that is original.
A Critic Argues in Favor of Romanticism
Stendhal (1824)
We are at the dawn of a revolution in the fine arts. The huge pictures composed of thirty nude figures inspired by antique statues and the heavy tragedies in verse in five acts are, without a doubt, very respectable works; but in spite of all that may be said in their favor, they have begun to be a little boring. If the painting of The Battle of the Romans and the Sabines [by the neo-classical painter Jacques Louis David] were to appear today, we would find that its figures were without passion and that in any country it is absurd to march off to battle with no clothes on. … The romantic in all the arts is that which shows the men of today and not those who probably never existed in those heroic times so distant from us. … That which may console romanticism for the attacks of the [newspaper] Journal des debats is that good sense applied to the arts has made immense progress in the last four years and particularly among the leaders of society.
When Giants Meet: Goethe and Beethoven
Bettina von Arnim
(1810)
Who among us could replace this genius? from whom could we expect a similar achievement? All human activity is like the pendulum of a clock that comes and goes for him: he alone is free and produces of his own free will, as he wishes, the uncreated and the unexpected. What matters then his traffic with the world, to him whom the rising sun finds already engaged upon the hallowed task of every day and who hardly lifts his eyes at sunset to glance about him; he who forgets to feed his body and whom the torrent of his inspiration keeps far removed from the platitudes of daily life? He has told me himself: “From the moment when I open my eyes I begin to groan, for what I see goes against my religion, and I must despise the world which does not sense that music is a more sublime revelation than all wisdom and all philosophy; it is the wine that inspires and leads to fresh creations, and I am the Bacchus who presses for mankind this wine of magnificence, it is I who makes them spiritually drunk; and when they find themselves with an empty stomach once more, they have in their intoxication fished in all sorts of things that they bring back with them onto the dry shore. I have no friend, I have to live alone with myself; but I know well that God is closer to me in my art than to all others, and I advance with him without fear, having recognized and understood him every time. Nor do I feel anxious about my music which could have no adverse destiny: he who freely opens his mind and his feelings shall be forever exempt from all the misery in which the others drag along.”
All these things Beethoven said to me when I saw him for the first time. A great sentiment of veneration took hold of me on hearing him thus reveal his thoughts to me who must have seemed to him so puny. I was the more surprised since I had been assured that he was misanthropic and would engage in conversation with no one. Nobody wanted to introduce me to him; I had to seek him out for myself. He owns three apartments in which he hides in turn; one in the country, one in town, the third in the bastion; it was there, in the third, that I was to find him. I went in unannounced; he was at the piano; I told him my name. He received me affectionately and asked me at once whether I would like to hear a song he had just put to music. And then he started to sing Kennst du das Land … ["Knowst thou the land," one of Mignon's songs from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister] in a voice so powerful and penetrating that its melancholy took possession of me.–”Is it not beautiful?” he asked me enthusiastically. “Wonderful.” “I shall sing it a second time.” He rejoiced at my delightful approval. “Most humans,” he said to me, “are moved by something good, but they are in no way artistic natures; artists are made of fire; they do not weep.” And he began once more to sing another song of yours, which he had composed in the last few days. …
Dr. Faust Longs for a Greater Existence
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1832)
Faust
Oh, happy the man with any hope
of rising out of error’s ocean!
You need just what you do not know,
and what you really know is worthless.
But let us not embitter this blessed hour
with melancholy thoughts.
See how the green-encircled huts
shine in the glow of the evening sun.
The day is over; the sun yields and hastens
onward to quicken new life. Oh, that wings
could lift me from the earth to follow,
struggling in the sun-wake! I would see
beneath my feet the silent world
glowing in the eternal evening;
each peak on fire, each valley calm,
the silver brooks flowing to golden rivers.
And the wild mountain with its gorges
could not check my godlike flight.
Already the ocean with its sun-warmed bays
broadens beneath my astonished eye.
Yet finally the sun appears to sink;
and a new instinct awakens.
I hurry onward to drink his eternal light,
the day before me, and the night behind,
the sky above, the waves below–
a splendid dream until the sun fades out.
Ah, if only the wings that raise the spirit
might be brothered by strong earthly wings!
Man is born with a desire
that drives his feeling upward, onward,
when overhead, lost in blue space,
the skylark sings his quavering song;
when over craggy fir-topped heights
he sees the out-spread eagle soaring,
or the crane struggling homeward
over lakes and swampy moors.
Wagner
I’ve often had strange whims myself,
but never such an urge as that.
You soon get bored with fields and forests;
I’ll never envy any bird his flight.
How differently the spirit’s pleasures bear us,
from page to page, through volume after volume.
Then winter nights are cheerful and friendly,
warm delight steals through the bones,
and ah, when you unroll some precious parchment,
Heaven itself comes down to you!
Faust
You know the one impulse only.
It’s better if you never learn the other.
Alas, there are two souls that live in me
and one would like to leave its brother;
one with gripping organs clings to earth
with a rough and hearty lust;
the other rises powerfully from the dirt
up toward the region of the great forefathers.
If there are lordly spirits in the air
roaming between the earth and sky,
let them come down from the golden atmosphere
and lead me to a new, more vivid life!
Yes, if I had a magic cloak to carry me
to foreign lands, I would not trade it
for the richest robes, or for the mantle of a king.
Frankenstein Meets His Monster
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
(1818)
It was nearly noon when I arrived at the top of the ascent. For some time I sat upon the rock that overlooks the sea of ice. A mist covered both that and the surrounding mountains. Presently a breeze dissipated the cloud, and I descended upon the glacier. The surface is very uneven, rising like the waves of a troubled sea, descending low, and interspersed by rifts that sink deep. The field of ice is almost a league in width, but I spent nearly two hours in crossing it. The opposite mountain is a bare perpendicular rock. From the side where I now stood. Montanvert was exactly opposite, at the distance of a league; and above it rose Mount Blanc, in awful majesty. I remained in a recess of the rock, gazing on this wonderful and stupendous scene. The sea, or rather the vast river of ice, wound among its dependent mountains, whose aerial summits hung over its recesses. Their icy and glittering peaks shone in the sunlight over the clouds. My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy; I exclaimed–”Wandering spirits, if indeed ye wander, and do not rest in your narrow beds, allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as your companion, away from the joys of life.”
As I said this, I suddenly beheld the figure of a man, at some distance, advancing towards me with superhuman speed. He bounded over the crevices in the ice, among which I had walked with caution; his stature, also, as he approached, seemed to exceed that of man. I was troubled: a mist came over my eyes, and I felt a faintness seize me; but I was quickly restored by the cold gale of the mountains. I perceived, as the shape came nearer (sight tremendous and abhorred!) that it was the wretch whom I had created. I trembled with rage and horror, resolving to wait his approach, and then close with him in mortal combat. He approached; his countenance bespoke bitter anguish, combined with disdain and malignity, while its unearthly ugliness rendered it almost too horrible for human eyes. But I scarcely observed this; rage and hatred had at first deprived me of utterance, and I recovered only to overwhelm him with words expressive of furious detestation and contempt.
“Devil,” I exclaimed, “do you dare approach me? and do not you fear the fierce vengeance of my arm wreaked on your miserable head? Begone, vile insect! or rather, stay, that I may trample you to dust! and, oh! that I could, with the extinction of your miserable existence, restore those victims whom you have so diabolically murdered!”
“I expected this reception,” said the daemon. “All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satisfied with the blood of your remaining friends.”
“Abhorred monster! fiend that thou art! the tortures of hell are too mild a vengeance for thy crimes. Wretched devil! you reproach me with your creation; come on, then, that I may extinguish the spark which I so negligently bestowed.”
My rage was without bounds; I sprang on him, impelled by all the feelings which can arm one being against the existence of another.
He easily eluded me, and said–
“Be calm! I entreat you to hear me, before you give vent to your hatred on my devoted head. Have I not suffered enough that you seek to increase my misery? Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it. Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than thyself; my height is superior to thine; my joints more supple. But I will not be tempted to set myself in opposition to thee. I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king, if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me. Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other, and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”
The Cult of Domesticity: A System of Middle-Class Values and Social Duties
Sarah Stickney Ellis
(1838)
One of the noblest features in her national character … is the domestic character of England–the home comforts, and fireside virtues for which she is so justly celebrated. These I hope to be able to speak of without presumption, as intimately associated with, and dependent upon, the moral feelings and habits of the women of this favored country. …
In looking around, then, upon our “nation of shopkeepers,” we readily perceive that by dividing society into three classes, as regards what is commonly called rank, the middle class must include so vast a portion of the intelligence and moral power of the country at large, that it may not improperly be designated the pillar of our nation’s strength, its base being the important class of the laborious poor, and its rich and highly ornamental capital, the ancient nobility of the land. In no other country is society thus beautifully proportioned, and England should beware of any deviation from the order and symmetry of her national column. …
Perhaps it may be necessary to be more specific in describing the class of women to which this work relates. It is, then, strictly speaking, to those who belong to that great mass of the population of England which is connected with trade and manufactures;–or, in order to make the application more direct, to that portion of it who are restricted to the services of from one to four domestics,–who, on the one hand, enjoy the advantages of a liberal education, and, on the other, have no pretension to family rank. …
It is from the class of females above described, that we naturally look for the highest tone of moral feeling, because they are at the same time removed from the pressing necessities of absolute poverty, and admitted to the intellectual privileges of the great: and thus, while they enjoy every facility in the way of acquiring knowledge, it is their still higher privilege not to be exempt from the domestic duties which call forth the best energies of the female character.
“What shall I do to gratify myself–to be admired–or to vary the tenor of my existence?” are not the questions which a woman of right feelings asks on first awaking to the avocations of the day. Much more congenial to the highest attributes of woman’s character, are inquiries such as these: “How shall I endeavor through this day to turn the time, the health, and the means permitted me to enjoy, to the best account? Is any one sick, I must visit their chamber without delay, and try to give their apartment an air of comfort, by arranging such things as the wearied nurse may not have thought of. Is any one about to set off on a journey, I must see that the early meal is spread, to prepare it with my own hands, in order that the servant, who was working late last night, may profit by unbroken rest. Did I fail in what was kind or considerate to any of the family yesterday; I will meet her this morning with a cordial welcome, and show, in the most delicate way I can, that I am anxious to atone for the past. Was any one exhausted by the last day’s exertion, I will be an hour before them this morning, and let them see that their labor is so much in advance. Or, if nothing extraordinary occurs to claim my attention, I will meet the family with a consciousness that, being the least engaged of any member of it, I am consequently the most at liberty to devote myself to the general good of the whole, by cultivating cheerful conversation, adapting myself to the prevailing tone of feeling, and leading those who are least happy, to think and speak of what will make them more so.” …
Above all other characteristics of the women of England, the strong moral feeling pervading even their most trifling and familiar actions, ought to be mentioned as most conducive to the maintenance of that high place which they so justly claim in the society of their native land. … The women of England are not surpassed by those of any other country for their clear perception of the right and the wrong of common and familiar things, for their reference to principle in the ordinary affairs of life, and for their united maintenance of that social order, sound integrity, and domestic peace, which constitute the foundation of all that is most valuable in the society of our native land.
Much as I have said of the influence of the domestic habits of my country-women, it is, after all, to the prevalence of religious instruction, and the operation of religious principle upon the heart, that the consistent maintenance of their high tone of moral character is to be attributed. … Women are said to be more easily brought under this influence than men; and we consequently see, in places of public worship, and on all occasions in which a religious object is the motive for exertion, a greater proportion of women than of men. …
If … all was confusion and neglect at home–filial appeals unanswered–domestic comforts uncalculated–husbands, sons, and brothers referred to servants for all the little offices of social kindness, in order that the ladies of the family might hurry away at the appointed time to some committee-room, scientific lecture, or public assembly: however laudable the object for which they met, there would be sufficient cause why their cheeks should be mantled with the blush of burning shame … which those whose charity has not begun at home, ought never to appropriate to themselves.
It is a widely mistaken notion to suppose that the sphere of usefulness recommended here, is a humiliating and degraded one. … With [some women] it is a favorite plea, brought forward in extenuation of their own uselessness, that they have no influence–that they are not leading women–that society takes no note of them. …
It is not to be presumed that women possess more moral power than men; but happily for them, such are their early impressions, associations, and general position in the world, that their moral feelings are less liable to be impaired by the pecuniary objects which too often constitute the chief end of man, and which, even under the limitations of better principle, necessarily engage a large portion of his thoughts. …
Power Politics According to the Scriptures: The Holy Alliance
Francis I, Frederick William III, and Alexander I
(1815)
Their majesties, the Emperor of Austria, the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Russia, in view of the great events which the last three years have brought to pass in Europe and in view especially of the benefits which it has pleased Divine Providence to confer upon those states whose governments have placed their confidence and their hope in Him alone, having reached the profound conviction that the policy of the powers, in their mutual relations, ought to be guided by the sublime truths taught by the eternal religion of God our Savior, solemnly declare that the present act has no other aim than to manifest to the world their unchangeable determination to adopt no other rule of conduct, either in the government of their respective countries or in their political relations with other governments, than the precepts of that holy religion, the precepts of justice, charity and peace. These, far from being applicable exclusively to private life, ought on the contrary directly to control the resolutions of princes and to guide their steps as the sole means of establishing human institutions and of remedying their imperfections. Hence their majesties have agreed upon the following articles:
ARTICLE I.–Conformably to the words of Holy Scripture which command all men to look upon each other as brothers, the three contracting monarchs will continue united by the bonds of a true and indissoluble fraternity and, regarding themselves as compatriots, they shall lend aid and assistance to each other on all occasions and in all places, viewing themselves, in their relations to their subjects and to their armies, as fathers of families, they shall direct them in the same spirit of fraternity by which they are animated for the protection of religion, peace and justice.
ARTICLE II.–Hence the sole principle of conduct, be it between the said government or their subjects, shall be that of rendering mutual service, and testifying by unceasing good-will, the mutual affection with which they should be animated. Considering themselves all as members of one great Christian nation, the three allied princes look upon themselves as delegates of Providence called upon to govern three branches of the same family, viz: Austria, Russia and Prussia. They thus confess that the Christian nation, of which they and their people form a part, has in reality no other sovereign than He alone to whom belongs by right the power, for in Him alone are to be found all the treasures of love, of knowledge and of infinite wisdom, that is to say God, our Divine Saviour Jesus Christ, the word of the Most High, the word of life. Their majesties recommend, therefore, to their peoples, as the sole means of enjoying that peace which springs from a good conscience and is alone enduring, to fortify themselves each day in the principles and practice of those duties which the Divine Saviour has taught to men.
ARTICLE III.–All those powers who wish solemnly to make avowal of the sacred principles which have dictated the present act, and who would recognize how important it is to the happiness of nations, too long agitated, that these truths should hereafter exercise upon human destiny all the influence belonging to them, shall be received into this Holy Alliance with as much cordiality as affection.
Engrossed in three copies and signed at Paris, year of grace, 1815, September 14/26.
FRANCIS,
Signed FREDERICK WILLIAM,
ALEXANDER.
A Crackdown on German Nationalists: The Carlsbad Decrees
The German Confederation (1819)
1. A special representative of the ruler of each state shall be appointed for each university with appropriate instructions and extended powers, and who shall reside in the place where the university is situated. …
The function of this agent shall be to see to the strictest enforcement of existing laws and disciplinary regulations; to observe carefully the spirit which is shown by the instructors in the university in their public lectures and regular courses, and, without directly interfering in scientific matters or in the methods of teaching, to give a salutary direction to the instruction, having in view the future attitude of the students. Lastly, they shall devote unceasing attention to everything that may promote morality, good order and outward propriety among the students. …
2. The confederated governments mutually pledge themselves to remove from the universities or other public educational institutions all teachers who, by obvious deviation from their duty or by exceeding the limits of their functions, or by the abuse of their legitimate influence over the youthful minds, or by propagating harmful doctrines hostile to the public order or subversive of existing governmental institutions, shall have unmistakably proved their unfitness for the important office intrusted to them. …
No teacher who shall have been removed in this manner shall be again appointed to a position in any public institution of learning in another state of the Union.
3. Those laws which have for a long period been directed against secret and unauthorized societies in the universities, shall be strictly enforced. These laws apply especially to that association established some years since under the name Universal Students’ Union (Allgemeine Burschenschaft), since the very conception of the society implies the utterly unallowable plan of permanent fellowship and constant communication between the various universities. The duty of especial watchfulness in this matter should be impressed upon the special agents of the government.
The governments mutually agree that such persons as shall, after the publication of the present decree, be shown to have remained in secret or unauthorized associations or shall have entered such associations, shall not be admitted to any public office.
4. No student, who shall be expelled from a university by a decision of the University Senate, which was ratified or prompted by the agent of the government, or who shall have left the institution in order to escape expulsion, shall be received in any other university. Nor, in general, shall any student be admitted to another university without a satisfactory certificate of his good conduct at the university he has left.
A German Philosopher Asserts Chauvinistic Nationalism Johann Fichte (ca. 1810)
Further, if I should use in speaking to the German, instead of the words Popularity (Popularitat) and Liberality (Liberalitat), the expressions ‘striving for favour among the great mob’ and ‘not having the mind of a slave,’ which is how those words must be literally translated, he would at first not obtain the clear and lively sensual image such as the Roman of old days certainly obtained. The latter saw every day with his own eyes the flexible politeness of an ambitious candidate to all and sundry, and saw outbursts of the slave-mind also; and those words represented these things to him in a living fashion. The change in the form of government and the introduction of Christianity took away even from the Roman of later days these sights and shows; and then, too, his own language was beginning to die away to a great extent in his own mouth, this being more especially due to Christianity, which was alien to him and which he could neither ward off nor incorporate with himself. How could this language, already half dead in its own home, have been transmitted alive to a foreign people? And how should it now be capable of transmission to us Germans? Further, with regard to the sensual image of a mental thing that lies in both those expressions, there is in Popularity even at the very beginning something base, which became perverted to a virtue in the mouth of the nation, owing to their corruption and their constitution. The German never falls into this perversion so long as it is presented to him in his own language. But when Liberality is translated by saying that a man has not ‘the soul of a slave,’ or, to bring it into accordance with modern custom, ‘a lackey’s way of thinking,’ he answers once more that when this is said it means very little too.
… Now supposing that what those … foreign words must really be intended to mean, if they mean anything at all, had been expressed to the German in his own words and in his own circle of sensual images as follows: … Leutseligkeit (condescension or affability), and Edelmut (noble-mindedness), he would have understood us; but the base associations we have named could never have been slipped into those designations. In the range of German speech a wrapping-up in incomprehensibility and darkness of the kind mentioned arises either from clumsiness or evil design; it can be avoided, and the means always ready to hand is to translate into right and true German. But in the Romance languages this incomprehensibility is natural and primitive and there is no means of avoiding it, for [those using] these languages are not in possession of any living language at all by which they might examine the dead one, and if one looks at the matter closely, are entirely without a mother tongue.
A Warning About the Dangers of German Nationalism Heinrich Heine (ca. 1830)
Christianity has to a certain degree moderated that brutal lust of battle, such as we find it among the ancient Germanic races who fought, not to destroy, nor yet to conquer, but merely from a fierce demoniac love of battle itself; but it could not altogether eradicate it. And when once that restraining talisman, the cross, is broken, then the smouldering ferocity of those ancient warriors will again blaze up; then again will be heard the deadly clang of that frantic Berserker wrath, of which the Norse poets say and sing so much. That talisman is rotten with decay, and the day will surely come when it will crumble and fall. Then the ancient stone gods will arise from out the ashes of dismantled ruins, and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes; and finally Thor, with his colossal hammer, will leap up and with it shatter into fragments the Gothic cathedrals. … . Smile not at my advice as the counsel of a visionary warning you against Kantians, Fichteans and natural philosophers. Scoff not at the dreamer who expects in the material world a revolution similar to that which has already taken place in the domain of thought. The thought goes before the deed, as the lightning precedes the thunder. True, the German thunder is German, is rather awkward, and comes rolling along rather tardily; but come it surely will, and when ye once hear a crash the like of which in the world’s history was never heard before, then know that the German thunderbolt has reached its mark. At this crash the eagles will fall dead in mid-air, and the lions in Africa’s most distant deserts will cower and sneak into their most royal dens. A drama will be enacted in Germany in comparison with which the French Revolution will appear a harmless idyl.
… That hour will come. As on the raised benches of an amphitheatre the nations will group themselves around Germany to behold the great tournament. … Ye have more to fear from emancipated Germany than from the whole Holy Alliance, with all its Croats and Cossacks.
Young Italy: A Dream of Republican and National Unity Giuseppe Mazzini (1832)
LIBERTY–EQUALITY–HUMANITY–INDEPENDENCE–UNITY
Young Italy is a brotherhood of Italians who believe in a law of progress and duty, and are convinced that Italy is destined to become one nation, convinced also that she possesses sufficient strength within herself to become one, and that the ill success of her former efforts is to be attributed not to the weakness, but to the misdirection of the revolutionary elements within her,–that the secret force lies in constancy and unity of effort. They join this association with the firm intention of consecrating both thought and action to the great aim of reconstituting Italy as one independent sovereign nation of free men and equals. …
The aim of the association is revolution; but its labors will be essentially educational, both before and after the day of revolution; and it therefore declares the principles upon which the national education should be conducted, and from which alone Italy may hope for safety and regeneration. …
Young Italy is republican and unitarian[1]–republican, because theoretically every nation is destined, by the law of God and humanity, to form a free and equal community of brothers; and the republican government is the only form of government that ensures this future: Because all true sovereignty resides essentially in the nation, the sole progressive and continuous interpreter of the supreme moral law; … because the monarchical element being incapable of sustaining itself alone by the side of the popular element, it necessarily involves the existence of the intermediate element of an aristocracy,–the source of inequality and corruption to the whole nation; because both history and the nature of things teach us that elective monarchy tends to generate anarchy, and hereditary monarchy tends to generate despotism; because, when monarchy is not–as in the Middle Ages–based upon the belief, now extinct, in right divine, it becomes too weak to be a bond of unity and authority in the State; because the inevitable tendency of the series of progressive transformations taking place in Europe is toward the enthronement of the republican principle, and because the inauguration of the monarchical principle in Italy would carry along with it the necessity of a new revolution shortly after.
Our Italian tradition is essentially republican; our great memories are republican; the whole history of our national progress is republican; whereas the introduction of monarchy amongst us was coeval [coincided] with our decay, and consummated our ruin by its constant servility to the foreigner and antagonism to the people as well as to the unity of the nation.
While the populations of the various Italian states would cheerfully unite in the name of a principle which could give no umbrage to local ambition, they would not willingly submit to be governed by one man,–the offspring of one of those States; and their several pretensions would necessarily tend to federalism.
If monarchy were once set up as the aim of the Italian insurrection, it would, by a logical necessity, draw along with it all the obligations of the monarchical system, concessions to foreign courts, trust in and respect for diplomacy, and the repression of that popular element, by which alone our salvation can be achieved. By intrusting the supreme authority to monarchists whose interest it would be to betray us, we should infallibly bring the insurrection to naught. …
Young Italy is unitarian, because, without unity there is no true nation; because, without unity there is no real strength; and Italy, surrounded as she is by powerful, united, and jealous nations, has need of strength above all things; because federalism, by reducing her to the political impotence of Switzerland, would necessarily place her under the influence of one of the neighboring nations; because federalism, by reviving the local rivalries now extinct, would throw Italy back upon the Middle Ages; … because federalism, by destroying the unity of the great Italian family, would strike at the root of the great mission Italy is destined to accomplish for humanity; because Europe is undergoing a progressive series of transformations, which are gradually and irresistibly guiding European society to form itself into vast and united masses; because the entire work of internal civilization in Italy will be seen, if rightly studied, to have been tending for ages toward unity.
The means by which Young Italy proposes to reach its aim are education and insurrection, to be adopted simultaneously and made to harmonize with each other. Education must ever be directed to teach, by example, word, and pen, the necessity of insurrection. Insurrection, whenever it can be realized, must be so conducted as to render it a means of national education. Education, though of necessity secret in Italy, will be public outside of Italy. …
Insurrection, by means of guerrilla bands, is the true method of warfare for all nations desirous of emancipating themselves from a foreign yoke. This method of warfare supplies the want–inevitable at the commencement of the insurrection–of a regular army; it calls the greatest number of elements into the field, and yet may be sustained by the smallest number. It forms the military education of the people and consecrates every foot of the native soil by the memory of some warlike deed. Guerrilla warfare opens a field of activity for every local capacity, forces the enemy into an unaccustomed method of battle, avoids the evil consequences of a great defeat, secures the national war from the risk of treason, and has the advantage of not confining it within any defined and determinate basis of operations. It is invincible, indestructible. The regular army, recruited with all possible solicitude and organized with all possible care, will complete the work begun by the war of insurrection.
All the members of Young Italy will exert themselves to diffuse these principles of insurrection. The association will develop them more fully in its writings, and will explain from time to time the ideas and organization which should govern the period of insurrection.
[1] That is, Italy must not become a mere federation.
The Case for Classical Liberalism James Mill (1820)
Of the laws of nature on which the condition of man depends, that which is attended with the greatest number of consequences is the necessity of labor for obtaining the means of subsistence, as well as the means of the greatest part of our pleasures. This is no doubt the primary cause of government; for if nature had produced spontaneously all the objects which we desire, and in sufficient abundance for the desires of all, there would have been no source of dispute or of injury among men, nor would any man have possessed the means of ever acquiring authority over another.
The results are exceedingly different when nature produces the objects of desire not in sufficient abundance for all. The source of dispute is then exhaustless, and every man has the means of acquiring authority over others in proportion to the quantity of those objects which he is able to possess. In this case the end to be obtained through government as the means, is to make that distribution of the scanty materials of happiness which would insure the greatest sum of it in the members of the community taken altogether, preventing every individual or combination of individuals from interfering with that distribution or making any man to have less than his share.
When it is considered that most of the objects of desire and even the means of subsistence are the product of labor, it is evident that the means of insuring labor must be provided for as the foundation of all. The means for the insuring of labor are of two sorts: the one made out of the matter of evil, the other made out of the matter of good. The first sort is commonly denominated force, and under its application the laborers are slaves. This mode of procuring labor we need not consider, for if the end of government be to produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number, that end cannot be attained by making the greatest number slaves.
The other mode of obtaining labor is by allurement, or the advantage which it brings. To obtain all the objects of desire in the greatest possible quantity, we must obtain labor in the greatest possible quantity; and to obtain labor in the greatest possible quantity, we must raise to the greatest possible height the advantage attached to labor. It is impossible to attach to labor a greater degree of advantage than the whole of the product of labor. Why so? Because if you give more to one man than the produce of his labor, you can do so only by taking it away from the produce of some other man’s labor. The greatest possible happiness of society is therefore attained by insuring to every man the greatest possible quantity of the produce of his labor.
How is this to be accomplished? For it is obvious that every man who has not all the objects of his desire, has inducement to take them from any other man who is weaker than himself: and how is he to be prevented? One mode is sufficiently obvious, and it does not appear that there is any other: the union of a certain number of men to protect one another. The object, it is plain, can best be attained when a great number of men combine and delegate to a small number the power necessary for protecting them all. This is government.
With respect to the end of government, or that for the sake of which it exists, it is not conceived to be necessary on the present occasion that the analysis should be carried any further. What follows is an attempt to analyze the means.
Two things are here to be considered: the power with which the small number are entrusted, and the use which they are to make of it. With respect to the first there is no difficulty. The elements out of which the power of coercing others is fabricated are obvious to all. Of these we shall therefore not lengthen this article by any explanation. All the difficult questions of government relate to the means of restraining those in whose hands are lodged the powers necessary for the protection of all from making a bad use of it.
Whatever would be the temptations under which individuals would lie if there was no government, to take the objects of desire from others weaker than themselves, under the same temptations the members of the government lie, to take the objects of desire from the members of the community, if they are not prevented from doing so. Whatever, then, are the reasons for establishing government, the very same exactly are the reasons for establishing securities that those entrusted with the powers necessary for protecting others, make use of them for that purpose solely, and not for the purpose of taking from the members of the community the objects of desire.
A New Model: Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville (1835)
The equality of conditions leads by a still straighter road to several of the effects which I have here described. When all the privileges of birth and fortune are abolished, when all professions are accessible to all, and a man’s own energies may place him at the top of any one of them, an easy and unbounded career seems open to his ambition, and he will readily persuade himself that he is born to no vulgar destinies. But this is an erroneous notion, which is corrected by daily experience. The same equality which allows every citizen to conceive these lofty hopes, renders all the citizens less able to realize them; it circumscribes their powers on every side, while it gives freer scope to their desires. Not only are they themselves powerless, but they are met at every step by immense obstacles, which they did not at first perceive. They have swept away the privileges of some of their fellow-creatures which stood in their way; but they have opened the door to universal competition: the barrier has changed its shape rather than its position. When men are nearly alike, and all follow the same track, it is very difficult for any one individual to walk quick and cleave a way through the dense throng which surrounds and presses him. This constant strife between the propensities springing from the equality of conditions and the means it supplies to satisfy them, harasses and wearies the mind.
It is possible to conceive men arrived at a degree of freedom which should completely content them; they would then enjoy their independence without anxiety and without impatience. But men will never establish any equality with which they can be contented. Whatever efforts a people may make, they will never succeed in reducing all the conditions of society to a perfect level; and even if they unhappily attained that absolute and complete depression, the inequality of minds would still remain, which, coming directly from the hand of God, will for ever escape the laws of man. However democratic then the social state and the political constitution of a people may be, it is certain that every member of the community will always find out several points about him which command his own position; and we may foresee that his looks will be doggedly fixed in that direction. When inequality of conditions is the common law of society, the most marked inequalities do not strike the eye; when everything is nearly on the same level, the slightest are marked enough to hurt it. Hence the desire of equality always becomes more insatiable in proportion as equality is more complete.
Among democratic nations men easily attain a certain equality of conditions; they can never attain the equality they desire. It perpetually retires from before them, yet without hiding itself from their sight, and in retiring draws them on. At every moment they think they are about to grasp it; it escapes at every moment from their hold. They are near enough to see its charms, but too far off to enjoy them; and before they have fully tasted its delights, they die. …
In democratic ages enjoyments are more intense than in the ages of aristocracy, and especially the number of those who partake in them is larger. But, on the other hand, it must be admitted that man’s hopes and his desires are often blasted, the soul is more stricken and perturbed, and care itself more keen.
German Romanticism is Introduced to France
Mme. Germaine de Stael (1810)
The word romantic has been lately introduced in Germany, to designate that kind of poetry which is derived from the songs of the Troubadours; that which owes its birth to the union of chivalry and Christianity. If we do not admit that the empire of literature has been divided between paganism and Christianity, the north and the south, antiquity and the middle ages, chivalry and the institutions of Greece and Rome, we shall never succeed in forming a philosophical judgment of ancient and of modern taste. …
The new school maintains the same system in the fine arts as in literature, and affirms that Christianity is the source of all modern genius; the writers of this school also characterize, in a new manner, all that in Gothic architecture agrees with the religious sentiments of Christians. It does not follow however from this, that the moderns can and ought to construct Gothic churches; neither art nor nature admit of repetition: it is only of consequence to us, in the present silence of genius, to lay aside the contempt which has been thrown on all the conceptions of the middle ages; it certainly does not suit us to adopt them, but nothing is more injurious to the development of genius, than to consider as barbarous everything that is original.
A Critic Argues in Favor of Romanticism
Stendhal (1824)
We are at the dawn of a revolution in the fine arts. The huge pictures composed of thirty nude figures inspired by antique statues and the heavy tragedies in verse in five acts are, without a doubt, very respectable works; but in spite of all that may be said in their favor, they have begun to be a little boring. If the painting of The Battle of the Romans and the Sabines [by the neo-classical painter Jacques Louis David] were to appear today, we would find that its figures were without passion and that in any country it is absurd to march off to battle with no clothes on. … The romantic in all the arts is that which shows the men of today and not those who probably never existed in those heroic times so distant from us. … That which may console romanticism for the attacks of the [newspaper] Journal des debats is that good sense applied to the arts has made immense progress in the last four years and particularly among the leaders of society.
When Giants Meet: Goethe and Beethoven
Bettina von Arnim
(1810)
Who among us could replace this genius? from whom could we expect a similar achievement? All human activity is like the pendulum of a clock that comes and goes for him: he alone is free and produces of his own free will, as he wishes, the uncreated and the unexpected. What matters then his traffic with the world, to him whom the rising sun finds already engaged upon the hallowed task of every day and who hardly lifts his eyes at sunset to glance about him; he who forgets to feed his body and whom the torrent of his inspiration keeps far removed from the platitudes of daily life? He has told me himself: “From the moment when I open my eyes I begin to groan, for what I see goes against my religion, and I must despise the world which does not sense that music is a more sublime revelation than all wisdom and all philosophy; it is the wine that inspires and leads to fresh creations, and I am the Bacchus who presses for mankind this wine of magnificence, it is I who makes them spiritually drunk; and when they find themselves with an empty stomach once more, they have in their intoxication fished in all sorts of things that they bring back with them onto the dry shore. I have no friend, I have to live alone with myself; but I know well that God is closer to me in my art than to all others, and I advance with him without fear, having recognized and understood him every time. Nor do I feel anxious about my music which could have no adverse destiny: he who freely opens his mind and his feelings shall be forever exempt from all the misery in which the others drag along.”
All these things Beethoven said to me when I saw him for the first time. A great sentiment of veneration took hold of me on hearing him thus reveal his thoughts to me who must have seemed to him so puny. I was the more surprised since I had been assured that he was misanthropic and would engage in conversation with no one. Nobody wanted to introduce me to him; I had to seek him out for myself. He owns three apartments in which he hides in turn; one in the country, one in town, the third in the bastion; it was there, in the third, that I was to find him. I went in unannounced; he was at the piano; I told him my name. He received me affectionately and asked me at once whether I would like to hear a song he had just put to music. And then he started to sing Kennst du das Land … ["Knowst thou the land," one of Mignon's songs from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister] in a voice so powerful and penetrating that its melancholy took possession of me.–”Is it not beautiful?” he asked me enthusiastically. “Wonderful.” “I shall sing it a second time.” He rejoiced at my delightful approval. “Most humans,” he said to me, “are moved by something good, but they are in no way artistic natures; artists are made of fire; they do not weep.” And he began once more to sing another song of yours, which he had composed in the last few days. …
Dr. Faust Longs for a Greater Existence
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1832)
Faust
Oh, happy the man with any hope
of rising out of error’s ocean!
You need just what you do not know,
and what you really know is worthless.
But let us not embitter this blessed hour
with melancholy thoughts.
See how the green-encircled huts
shine in the glow of the evening sun.
The day is over; the sun yields and hastens
onward to quicken new life. Oh, that wings
could lift me from the earth to follow,
struggling in the sun-wake! I would see
beneath my feet the silent world
glowing in the eternal evening;
each peak on fire, each valley calm,
the silver brooks flowing to golden rivers.
And the wild mountain with its gorges
could not check my godlike flight.
Already the ocean with its sun-warmed bays
broadens beneath my astonished eye.
Yet finally the sun appears to sink;
and a new instinct awakens.
I hurry onward to drink his eternal light,
the day before me, and the night behind,
the sky above, the waves below–
a splendid dream until the sun fades out.
Ah, if only the wings that raise the spirit
might be brothered by strong earthly wings!
Man is born with a desire
that drives his feeling upward, onward,
when overhead, lost in blue space,
the skylark sings his quavering song;
when over craggy fir-topped heights
he sees the out-spread eagle soaring,
or the crane struggling homeward
over lakes and swampy moors.
Wagner
I’ve often had strange whims myself,
but never such an urge as that.
You soon get bored with fields and forests;
I’ll never envy any bird his flight.
How differently the spirit’s pleasures bear us,
from page to page, through volume after volume.
Then winter nights are cheerful and friendly,
warm delight steals through the bones,
and ah, when you unroll some precious parchment,
Heaven itself comes down to you!
Faust
You know the one impulse only.
It’s better if you never learn the other.
Alas, there are two souls that live in me
and one would like to leave its brother;
one with gripping organs clings to earth
with a rough and hearty lust;
the other rises powerfully from the dirt
up toward the region of the great forefathers.
If there are lordly spirits in the air
roaming between the earth and sky,
let them come down from the golden atmosphere
and lead me to a new, more vivid life!
Yes, if I had a magic cloak to carry me
to foreign lands, I would not trade it
for the richest robes, or for the mantle of a king.
Frankenstein Meets His Monster
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
(1818)
It was nearly noon when I arrived at the top of the ascent. For some time I sat upon the rock that overlooks the sea of ice. A mist covered both that and the surrounding mountains. Presently a breeze dissipated the cloud, and I descended upon the glacier. The surface is very uneven, rising like the waves of a troubled sea, descending low, and interspersed by rifts that sink deep. The field of ice is almost a league in width, but I spent nearly two hours in crossing it. The opposite mountain is a bare perpendicular rock. From the side where I now stood. Montanvert was exactly opposite, at the distance of a league; and above it rose Mount Blanc, in awful majesty. I remained in a recess of the rock, gazing on this wonderful and stupendous scene. The sea, or rather the vast river of ice, wound among its dependent mountains, whose aerial summits hung over its recesses. Their icy and glittering peaks shone in the sunlight over the clouds. My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy; I exclaimed–”Wandering spirits, if indeed ye wander, and do not rest in your narrow beds, allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as your companion, away from the joys of life.”
As I said this, I suddenly beheld the figure of a man, at some distance, advancing towards me with superhuman speed. He bounded over the crevices in the ice, among which I had walked with caution; his stature, also, as he approached, seemed to exceed that of man. I was troubled: a mist came over my eyes, and I felt a faintness seize me; but I was quickly restored by the cold gale of the mountains. I perceived, as the shape came nearer (sight tremendous and abhorred!) that it was the wretch whom I had created. I trembled with rage and horror, resolving to wait his approach, and then close with him in mortal combat. He approached; his countenance bespoke bitter anguish, combined with disdain and malignity, while its unearthly ugliness rendered it almost too horrible for human eyes. But I scarcely observed this; rage and hatred had at first deprived me of utterance, and I recovered only to overwhelm him with words expressive of furious detestation and contempt.
“Devil,” I exclaimed, “do you dare approach me? and do not you fear the fierce vengeance of my arm wreaked on your miserable head? Begone, vile insect! or rather, stay, that I may trample you to dust! and, oh! that I could, with the extinction of your miserable existence, restore those victims whom you have so diabolically murdered!”
“I expected this reception,” said the daemon. “All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satisfied with the blood of your remaining friends.”
“Abhorred monster! fiend that thou art! the tortures of hell are too mild a vengeance for thy crimes. Wretched devil! you reproach me with your creation; come on, then, that I may extinguish the spark which I so negligently bestowed.”
My rage was without bounds; I sprang on him, impelled by all the feelings which can arm one being against the existence of another.
He easily eluded me, and said–
“Be calm! I entreat you to hear me, before you give vent to your hatred on my devoted head. Have I not suffered enough that you seek to increase my misery? Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it. Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than thyself; my height is superior to thine; my joints more supple. But I will not be tempted to set myself in opposition to thee. I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king, if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me. Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other, and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”
The Cult of Domesticity: A System of Middle-Class Values and Social Duties
Sarah Stickney Ellis
(1838)
One of the noblest features in her national character … is the domestic character of England–the home comforts, and fireside virtues for which she is so justly celebrated. These I hope to be able to speak of without presumption, as intimately associated with, and dependent upon, the moral feelings and habits of the women of this favored country. …
In looking around, then, upon our “nation of shopkeepers,” we readily perceive that by dividing society into three classes, as regards what is commonly called rank, the middle class must include so vast a portion of the intelligence and moral power of the country at large, that it may not improperly be designated the pillar of our nation’s strength, its base being the important class of the laborious poor, and its rich and highly ornamental capital, the ancient nobility of the land. In no other country is society thus beautifully proportioned, and England should beware of any deviation from the order and symmetry of her national column. …
Perhaps it may be necessary to be more specific in describing the class of women to which this work relates. It is, then, strictly speaking, to those who belong to that great mass of the population of England which is connected with trade and manufactures;–or, in order to make the application more direct, to that portion of it who are restricted to the services of from one to four domestics,–who, on the one hand, enjoy the advantages of a liberal education, and, on the other, have no pretension to family rank. …
It is from the class of females above described, that we naturally look for the highest tone of moral feeling, because they are at the same time removed from the pressing necessities of absolute poverty, and admitted to the intellectual privileges of the great: and thus, while they enjoy every facility in the way of acquiring knowledge, it is their still higher privilege not to be exempt from the domestic duties which call forth the best energies of the female character.
“What shall I do to gratify myself–to be admired–or to vary the tenor of my existence?” are not the questions which a woman of right feelings asks on first awaking to the avocations of the day. Much more congenial to the highest attributes of woman’s character, are inquiries such as these: “How shall I endeavor through this day to turn the time, the health, and the means permitted me to enjoy, to the best account? Is any one sick, I must visit their chamber without delay, and try to give their apartment an air of comfort, by arranging such things as the wearied nurse may not have thought of. Is any one about to set off on a journey, I must see that the early meal is spread, to prepare it with my own hands, in order that the servant, who was working late last night, may profit by unbroken rest. Did I fail in what was kind or considerate to any of the family yesterday; I will meet her this morning with a cordial welcome, and show, in the most delicate way I can, that I am anxious to atone for the past. Was any one exhausted by the last day’s exertion, I will be an hour before them this morning, and let them see that their labor is so much in advance. Or, if nothing extraordinary occurs to claim my attention, I will meet the family with a consciousness that, being the least engaged of any member of it, I am consequently the most at liberty to devote myself to the general good of the whole, by cultivating cheerful conversation, adapting myself to the prevailing tone of feeling, and leading those who are least happy, to think and speak of what will make them more so.” …
Above all other characteristics of the women of England, the strong moral feeling pervading even their most trifling and familiar actions, ought to be mentioned as most conducive to the maintenance of that high place which they so justly claim in the society of their native land. … The women of England are not surpassed by those of any other country for their clear perception of the right and the wrong of common and familiar things, for their reference to principle in the ordinary affairs of life, and for their united maintenance of that social order, sound integrity, and domestic peace, which constitute the foundation of all that is most valuable in the society of our native land.
Much as I have said of the influence of the domestic habits of my country-women, it is, after all, to the prevalence of religious instruction, and the operation of religious principle upon the heart, that the consistent maintenance of their high tone of moral character is to be attributed. … Women are said to be more easily brought under this influence than men; and we consequently see, in places of public worship, and on all occasions in which a religious object is the motive for exertion, a greater proportion of women than of men. …
If … all was confusion and neglect at home–filial appeals unanswered–domestic comforts uncalculated–husbands, sons, and brothers referred to servants for all the little offices of social kindness, in order that the ladies of the family might hurry away at the appointed time to some committee-room, scientific lecture, or public assembly: however laudable the object for which they met, there would be sufficient cause why their cheeks should be mantled with the blush of burning shame … which those whose charity has not begun at home, ought never to appropriate to themselves.
It is a widely mistaken notion to suppose that the sphere of usefulness recommended here, is a humiliating and degraded one. … With [some women] it is a favorite plea, brought forward in extenuation of their own uselessness, that they have no influence–that they are not leading women–that society takes no note of them. …
It is not to be presumed that women possess more moral power than men; but happily for them, such are their early impressions, associations, and general position in the world, that their moral feelings are less liable to be impaired by the pecuniary objects which too often constitute the chief end of man, and which, even under the limitations of better principle, necessarily engage a large portion of his thoughts. …
Primary Sources – Unit Twelve – Life in the Emerging Urban Society
“Sweated Labor:” A Poor Woman’s Fate
Henry Mayhew
(1849)
I do the “looping.” The looping consists in putting on the lace work down the front of the coats. I puts it on. That’s my living; I wish it was not. I get 5d. for the looping of each coat; that’s the regular price. It’s three hours’ work to do one coat, and work fast to do it as it’s done now. I’m a particular quick hand. I have to find my own thread. It cost 1 1/2d. for a reel of cotton; that will do five coats. If I sit down between eight and nine in the morning, and work till twelve at night–I never enters my bed afore–and then rise between eight and nine again (that’s the time I sit down to work on account of doing my own affairs first), and then work on till eleven, I get my four coats done by that time, and some wouldn’t get done till two. It’s an hour’s work going and coming, and waiting to be served at the piece-master’s, so that at them long hours it takes me a day and a half hard work to get four coats looped. When I first touched this work I could do eight in the same time, and be paid better; I had 7d. then instead of 5d.; now the work in each is nearly double in quantity, that it is.
I’ve got two boys both at work, one about fifteen, earning 3s. per week, and I have got him to keep and clothe. The week before last I bought him a top coat–it cost me 6s.–for fear he should be laid up, for he’s such bad health. The other boy is eighteen years, and earns 9s. a week. He’s been in work about four months, and was out six weeks. At the same time I had no work. Oh, it was awful then! I have been paying 1s. 6d. a week off a debt for bread and things I was obliged to get on credit then.
My last boy is only nine years of age, and him I have entirely to keep [support]. He goes to the charity school. It lets him have one coat and trousers and shoes and stockings every year. He wears a pinafore now to save his coat. My eldest boy is like a hearty man to every meal. If he hadn’t got me to manage for him, may be he’d spend all his earnings in mere food. I get my second bread, and I go as far as Nassau-street to save two or three halfpence. Butter we neverhave. A roast of meat none of us ever sees. A cup of tea, a piece of bread, and an onion, is generally all I have for my dinner, and sometimes I haven’t even an onion.
The Theory of Natural Selection and the Evolution of Species
Charles Darwin
(1859)
I have now recapitulated the facts and considerations which have thoroughly convinced me that species have been modified, during a long course of descent. This has been effected chiefly through the natural selections of numerous successive, slight, favourable variations; aided in an important manner by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts; and in an unimportant manner, that is in relation to adaptive structures, whether past or present, by the direct action of external conditions, and by variations which seem to us in our ignorance to arise spontaneously. … But as my conclusions have lately been much misrepresented, and it has been stated that I attribute the modification of species exclusively to natural selection, I may be permitted to remark that in the first edition of this work, and subsequently, I placed in a most conspicuous position–namely, at the close of the Introduction–the following words: “I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification.” This has been of no avail. Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.
It can hardly be supposed that a false theory would explain, in so satisfactory a manner as does the theory of natural selection, the several large classes of facts above specified. It has recently been objected that this is an unsafe method of arguing; but it is a method used in judging of the common events of life, and has often been used by the greatest natural philosophers. The undulatory theory of light has thus been arrived at; and the belief in the revolution of the earth on its own axis was until lately supported by hardly any direct evidence. It is no valid objection that science as yet throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life. Who can explain what is the essence of the attraction of gravity? No one now objects to following out the results consequent on this unknown element of attraction; notwithstanding that Leibnitz formerly accused Newton of introducing “occult qualities and miracles into philosophy.”
I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz, “as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion.” A celebrated author and divine has written to me that “he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.” …
… The chief cause of our natural unwillingness to admit that one species has given birth to clear and distinct species, is that we are always slow in admitting great changes of which we do not see the steps. The difficulty is the same as that felt by so many geologists, when Lyell first insisted that long lines of inland cliffs had been formed, and great valleys excavated, by the agencies which we see still at work. The mind cannot possibly grasp the full meaning of the term of even a million years; it cannot add up and perceive the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost infinite number of generations. …
Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for the manner in which all organic beings are grouped, shows that the greater number of species in each genus, and all the species in many genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct. We can so far take a prophetic glance into futurity as to foretell that it will be the common and widely-spread species, belonging to the larger and dominant groups within each class, which will ultimately prevail and procreate new and dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Cambrian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. … Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.
A Clergyman’s Response to Darwin
Bishop Samuel Wilberforce
(1860)
The conclusion, then, to which Mr. Darwin would bring us is, that all the various forms of vegetable and animal life with which the globe is now peopled, or of which we find the remains preserved in a fossil state in the great earth-museum around us, which the science of geology unlocks for our instruction, … “have descended from some one primordial form into which life was first breathed by the Creator.” This is the theory which really pervades the whole volume. Man, beast, creeping thing, and plant of the earth, are all the lineal and direct descendants of some one individual ens, whose various progeny have been simply modified by the action of natural and ascertainable conditions into the multiform aspect of life which we see around us. This is undoubtedly at first sight a somewhat startling conclusion to arrive at. To find that mosses, grasses, turnips, oaks, worms, and flies, mites and elephants, infusoria and whales, tadpoles of to-day and venerable saurians, truffles and men, are all equally the lineal descendants of the same aboriginal common ancestor. … –This, to say the least of it, is no common discovery–no very expected conclusion. …
We come then to these conclusions. All the facts presented to us in the natural world tend to show that none of the variations produced in the fixed forms of animal life, when seen in its most plastic condition under domestication, give any promise of a true transmutation of species; first, from the difficulty of accumulating and fixing variations within the same species; secondly, from the fact that these variations, though most serviceable for man, have no tendency to improve the individual beyond the standard of his own specific type, and so to afford matter, even if they were infinitely produced, for the supposed power of natural selection on which to work; whilst all variations from the mixture of species are barred by the inexorable law of hybrid sterility. Further, the embalmed records of 3,000 years show that there has been no beginning of transmutation in the species of our most familiar domesticated animals; and beyond this, that in the countless tribes of animal life around us, down to its lowest and most variable species, no one have ever discovered a single instance of such transmutation being now in prospect; no new organ has ever been known to be developed–no new natural instinct to be formed–whilst, finally, in the vast museum of departed animal life which the strata of the earth imbed for our examination, whilst they contain far too complete a representation of the past to be set aside as a mere imperfect record, yet afford no one instance of any such change as having ever been in progress, or give us anywhere the missing links of the assumed chain, or the remains which would enable now existing variations, by gradual approximations to shade off into unity. …
Few things have more deeply injured the cause of religion than the busy fussy energy with which men, narrow and feeble alike in faith and in science, have bustled forth to reconcile all new discoveries in physics with the word of inspiration. For it continually happens that some larger collection of facts, or some wider view of the phenomena of nature, alter the whole philosophic scheme; whilst revelation has been committed to declare an absolute agreement with what turns out after all to have been a misconception or an error. We cannot, therefore, consent to test the truth of natural science by the word of revelation. But this does not make it the less important to point out on scientific grounds scientific errors, when those errors tend to limit God’s glory in creation, or to gainsay the revealed relations of that creation to Himself. To both these classes of error, though, we doubt not, quite unintentionally on his part, we think that Mr. Darwin’s speculations directly tend.
The Regulation of Prostitution in Vienna
Viennese Police Code
(1852)
Instructions for Police Treatment of Prostitutes, 1852
1. Under the designation prostitute is understood to be every woman who seeks business by exposing her body for sale in lewdness.
2. Under what circumstances the prostitute is officially conducted to the criminal court and what penalties in all other cases remain under police jurisdiction is determined by penal law.
3. The prostitute falls into the realm of police correction when she:
a. walks the streets, that is, she walks in such a way as to enlist business from men;
b. loiters for the same end on doorsteps in allies or in open spaces;
c. has her residence in a house or part of the city in which are gathered such women of a conduct similar to those of a bordello or in a region known for its lewd manners;
d. lures people in a shameless way from a window or from an open air part of the house, or otherwise offends public decency, and not only in a criminal way.
4. Every one who is defined under these as a streetwalker and who is held in detention is subject to the following proceedings:
a. a medical examination;
b. an inquiry into her present situation, and
c. her past, in order to
d. conduct an investigation into her methods of earning a living and her personal relationships.
5. Should such a female qualify as a prostitute and be found ill, she must first of all go to the hospital or according to the circumstances to an investigatory hospital and after a successful cure further investigation will be undertaken.
Survival of the Fittest Applied to Human Kind
Herbert Spencer
(1851)
In common with its other assumptions of secondary offices, the assumption by a government of the office of Reliever-general to the poor, is necessarily forbidden by the principle that a government cannot rightly do anything more than protect. In demanding from a citizen contributions for the mitigation of distress–contributions not needed for the due administration of men’s rights–the state is, as we have seen, reversing its function, and diminishing that liberty to exercise the faculties which it was instituted to maintain. Possibly, … some will assert that by satisfying the wants of the pauper, a government is in reality extending his liberty to exercise his faculties. … But this statement of the case implies a confounding of two widely different things. To enforce the fundamental law–to take care that every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man–this is the special purpose for which the civil power exists. Now insuring to each the right to pursue within the specified limits the objects of his desires without let or hindrance, is quite a separate thing from insuring him satisfaction. …
Pervading all nature we may see at work a stern discipline, which is a little cruel that it may be very kind. That state of universal warfare maintained throughout the lower creation, to the great perplexity of many worthy people, is at bottom the most merciful provision which the circumstances admit of. … The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many “in shallows and in miseries,” are the decrees of a large, farseeing benevolence. It seems hard that an unskilfulness which with all its efforts he cannot overcome, should entail hunger upon the artisan. It seems hard that a labourer incapacitated by sickness from competing with his stronger fellows, should have to bear the resulting privations. It seems hard that widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life or death. Nevertheless, when regarded not separately, but in connection with the interests of universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to be full of the highest beneficence–the same beneficence which brings to early graves the children of diseased parents, and singles out the low-spirited, the intemperate, and the debilitated as the victims of an epidemic. …
Political Reform Taken to Its Logical Conclusion: Rights for Women
John Stuart Mill
(1869)
It will be said, the rule of men over women differs from all these others in not being a rule of force: it is accepted voluntarily; women make no complaint, and are consenting parties to it. In the first place, a great number of women do not accept it. Ever since there have been women able to make their sentiments known by their writings (the only mode of publicity which society permits to them), an increasing number of them have recorded protests against their present social condition: and recently many thousands of them, headed by the most eminent women known to the public, have petitioned Parliament for their admission to the parliamentary suffrage. The claim of women to be educated as solidly, and in the same branches of knowledge, as men, is urged with growing intensity, and with a great prospect of success; while the demand for their admission into professions and occupations hitherto closed against them, becomes every year more urgent. …
But if the principle is true, we ought to act as if we believed it, and not to ordain that to be born a girl instead of a boy, any more than to be born black instead of white, or a commoner instead of a nobleman, shall decide the person’s position through all life–shall interdict people from all the more elevated social positions, and from all, except a few, respectable occupations. …
At present, in the more improved countries, the disabilities of women are the only case, save one, in which laws and institutions take persons at their birth, and ordain that they shall never in all their lives be allowed to compete for certain things. The one exception is that of royalty. … All other dignities and social advantages are open to the whole male sex: many indeed are only attainable by wealth, but wealth may be striven for by any one, and is actually obtained by many men of the very humblest origin. The difficulties, to the majority, are indeed insuperable without the aid of fortunate accidents; but no male human being is under any legal ban: neither law nor opinion superadd artificial obstacles to the natural ones. …
Neither does it avail anything to say that the nature of the two sexes adapts them to their present functions and position, and renders these appropriate to them. Standing on the ground of common sense and the constitution of the human mind, I deny that any one knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another. … What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing–the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others. …
One thing we may be certain of–that what is contrary to women’s nature to do, they never will be made to do by simply giving their nature free play. The anxiety of mankind to interfere in behalf of nature, for fear lest nature should not succeed in effecting its purpose, is an altogether unnecessary solicitude. What women by nature cannot do, it is quite superfluous to forbid them from doing. What they can do, but not so well as the men who are their competitors, competition suffices to exclude them from; since nobody asks for protective duties and bounties in favor of women; it is only asked that the present bounties and protective duties in favor of men should be recalled. If women have a greater natural inclination for some things than for others, there is no need of laws or social inculcation to make the majority of them do the former in preference to the latter. Whatever women’s services are most wanted for, the free play of competition will hold out the strongest inducements to them to undertake. …
Those who attempt to force women into marriage by closing all other doors against them … are afraid, not lest women should be unwilling to marry, for I do not think that any one in reality has that apprehension; but lest they should insist that marriage should be on equal conditions; lest all women of spirit and capacity should prefer doing almost anything else, not in their own eyes degrading, rather than marry, when marrying is giving themselves a master, and a master too of all their earthly possessions. … looking to the laws alone, society would be a hell upon earth. Happily there are both feelings and interests which in many men exclude, and in most, greatly temper, the impulses and propensities which lead to tyranny: and of those feelings, the tie which connects a man and his wife affords, in a normal state of things, incomparably the strongest example. The only tie which at all approaches to it, that between him and his children, tends, in all save exceptional cases, to strengthen, instead of conflicting with, the first. Because this is true; because men in general do not inflict, nor women suffer, all the misery which could be inflicted and suffered if the full power of tyranny with which the man is legally invested were acted on; the defenders of the existing form of the institution think that all its iniquity is justified, and that any complaint is merely quarrelling with the evil which is the price paid for every great good. …
Marriage Patterns in Eastern and Western Europe: A Statistical Comparison
Various Governments
(ca. 1900s)
Eastern and Western Europe Diverge in the Incidence of Unmarried People, c. 1900
Unmarried Population as Percentage of Total Population in Each Age Group
Europe (except Eastern Europe)
Men Women
Country 20 – 2 4 2 5 – 29 45 – 4 9 2 0 – 24 25 – 2 9 4 5 – 49
Austria 93 51 1 1 66 38 13
Belgium 85 50 16 71 41 17
Denmark 88 50 9 7 5 4 2 1 3
Finland 84 51 14 68 40 15
France 90 48 1 1 58 30 12
Germany 91 48 9 7 1 3 4 1 0
Great Britain 83 47 12 73 42 15
Holland 89 53 13 79 44 14
Iceland 92 66 19 81 56 29
Ireland 96 78 20 86 59 17
Italy 86 46 1 1 60 30 1 1
Norway 86 54 1 1 77 48 18
Portugal 84 48 13 69 41 20
Sweden 92 61 13 80 52 19
Switzerland 91 58 16 78 45 17
Eastern Europe
Men Women
Country 20 – 2 4 2 5 – 29 45 – 4 9 2 0 – 24 25 – 2 9 4 5 – 49
Greece 82 47 9 1 4 1 3 4
Hungary 81 31 5 3 6 1 5 4
Romania 67 21 5 2 0 8 3
Bulgaria 58 23 3 2 4 3 1
U.S.S.R. 51 18 3 2 8 9 4
Serbia 50 18 3 1 6 2 1
Live Births in Europe on the Eve of the Great War
Various Governments
(1908-1913)
Live Births per 1,000 Inhabitants, 1908 – 1913
European Russia 45.6 Australia (1911-13) 28.1
Romania 43.1 Denmark 27.1
Serbia 38.2 Norway 26.0
Portugal 34.6 England 24.9
Italy 32.4 Sweden 24.4
Austria 31.9 USA 24.3
Germany 29.5 Ireland 23.3
Netherlands 29.1 France 19.5
Women’s Suffrage: An Englishwoman Says “No”
Mrs. Humphrey Ward (1889)
We, the undersigned, wish to appeal to the common sense and the educated thought of men and women of England against the proposed extension of the Parliamentary suffrage to women.
While desiring the fullest possible development of the powers, energies, and education of women, we believe that their work for the State, and their responsibilities towards it, must always differ essentially from those of men, and that therefore their share in the working of the State machinery should be different from that assigned to men. Certain large departments of the national life are of necessity worked exclusively by men. To men belong the struggle of debate and legislation in Parliament; the working of the army and navy; all the heavy, laborious, fundamental industries of the State, such as those of mines, metals, and railways; the lead and supervision of English commerce, the service of that merchant fleet on which our food supply depends.
At the same time we are heartily in sympathy with all the recent efforts which have been made to give women a more important part in those affairs of the community where their interests and those of men are equally concerned; where it is possible for them not only to decide but to help in carrying out, and where, therefore, judgment is weighted by a true responsibility, and can be guided by experience and the practical information which comes from it. As voters for or members of School Boards, Boards of Guardians, and other important public bodies, women have now opportunities for public usefulness which must promote the growth of character, and at the same time strengthen among them the social sense and habit. But we believe that the emancipating process has now reached the limits fixed by the physical constitution of women, and by the fundamental difference which must always exist beween their main occupations and those of men. The care of the sick and the insane; the treatment of the poor; the education of children: in all these matters, and others besides, they have made good their claim to larger and more extended powers. We rejoice in it. But when it comes to questions of foreign or colonial policy, or of grave constitutional change, then we maintain that the necessary and normal experience of women does not and can never provide them with such materials for sound judgment as are open to men.
In conclusion: nothing can be further from our minds than to seek to depreciate the position or the importance of women. It is because we are keenly alive to the enormous value of their special contribution to the community, that we oppose what seems to us likely to endanger that contribution. We are convinced that the pursuit of a mere outward equality with men is for women not only vain but demoralizing. It leads to a total misconception of women’s true dignity and special mission. It tends to personal struggle and rivalry, where the only effort of both the great divisions of the human family should be to contribute the characteristic labour and the best gifts of each to the common stock.
The Suffrage Movement Radicalized
Emmeline Pankhurst
(ca. 1906-7)
The contention of the old-fashioned suffragists, and of the politicians as well, has always been that an educated public opinion will ultimately give votes to women without any great force being exerted in behalf of the reform. … In the year 1906 there was an immensely large public opinion in favor of woman suffrage. But what good did that do the cause?
From the very first … we made the public aware of the woman suffrage movement as it had never been before. … We threw away all our conventional notions of what was “ladylike” and “good form,” and we applied to our methods the one test question, Will it help? Just as the [Salvation Army] took religion to the street crowds in such fashion that the church people were horrified, so we took suffrage to the general public in a manner that amazed and scandalised the other suffragists. …
Women have concealed themselves for thirty-six hours in dangerous positions, under the platforms, in the organs, wherever they could get a vantage point. They waited starving in the cold, sometimes on the roof exposed to a winter’s night, just to get a chance of saying in the course of a Cabinet Minister’s speech, “When is the Liberal Government going to put its promises into practice?”
A Socialist Solution to the Question of Women’s Rights
Clara Zetkin
(1887)
It is not just the women workers who suffer because of the miserable payment of their labor. The male workers, too, suffer because of it. As a consequence of their low wages, the women are transformed from mere competitors into unfair competitors who push down the wages of men. Cheap women’s labor eliminates the work of men and if the men want to continue to earn their daily bread, they must put up with low wages. Thus women’s work is not only a cheap form of labor, it also cheapens the work of men and for that reason it is doubly appreciated by the capitalist, who craves profits. The economic advantages of the industrial activity of proletarian women only aid the tiny minority of the sacrosanct guild of coupon clippers and extortionists of profit.
Given the fact that many thousands of female workers are active in industry, it is vital for the trade unions to incorporate them into their movement. In individual industries where female labor plays an important role, any movement advocating better wages, shorter working hours, etc., would be doomed from the start because of the attitude of those women workers who are not organized. Battles which begin propitiously enough, ended up in failure because the employers were able to play off non-union female workers against those that are organized in unions. These non-union workers continued to work (or took up work) under any conditions, which transformed them from competitors in dirtywork to scabs.
Certainly one of the reasons for these poor wages for women is the circumstances that female workers are practically unorganized. They lack the strength which comes with unity. They lack the courage, the feeling of power, the spirit of resistance, and the ability to resist which is produced by the strength of an organization in which the individual fights for everybody and everybody fights for the individual. Furthermore, they lack the enlightenment and the training which an organization provides.
A French Response to the Demographic Crisis: Bonuses for Babies
French National Assembly
(1913)
Article 1–For large families allowances are a compulsory service for all departements, with the participation of the communes and the State.
Article 2–Every head of a family of French nationality, who is responsible for more than three legitimate or acknowledged children and whose resources are insufficient for their upbringing, receives an annual allowance for each child under thirteen years of age, after the third child under thirteen years of age.
Article 3– The rate of allowance is determined for each commune by the municipal council, subject to the approval of the General Council and the Minister of the Interior.
It may not be less than 60 francs per year per child, and not more than 90 francs; if the allowance exceeds 90 francs, the difference is the exclusive responsibility of the commune.
Primary Sources – Unit Thirteen – The Age of Nationalism, 1850-1914The Liberal Dilemma: Extension of the Franchise–A No Vote
Robert Lowe
(1867)
If the working classes, in addition to being a majority in the boroughs, get a redistribution of the seats in their favor, it will follow that their influence will be enormously increased. They will then urge the House of Commons to pass another Franchise Bill, and another Redistribution Bill to follow it. … No one can tell where it will stop, and it will not be likely to stop until we get equal electoral districts and a qualification so low that it will keep out nobody. There is another matter with which my honorable friend has not dealt. I mean the point of combination among the working classes. To many persons there appears great danger that the machinery which at present exists for strikes and trade unions may be used for political purposes.
I come now to the question of the representatives of the working classes. It is an old observation that every democracy is in some respect similar to a despotism. As courtiers and flatterers are worse than despots themselves, so those who flatter and fawn upon the people are generally very inferior to the people, the objects of their flattery and adulation. We see in America, where the people have undisputed power, that they do not send honest, hard-working men to represent them in Congress, but traffickers in office, bankrupts, men who have lost their character and been driven from every respectable way of life, and who take up politics as a last resource.
Now, Sir, democracy has yet another tendency, which it is worth while to study at the present moment. It is singularly prone to the concentration of power. Under it individual men are small and the government is great. That must be the character of a government which represents the majority, and which absolutely tramples down and equalizes everything except itself. And democracy has another strong peculiarity. It looks with the utmost hostility on all institutions not of immediate popular origin, which intervene between the people and the sovereign power which the people have set up.
Now, look what was done in France. Democracy has left nothing in that country between the people and the emperor except a bureaucracy which the emperor himself has created. In America it has done almost the same thing. You have there nothing to break the shock between the two great powers of the State. The wise men who framed the constitution tried to provide a remedy by dividing functions as much as possible. They assigned one function to the President, another to the Senate, a third to the Congress, and a fourth to the different States. But all their efforts have been in vain, and you see how two hostile camps have arisen, and the terrible duel which is now taking place between them. …
I have now, Sir, traced as well as I can what I believe will be the natural results of a measure which, it seems to my poor imagination, is calculated, if it should pass into law, to destroy one after another those institutions which have secured for England an amount of happiness and prosperity which no country has ever reached or is ever likely to attain. Surely the heroic work of so many centuries, the matchless achievements of so many wise heads and strong hands, deserve a nobler consummation than to be sacrificed at the shrine of revolutionary passion or the maudlin enthusiasm of humanity. But if we do fall, we shall fall deservedly. Uncoerced by any external force, not borne down by any internal calamity, but in the full plethora of our wealth and the surfeit of our too exuberant prosperity, with our own rash and inconsiderate hands, we are about to pluck down on our own heads the venerable temple of our liberty and our glory. History may tell of other acts as signally disastrous, but of none more wanton, none more disgraceful.
A Russian Zionist Makes the Case for a Jewish Homeland
Leo Pinsker
(1882)
That hoary problem, subsumed under the Jewish question, today, as ever in the past, provokes discussion. Like the squaring of the circle it remains unsolved, but unlike it, continues to be the everburning question of the day. That is because the problem is not one of mere theoretical interest: it renews and revives in everyday life and presses ever more urgently for solution.
This is the kernel of the problem, as we see it: the Jews comprise a distinctive element among the nations under which they dwell, and as such can neither assimilate nor be readily digested by any nation.
Hence the solution lies in finding a means of so readjusting this exclusive element to the family of nations, that the basis of the Jewish question will be permanently removed. …
A fear of the Jewish ghost has passed down the generations and the centuries. First a breeder of prejudice, later in the conjunction with other forces we are about to discuss, it culminated in Judeophobia.
Judeophobia, together with other symbols, superstitions, and idiosyncrasies, has acquired legitimacy among all the peoples of the earth with whom the Jews had intercourse. Judeophobia is a variety of demonopathy with the distinction that it is not peculiar to particular races but is common to the whole of mankind, and that this ghost is not disembodied like other ghosts but partakes of flesh and blood, must endure pain inflicted by the fearful mob who imagines itself endangered.
Judeophobia is a psychic aberration. As a psychic aberration it is hereditary, and as a disease transmitted for two thousand years it is incurable. …
The Jews are aliens who can have no representatives, because they have no country. Because they have none, because their home has no boundaries within which they can be entrenched, their misery too is boundless. The general law does not apply to the Jews as true aliens, but there are everywhere laws for the Jews, and if the general law is to apply to them, a special and explicit bylaw is required to confirm it. Like the Negroes, like women, and unlike all free peoples, they must be emancipated. If, unlike the Negroes, they belong to an advanced race, and if, unlike women, they can produce not only women of distinction, but also distinguished men, even men of greatness, then it is very much the worse for them.
Since the Jew is nowhere at home, nowhere regarded as a native, he remains an alien everywhere. That he himself and his ancestors as well are born in the country does [not] alter this fact in the least.
When we are ill-used, robbed, plundered, and dishonored, we dare not defend ourselves, and, worse still, we take it almost as a matter of course. When our face is slapped, we soothe our burning cheek with cold water; and when a bloody wound has been inflicted, we apply a bandage. When we are turned out of the house which we ourselves built, we beg humbly for mercy, and when we fail to reach the heart of our oppressor we move on in search of another exile.
When an idle spectator on the road calls out to us: “You poor Jewish devils are certainly to be pitied,” we are most deeply touched; and when a Jew is said to be an honor to his people, we are foolish enough to be proud of it. We have sunk so low that we become almost jubilant when, as in the West, a small fraction of our people is put on an equal footing with non-Jews. But he who must be put on a footing stands but weakly. If no notice is taken of our descent and we are treated like others born in the country, we express our gratitude by actually turning renegades. For the sake of the comfortable position we are granted, for the fleshpots which we may enjoy in peace, we persuade ourselves, and others, that we are no longer Jews, but full-blooded citizens. Idle delusion! Though you prove yourselves patriots a thousand times, you will still be reminded at every opportunity of your Semitic descent. This fateful memento mori will not prevent you, however, from accepting the extended hospitality, until some fine morning you find yourself crossing the border and you are reminded by the mob that you are, after all, nothing but vagrants and parasites, without the protection of the law.
But even humane treatment does not prove that we are welcome. … Moreover, the belief in a Messiah, in the intervention of a higher power to bring about our political resurrection, and the religious assumption that we must bear patiently divine punishment, caused us to abandon every thought of our national liberation, unity, and independence. Consequently, we have renounced the idea of a nationhood and did so the more readily since we were preoccupied with our immediate needs. Thus we sank lower and lower. The people without a country forgot their country. Is it not high time to perceive the disgrace of it all?
Happily, matters stand somewhat differently now. The events of the last few years in enlightened Germany, in Romania, in Hungary, and especially in Russia, have effected what the far bloodiest persecutions of the Middle Ages could not. The national consciousness which until then had lain dormant in sterile martyrdom awoke the masses of the Russian and Romanian Jews and took form in an irresistible movement toward Palestine. Mistaken as this movement has proved to be by its results, it was, nevertheless, a right instinct to strike out for home. The severe trials which they have endured have now provoked a reaction quite different from the fatalistic submission to a divine condign punishment. Even the unenlightened masses of the Russian Jews have not entirely escaped the influences of the principles of modern culture. Without renouncing Judaism and their faith, they revolted against undeserved ill-treatment which could be inflicted with impunity only because the Russian Government regards the Jews as aliens. And the other European governments–why should they concern themselves with the citizens of a state in whose internal affairs they have no right to interfere?. …
If we would have a secure home, give up our endless life of wandering and rise to the dignity of a nation in our own eyes and in the eyes of the world, we must, above all, not dream of restoring ancient Judaea. We must not attach ourselves to the place where our political life was once violently interrupted and destroyed. The goal of our present endeavors must be not the “Holy Land,” but a land of our own. We need nothing but a large tract of land for our poor brothers, which shall remain our property and from which no foreign power can expel us. There we shall take with us the most sacred possessions which we have saved from the shipwreck of our former country, the God-idea and the Bible. It is these alone which have made our old fatherland the Holy Land, and not Jerusalem or the Jordan. Perhaps the Holy Land will again become ours. If so, all the better, but first of all, we must determine–and this is the crucial point–what country is accessible to us, and at the same time adapted to offer the Jews of all lands who must leave their homes a secure and indisputed refuge, capable of productivization. …
Czech Nationalism Finds a Literary Outlet
Bozena Nemcova
(1855)
“The Sibyl foretold that great misery would come on the Czech lands, that there would be wars and famine and plague. But the worst of all would be when father wouldn’t understand son, or son father, or brother brother, and when neither word nor bond would be worth anything. That would be the worst of all, she said, and then the Czech earth would be scattered under the hooves of horses.”
“You remembered it well. But God forbid it should ever come true,” said Granny with a sigh.
“Oh, Granny, sometimes I’m so afraid I can’t tell you! You wouldn’t like the Czech earth to be scattered under the hooves of horses, either, would you?”
“Silly girl, or course I wouldn’t! Don’t we pray every day for the well-being of the Czech earth? Isn’t this land our mother? Well, then, if I should see my mother falling into distress, do you think I could be indifferent? What would you do, if somebody was trying to kill your mother?”
“We should scream and cry,” said the boys and Adelka.
“Ah, you’re children,” said Granny with a smile.
“We should have to go to her help, shouldn’t we, Granny?” said Babbie, and her eyes were burning.
“That’s it, child, that’s it, that’s the right of it! Screaming and crying don’t help,” said the old woman, and laid her hand upon her granddaughter’s head.
“But, Granny, we’re only little, how could we help?” asked John, who was annoyed that he should be dismissed as a mere child.
“Don’t you remember what I told you about little David, who killed great Goliath? You see, even a little person can do much, if he has faith in God, you remember that. When you grow up and go out into the world you’ll get to know evil and good, you’ll be led astray and brought into temptation. Then remember your Granny, and the things she told you when she was out walking with you. You know that I left the good living the Prussian king offered me, and chose to work till I dropped rather than let my children be turned into foreigners and estranged from me. You must love your country like a mother, too, love her above all things, and work for her like good sons and daughters, and then the prophecy that frightens you will never be fulfilled. I shan’t see you grow to be men, but I hope you’ll remember your Granny’s words,” she concluded in a trembling voice.
“I’ll never, never forget them,” whispered Babbie, hiding her face in the old woman’s lap.
Economic Nationalism: A System of Political Economy
Friedrich List
(1841)
The State is not merely justified in imposing, but bound to impose, certain regulations and restrictions on commerce (which is in itself harmless) for the best interests of the nation. By prohibitions and protective duties it does not give directions to individuals how to employ their productive powers and capital (as the popular school[1] sophistically alleges); it does not tell the one, ‘You must invest your money in the building of a ship, or in the creation of a manufactory;’ or the other, ‘You must be a naval captain or a civil engineer:’ it leaves it to the judgment of every individual how and where to invest his capital, or to what vocation he will devote himself. It merely says, ‘It is to the advantage of our nation that we manufacture these or the other goods ourselves; but as by free competition with foreign countries we can never obtain possession of this advantage, we have imposed restrictions on that competition, so far as in our opinion is necessary, to give those among us who invest their capital in these new branches of industry, and those who devote their bodily and mental powers to them, the requisite guarantees that they shall not lose their capital and shall not miss their vocation in life; and further to stimulate foreigners to come over to our side with their productive powers. In this manner, it does not in the least degree restrain private industry; on the contrary, it secures to the personal, natural, and moneyed powers of the nation a greater and wider field of activity. It does not thereby do something which its individual citizens could understand better and do better than it; on the contrary, it does something which the individuals, even if they understood it, would not be able to do for themselves.
The allegation of the school, that the system of protection occasions unjust and anti-economical encroachments by the power of the State against the employment of the capital and industry of private individuals, appears in the least favourable light if we consider that it is the foreign commercial regulations which allow such encroachments on our private industry to take place, and that only by the aid of the system of protection are we enabled to counteract those injurious operations of the foreign commercial policy. If the English shut out our corn [grain] from their markets, what else are they doing than compelling our agriculturists to grow so much less corn than they would have sent out to England under systems of free importation? If they put such heavy duties on our wool, our wines, or our timber, that our export trade to England wholly or in great measure ceases, what else is thereby effected than that the power of the English nation restricts proportionately our branches of production? In these cases a direction is evidently given by foreign legislation to our capital and our personal productive powers, which but for the regulations made by it they would scarcely have followed. It follows from this, that were we to disown giving, by means of our own legislation, a direction to our own national industry in accordance with our own national interests, we could not prevent foreign nations from regulating our national industry after a fashion which corresponds with their own real or presumed advantage, and which in any case operates disadvantageously to the development of our own productive powers. …
The system of the school suffers, as we have already shown in the preceding chapters … , from three main defects: firstly, from boundless cosmopolitanism, which neither recognises the principle of nationality, nor takes into consideration the satisfaction of its interests; secondly, from a dead materialism, which everywhere regards chiefly the mere exchangeable value of things without taking into consideration the mental and political, the present and the future interests, and the productive powers of the nation; thirdly, from a disorganising particularism and individualism, which, ignoring the nature and character of social labour and the operation of the union of powers in their higher consequences, considers private industry only as it would develop itself under a state of free interchange with society (i.e. with the whole human race) were that race not divided into separate national societies.
Between each individual and entire humanity, however, stands THE NATION, with its special language and literature, with its peculiar origin and history, with its special manners and customs, laws and institutions, with the claims of all these for existence, independence, perfection, and continuance for the future, and with its separate territory; a society which, united by a thousand ties of mind and of interests, combines itself into one independent whole, which recognises the law of right for and within itself, and in its united character is still opposed to other societies of a similar kind in their national liberty, and consequently can only under the existing conditions of the world maintain self-existence and independence by its own power and resources. As the individual chiefly obtains by means of the nation and in the nation mental culture, power of production, security, and prosperity, so is the civilisation of the human race only conceivable and possible by means of the civilisation and development of the individual nations.
Meanwhile, however, an infinite difference exists in the condition and circumstances of the various nations: we observe among them giants and dwarfs, well-formed bodies and cripples, civilised, half-civilised, and barbarous nations; but in all of them, as in the individual human being, exists the impulse of self-preservation, the striving for improvement which is implanted by nature. It is the task of politics to civilise the barbarous nationalities, to make the small and weak ones great and strong, but, above all, to secure to them existence and continuance. It is the task of national economy to accomplish the economical development of the nation, and to prepare it for admission into the universal society of the future. …
By its Zollverein, the German nation first obtained one of the most important attributes of its nationality. But this measure cannot be considered complete so long as it does not extend over the whole coast, from the mouth of the Rhine to the frontier of Poland, including Holland and Denmark. A natural consequence of this union must be the admission of both these countries into the German Bund, and consequently into the German nationality, whereby the latter will at once obtain what it is now in need of, namely, fisheries and naval power, maritime commerce and colonies. Besides, both these nations belong, as respects their descent and whole character, to the German nationality. The burden of debt with which they are oppressed is merely a consequence of their unnatural endeavours to maintain themselves as independent nationalities, and it is in the nature of things that this evil should rise to a point when it will become intolerable to those two nations themselves, and when incorporation with a larger nationality must seem desirable and necessary to them.
Belgium can only remedy by means of confederation with a neighbouring larger nation her needs which are inseparable from her restricted territory and population. …
________________________________________
[1] The laissez-faire economists
A Poetic Tribute to the Zollverein
Hoffmann von Fallersleben
(1840)
The Zollverein
Leather, salmon, eels and matches,
Cows and madder, paper, shears,
Ham and cheese and boots and vetches,
Wool and soap and yarns and beers;
Gingerbread and rags and fennels,
Nuts, tobacco, glasses, flax,
Leather, salt, lard, dolls and funnels,
Radish, rape, rep, whisky, wax;
Articles of home consumption,
All our thanks are due to you!
You have wrought without presumption
What no intellect could do;
You have made the German Nation
Stand united, hand in hand,
More than the Confederation
Ever did for Fatherland.
A Frenchman Receives a Lesson in the Realities of Peasant Life in Russia
Alexander Herzen
(ca. 1850s)
“The Russian,” you say, “is a liar and a thief; he is lying and always stealing, and quite innocently, for it is his nature.”
I shall not stop to call attention to the sweeping nature of this observation, but should like to be allowed to put to you this simple question: who, now, is the deceived, the robbed, the dupe? Heavens above, it is the landowner, the government official, the steward, the judge, the police officer: in other words, the sworn foes of the peasant, whom he looks upon as apostates, as traitors, as half-Germans. Deprived of every possible means of defense the peasant resorts to cunning in dealing with his oppressors; he deceives them, and [he] is perfectly right in doing so. Cunning, Monsieur, is, in the words of a great thinker [Hegel], the irony of brute force.
Through his horror of private property in land, as you have so well observed, through his listless, careless temperament, the Russian peasant, I say, has seen himself gradually and silently caught in the toils of the German bureaucracy and of the landowners’ power. He has submitted to this humiliating yoke with the resignation of despair, I agree, but he has never believed in either the rights of the landowner, or the justice of the law-courts, or the fair-dealing of the administration. For nearly two hundred years the peasant’s whole life has been nothing but a dumb, passive opposition to the existing order of things. He submits to oppression, he endures it, but he dips his hand in nothing that goes on outside the village communes.
The idea of the Tsar still enjoys prestige among the peasants; it is not the Tsar Nicholas that the people venerates; it is an abstract idea, a myth, a providence, an avenger, a representative of justice in the people’s imagination.
After the Tsar, only the clergy could possibly have a moral influence on Orthodox Russia. The higher clergy alone represent old Russia in governing spheres; the clergy have never shaved their beards, and by that fact have remained on the side of the people. The people listen with confidence to a monk. But the monks and the higher clergy, occupied exclusively, as they say, with life beyond the grave, care little for the people. The Pop [priest] has lost all influence through his cupidity, his drunkenness, and his intimate relations with the police. Here, too, the peasants respect the idea but not the person.
As for the sectaries [Old Believers] they hate both person and idea, both Pop and Tsar.
Apart from the Tsar and the clergy every element of government and society is utterly alien, essentially antagonistic to the people. The peasant finds himself in the literal sense of the word an outlaw. The law-court takes good care not to protect him, and his share in the existing order of things is entirely confined to the twofold tribute that lies heavily upon him and is paid in his sweat and his blood. Poor disinherited man, he instinctively understands that the whole system is ordered not for his benefit but to his detriment, and that the whole problem of the government and the landowners is to wring out of him as much labor and as much money as possible. Since he understands this and is gifted with a supple and resourceful intelligence, he deceives them all and in everything. It could not be otherwise; if he spoke the truth it would already be an assent on his side, an acceptance of their power over him; if he did not rob them (observe that to conceal part of the produce of his own labor is considered theft in a peasant) he would thereby be fatally recognizing the lawfulness of their exactions, the rights of the landowners and the justice of the law-courts. …
The life of the Russian peasantry has hitherto been confined to the commune. It is only in relation to the commune and its members that the peasant recognizes that he has rights and duties. Outside the commune he recognizes no duties and everything seems to him to be based upon violence. The baneful side of his nature is his submitting to that violence, and not his refusing in his own way to recognize it and his trying to protect himself by guile. There is much more uprightness in lying before a judge set over him by unlawful authority than in a hypocritical show of respect for the verdict of a jury packed by a prefect, whose revolting iniquity is as clear as daylight. The people respect only those institutions which reflect their innate conception of law and right. …
The Russian autocracy is entering upon a new phase. Having grown out of [the] anti-national revolution [of Peter the Great], it has accomplished its mission. It has created a colossal empire, a numerous army, a centralized government. Without principles, without tradition, it has no more to do; it is true that it undertook another task–to bring Western civilization into Russia; and it was to some extent successful in doing that while it still persisted in its fine role of civilizing government.
That role it has now abdicated.
The government, which had broken with the people in the name of civilization, has lost no time a hundred years later in breaking with civilization in the name of absolutism.
It did so as soon as the tri-colored specter of liberalism began to be visible through its civilizing tendencies: it tried then to return to nationalism, to the people. That was impossible–the people and the government had nothing in common any longer; the former had grown away from the latter, while the government thought it could discern rising from deep within the masses the still more terrible specter of the Red Cock. All things considered liberalism was still less dangerous than another Pugachev, but the panic and distaste of liberal ideas had become such that the government was no longer capable of making its peace with civilization.
War Reportage: News from the Front Lines in the Crimea
William Howard Russell
(1855)
On the 9th September Sebastopol was in flames! The fleet, the object of so much diplomatic controversy, and of so many bloody struggles, had disappeared in the deep! One more great act of carnage was added to the tremendous but glorious tragedy, of which the whole world, from the most civilized nations down to the most barbarous hordes of the East, was the anxious and excited audience.
Amid shouts of victory and cries of despair–in frantic rejoicing and passionate sorrow–a pall of black smoke, streaked by the fiery flashings of exploding fortresses, descended upon the stage, …
In the middle of the day there was a council of the allied generals, and at two o’clock it became generally known that the allies would assault the place at noon on the 8th, after a vigorous cannonade and bombardment. The hour was well selected, as it had been ascertained that the Russians were accustomed to indulge in a siesta about that time.
The weather changed suddenly on the 7th September, and on the morning of the 8th it became bitterly cold. A biting wind right from the north side of Sebastopol blew intolerable clouds of harsh dust into our faces. The sun was obscured, and the sky became of a leaden, wintry gray.
The French were reenforced by five thousand Sardinians, who marched up from the Tchernaya. It was arranged that the French should attack the Malakoff at noon, and, as soon as their attack succeeded, we were to assault the Redan. At five minutes before twelve o’clock, the French, like a swarm of bees, issued forth from their trenches close to the Malakoff, scrambled up its face, and were through the embrasures in the twinkling of an eye. They crossed the seven meters of ground which separated them from the enemy at a few bounds; they drifted as lightly and quickly as autumn leaves before the wind, battalion after battalion, into the embrasures, and in a minute or two after the head of their column issued from the ditch the tricolor was floating over the Korniloff Bastion. The musketry was very feeble at first,–indeed, our allies took the Russians by surprise, and very few of the latter were in the Malakoff; but they soon recovered themselves, and from twelve o’clock till past seven in the evening the French had to meet and repulse the repeated attempts of the enemy to regain the work, when, weary of the fearful slaughter of his men, who lay in thousands over the exterior of the works, and despairing of success, the Muscovite general withdrew his exhausted legions, and prepared, with admirable skill, to evacuate the place.
As the alarm of the English assault on the Redan circulated, the enemy came rushing up from the barracks in the rear of the Redan, increasing the force and intensity of their fire, while our soldiers dropped fast. The Russians were encouraged to maintain their ground by the immobility of our soldiers and the weakness of a fusillade, from the effects of which the enemy were well protected. In vain the officers, by voice and act, by example and daring valor, tried to urge our soldiers on to clear the works. The men, most of whom belonged to regiments which had suffered in the trenches and were acquainted with the traditions of June 18, had an impression that the Redan was extensively mined, and that if they advanced they would all be blown up; yet, to their honor be it recorded, many of them acted as became the men of Alma and Inkermann, and, rushing confusedly to the front, were swept down by the enemy’s fire.
Every moment our men were diminishing in numbers, while the Russians were arriving in swarms from the town, and rushing down from the Malakoff, which had been occupied by the French. The struggle that ensued was short, desperate, and bloody. Our soldiers, taken at every disadvantage, met the enemy with the bayonet too, and isolated combats occurred, in which the brave fellows who stood their ground had to defend themselves against three or four adversaries at once. In this melee the officers, armed only with their swords, had but little chance; nor had those who carried pistols much opportunity of using them in such a close and sudden contest. They fell like heroes, and many a gallant soldier with them. The bodies of English and Russians inside the Redan, locked in an embrace which death could not relax, but had rather cemented all the closer, were found next day as evidences of the terrible animosity of the struggle.
The scene in the ditch was appalling, although some of the officers have assured me that they and the men were laughing at the precipitation with which many brave and gallant fellows did not hesitate to plunge headlong upon the mass of bayonets, muskets, and sprawling soldiers,–the ladders were all knocked down or broken, so that it was difficult for the men to scale the other side, and the dead, the dying, the wounded, and the uninjured were all lying in piles together. …
“The Lady with the Lamp” Lights the Way for Future Nurses
Florence Nightingale
(1858)
There is no doubt that the admission of women to ward service is beset with difficulties. Nurses are careful, efficient, often decorous, and always kind, sometimes drunken, sometimes unchaste.
The nurses should be strong, active women, of unblemished character, and should be irreversibly dismissed for the first offence of unchastity, drunkenness, or dishonesty, or proved impropriety of any kind.
Their rules should be simple, very definite, should leave them at the absolute disposal of the surgeon. Their dress should be uniform.
Give them plenty to do, and great responsibility–two effectual means of steadying women.
“In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.” Quietness has been from the beginning of its publicity the one thing wanted in this work. I know the fuss, which from its beginning surrounded it, was abhorrent to us: but the work, which is all we care for, has throughout suffered from it. One hospital, naval, military, or civil, nursed well, and gradually training a few nurses, would do more good to the cause than an endless amount of meetings, testimonials, pounds, and speeches. This never will, never can be a popular work. Few good ones are, without the stern fructifying element of moral restraint and influence; and though the streams of this are many, its source is one. Hearts are not touched without Religion. Religion was not given us from above in impressions and generalities, but in habits of thought and action, in love of God and of mankind, carried into action.
A Marxist Analysis of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s Coup
Karl Marx
(1851)
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, worldhistorical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Mountain of 1848 to 1851 for the Mountain of 1793 to 1795, the Nephew for the Uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances in which the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire is taking place.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this timehonoured disguise and this borrowed language. Thus Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, in turn, 1789 and the revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1795. In like manner the beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can produce freely in it only when he moves in it without remembering the old and forgets in it his ancestral tongue. …
The February Revolution was a sudden attack, a taking of the old society by surprise, and the people proclaimed this unhoped for stroke as a world-historical deed, opening the new epoch. On December 2 the February Revolution is conjured away by a cardsharper’s trick, and what seems overthrown is no longer the monarchy; it is the liberal concessions that were wrung from it by century-long struggles. Instead of society having conquered a new content for itself, the state only appears to have returned to its oldest form, to the shamelessly simple domination of the sabre and the cowl. …
Let us recapitulate in their general outlines the phases that the French Revolution has gone through from February 24, 1848, to December 1851. …
It could not be otherwise. The February days originally intended an electoral reform, by which the circle of the politically privileged among the possessing class itself was to be widened and the exclusive domination of the aristocracy of finance overthrown. When it came to the actual conflict, however, when the people mounted the barricades, the National Guard maintained a passive attitude, the army offered no serious resistance and the monarchy ran away, the republic appeared to be a matter of course. Every party construed it in its own sense. Having been won by the proletariat by force of arms, the proletariat impressed its stamp on it and proclaimed it to be a social republic. …
During the June days all classes and parties had united in the party of order against the proletarian class as the party of anarchy, of socialism, of communism. They had “saved” society from ” the enemies of society.” They had given out the watchwords of the old society, “property, family, religion, order,” to their army as pass words and proclaimed to the counter-revolutionary crusaders: “In this sign you will conquer!” From that moment, as soon as one of the numerous parties which ad gathered under this sign against the June insurgents seeks to hold the revolutionary battle field in its own interests, it goes down before the cry: “Property, family, religion, order.” …
The history of the Constituent National Assembly since the June days is the history of the domination and the liquidation of the republican section of the bourgeoisie, of that section which is known by the names of tricolour republicans, pure republicans, political republicans, formalist republicans, etc. …
The republican bourgeois section, which had long regarded itself as the legitimate heir of the July monarchy, thus found itself successful beyond its hopes; it attained power, however, not as it had dreamed under Louis Philippe, through a liberal revolt of the bourgeoisie against the throne, but through a rising of the proletariat against capital, a rising laid low with grapeshot. What it had pictured to itself as the most revolutionary happening, turned out in reality to be the most counter-revolutionary. The fruit fell into its lap, but it fell from the tree of knowledge, not from the tree of life.
The exclusive rule of the bourgeois republicans lasted only from June 24 to December 10, 1848. It is summed up [by] the drafting of a republican Constitutionand in the state of siege of Paris. … I have worked out elsewhere the significance of the election of December 10. I will not revert to it here. It is sufficient to remark here that it was a reaction of the peasants, who had had to pay the costs of the February Revolution, against the remaining classes of the nation, a reaction of the countryside against the town. It met with great approval in the army, for which the republicans of the National had provided neither glory nor additional pay; among the big bourgeoisie, which hailed Bonaparte as a bridge to monarchy; among the proletarians and petty bourgeois, who hailed him as a scourge for Cavaignac [the general who had crushed the workers' uprising in June 1848]. I shall have an opportunity later of going more closely into the relationship of the peasants to the French Revolution.
The period from December 20, 1848, until the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in May, 1849, comprises the history of the downfall of the bourgeois republicans. After having founded a republic for the bourgeoisie, driven the revolutionary proletariat out of the field and reduced the democratic petty bourgeoisie to silence for the time being, they are themselves thrust aside by the mass of the bourgeoisie, which justly impounds this republic as its property. This bourgeois mass was, however, royalist. …
Before we finish with this period we must still cast a retrospective glance at the two powers, one of which annihilates the other on December 2, 1851, whereas from December 10, 1848, until the exit of the Constituent Assembly they lived in conjugal relations. We mean Louis Bonaparte, on the one hand, and the party of the royalist coalition, the Party of Order, of the big bourgeoisie, on the other. On his entry into the presidency, Bonaparte at once formed a ministry of the Party of Order, at the head of which he placed Odilon Barrot, the old leader, nota bene, of the most liberal section of the parliamentary bourgeoisie. …
The Prussian King Receives a Much-Needed Pep Talk
Otto von Bismarck
(1863)
In the beginning of October [1863] I went as far as Juterbogk [a town south of Berlin] to meet the King, who had been at Baden-Baden for September 30, his wife’s birthday, and waited for him in the still unfinished railway station, filled with third-class travellers and workmen, seated in the dark on an overturned wheelbarrow. My object in taking this opportunity for an interview was to set his Majesty at rest about a speech made by me in the Budget Commission on September 30, which had aroused some excitement, and which, though not taken down in shorthand, had still been reproduced with tolerable accuracy in the newspapers.
For people who were less embittered and blinded by ambition, I had indicated plainly enough the direction in which I was going. Prussia–such was the point of my speech–as a glance at the map will show, could no longer wear unaided on its long narrow figure the panoply which Germany required for its security; that must be equally distributed over all German peoples. We should get no nearer the goal by speeches, associations, decisions of majorities; we should be unable to avoid a serious contest, a contest which could only be settled by blood and iron. In order to secure our success in this, the deputies must place the greatest possible weight of blood and iron in the hands of the King of Prussia, in order that according to his judgment he might throw it into one scale or the other. I had already given expression to the same idea in the House of Deputies in 1849, in answer to Schramm on the occasion of an amnesty debate.
Roon [the minister of war], who was present, expressed his dissatisfaction with my remarks on our way home, and said, among other things, that he did not regard these ‘witty digressions’ as advantageous for our cause. For my part, I was torn between the desire of winning over members to an energetic national policy, and the danger of inspiring the King, whose own disposition was cautious, and shrank from violent measures, with mistrust in me and my intentions. My object in going to meet him at Juterbogk was to counteract betimes the probable effect of press criticisms.
I had some difficulty in discovering from the curt answers of the officials the carriage in the ordinary train, in which the King was seated by himself in an ordinary first-class carriage. The after-effect of his intercourse with his wife was an obvious depression, and when I begged for permission to narrate the events which had occurred during his absence, he interrupted me with the words: ‘I can perfectly well see where all this will end. Over there, in front of the Opera House, under my windows, they will cut off your head, and mine a little while afterwards.’
I guessed, and it was afterwards confirmed by witnesses, that during his week’s stay in Baden his mind had been worked upon with variations in the theme of Polignac, Strafford, and Lewis XVI. When he was silent, I answered with the short remark, ‘Et apres, Sire.’ ‘Apres, indeed; we shall be dead,’ answered the King. ‘Yes,’ I continued, ‘then we shall be dead; but we must all die sooner or later, and can we perish more honourably? I, fighting for my King’s cause, and your Majesty sealing with your own blood your rights as King by the grace of God; whether on the scaffold or the battlefield, makes no difference to the glory of sacrificing life and limb for the rights assigned to you by the grace of God. Your Majesty must not think of Lewis XVI; he lived and died in a condition of mental weakness, and does not present a heroic figure in history. Charles I, on the other hand, will always remain a noble historical character, for after drawing his sword for his rights and losing the battle, he did not hesitate to confirm his royal intent to retain their position in Germany, the Austrians declared war in 1866. The with his blood. Your Majesty is bound to fight, you cannot capitulate; you must, even at the risk of bodily danger, go forth to meet any attempt at coercion.’
As I continued to speak in this sense, the King grew more and more animated, and began to assume the part of an officer fighting for kingdom and fatherland. In [the] presence of external and personal danger he possessed a rare and absolutely natural fearlessness, whether on the field of battle or in the face of attempts on his life; his attitude in any external danger was elevating and inspiring. The ideal type of the Prussian officer who goes to meet certain death in the service with the simple words, ‘At your orders,’ but who, if he has to act on his own responsibility, dreads the criticism of his superior officer or of the world more than death, even to the extent of allowing his energy and correct judgment to be impaired by the fear of blame and reproof–this type was developed in him to the highest degree. Hitherto, on his journey, he had only asked himself whether, under the superior criticism of his wife and public opinion in Prussia, he would be able to keep steadfast on the road on which he was entering with me. The influence of our conversation in the dark railway compartment counteracted this sufficiently to make him regard the part which the situation forced upon him more from the standpoint of the officer. He felt as though he had been touched in his military honour, and was in the position of an officer who has orders to hold a certain position to the death, no matter whether he perishes in the task or not. This set him on a course of thought which was quite familiar to him; and in a few minutes he was restored to the confidence which he had lost at Baden, and even recovered his cheerfulness. To give up his life for King and Fatherland was the duty of an officer; still more that of a King, as the first officer in the land. As soon as he regarded his position from the point of view of military honour, it had no more terror for him than the command to defend what might prove a desperate position would have for any ordinary Prussian officer. This raised him above the anxiety about the criticism which public opinion, history, and his wife might pass on his political tactics. He fully entered into the part of the first officer in the Prussian monarchy, for whom death in the service would be an honourable conclusion to the task assigned him. The correctness of my judgment was confirmed by the fact that the King, whom I had found at Juterbogk weary, depressed, and discouraged, had, even before we arrived at Berlin, developed a cheerful, I might almost say joyous and combative disposition, which was plainly evident to the ministers and officials who received him on his arrival. …
The Dual Monarchy Is Born: The Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich
Austro-Hungarian Government
(1867)
Article 1. The following affairs are declared common to Austria and Hungary:
a. Foreign affairs, including diplomatic and commercial representation abroad, as well as measures relating to international treaties, reserving the right of the representative bodies of both parts of the empire [Reichsrat and Hungarian Diet] to approve such treaties, in so far as such approval is required by the Constitution.
b. Military and naval affairs. …
c. The finances, with reference to matters of common expense. …
Article 2. Besides these, the following affairs shall not indeed be administered in common, but shall be regulated upon uniform principles to be agreed upon from time to time:
1. Commercial affairs. …
2. Legislation concerning indirect taxes which stand in close relation to industrial production.
3. The establishment of a monetary system and monetary standards.
4. Regulations concerning railway lines which affect the interests of both parts of the empire.
5. The establishment of a system of defense.
Article 3. The expenses of affairs common to both Austria and Hungary shall be borne by the two parts of the empire in proportion to be fixed from time to time by an agreement between the two legislative bodies (Reichsrat and Diet), approved by the emperor. If an agreement can not be reached between the two representative bodies, the proportion shall be fixed by the emperor, but for the term of one year only. The method of defraying its quota of the common expense shall belong exclusively to each of the parts of the empire.
Nevertheless, joint loans may be made for affairs of common interest. …
The decision as to whether a joint loan shall be made is reserved for legislation by each of the two parts of the empire.
Article 4. The contribution towards the expense of the present public debt shall be determined by an agreement between the two parts of the empire.
Article 5. The administration of common affairs shall be conducted by a joint responsible ministry, which is forbidden to direct at the same time the administration of joint affairs and those of either part of the empire.
The regulation of the management, conduct, and internal organization of the joint army shall belong exclusively to the emperor.
Article 6. The legislative power belonging to the legislative bodies of each of the two parts of the empire [Reichsrat and Hungarian Diet] shall be exercised by them, in so far as it relates to joint affairs, by means of delegations. …
Article 11. The delegations shall be convened annually by the emperor, who shall determine the place of their meeting. …
Article 13. The powers of the delegations shall extend to all matters concerning common affairs.
All other matters shall be beyond their power.
Article 14. The projects of the government shall be submitted by the joint ministry to each of the delegations separately.
Each delegation shall also have the right to submit projects concerning affairs which are within its competence.
Article 15. For the passage of a law concerning matters within the power of the delegations the agreement of both delegations shall be necessary, or in default of such agreement, a vote of the full assembly of the two delegations sitting together; in either case the approval of the emperor shall be necessary.
Article 16. The right to hold the joint ministry to its responsibility shall be exercised by the delegations. …
Article 19. Each delegation shall act, deliberate and vote in separate session. …
Article 21. The delegates and substitutes from the Reichsrat shall receive no instructions from their electors. …
Article 27. The session of the delegation shall be closed, after the completion of its work, by the president with the consent of the emperor or by his order.
Article 29. The sessions of the delegation shall be as a rule public.
Exceptionally the public may be excluded if it is so decided by the assembly in secret session, upon the request of the president or of not less than five members.
Every decision, however, shall be made in public session. …
“What Is to Be Done” with Russia?
Nikolai Chernyshevsky
(1864)
“I will find employment in my profession, though it will not pay me much; but there will be time left to attend to patients, and, taking all things together, we shall be able to live.”
“Yes, dear friend, we shall need so little; only I do not wish to live by your labor. I too will live by my labor; isn’t that fair? I should not live at your expense.”
“Who told you that, dear Verochka?”
“Oh! he asks who told me! Your books are full of such thoughts.”
“In my books? At any rate I never said such a thing to you. When, then, did I say so?”
“When? Haven’t you always told me that everything rests on money?”
“Well?”
“And do you really consider me so stupid that I cannot understand books and draw conclusions from premises?
Everything rests on money, you say, Dmitry Sergeich; consequently, whoever has money has power and freedom, say your books; then, as long as woman lives at man’s expense, she will be dependent on him, will she not? You thought that I could not understand that, and would be your slave? I know that you intend to be a good and benevolent despot, but I do not intend that you should be a despot at all. And now this is what we will do. You shall cut off arms and legs and administer drugs; I, on the other hand, will give lessons on the piano.”
Russian Society Meets Nihilism
Ivan Turgenev
(1862)
“What is Bazarov?” Arcadii smiled, “I’ll tell you just what Bazarov is–would you like me to, Uncle?”
“Do oblige me, Nephew.”
“He is a nihilist.”
“How?” Nicholai Petrovich asked, while his brother lifted up his knife with a pat of butter at its tip and arrested his hand in midair.
“He’s a nihilist,” Arcadii repeated.
“A nihilist,” his father uttered. “That comes from the Latin, nihil, meaning nothing, if I am any judge; the word, then, designates a man who … who recognizes nothing?”
“Say: one who respects nothing,” Pavel Petrovich interjected and went back to buttering his bread.
“One who regards everything from a critical point of view,” Arcadii commented.
“But isn’t that all one?” his uncle queried.
“No, it’s not. A nihilist is a man who does not accede to any authority, who does not accept a single principle on faith, no matter how great the aura of respect which surrounds that principle.
“Well, and is that a good thing?” Pavel Petrovich cut him short.
“That all depends on the person, Uncle. One man may find it a very good thing for him, while another may find it very bad.”
“So, that’s how things are. Well, now, I can see that’s outside our province. We who belong to an older age, we go upon the assumption that without principles”–he gave the word a soft pronunciation, after the French manner, while Arcadii, on the contrary, gave it a harsh sound, placing the accent on the first syllable–”principles accepted on faith, as you said, a man cannot take a step, cannot draw a breath. Vous avez change tout cela–you have changed all that. May God grant you good health and a general’s rank, but as for us, we will merely look on and admire you, Messieurs les–what was that term you used?”
“Nihilists,” Arcadii told him, enunciating the word clearly.
“Yes. Before we had the Hegelists, but now we have the nihilists. We’ll see how you’ll manage to exist in a void, in a vacuum; but right now please ring, brother Nicholai–it’s time for my cocoa.”
Post-emancipation Problems for Russian Peasants
Balashov District Peasants
(1862)
Your Imperial Excellency! Most gracious sire! Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich!
Most magnanimous prince, given by God for the welfare of people in the Russian Empire! The countless acts of mercy and humanitarianism of Your Imperial Excellency toward the loyal subjects have emboldened us to fall to your feet and plead:
Show you steadfast and just protection of oppressed humanity! Following the example of our fathers, grandfathers and ancestors, we have always and without complaint obeyed the laws of Russian monarchs and the authority of its rulers. Hence, as peasants in the hamlet of Blagoveshchenskoe and three villages (Avdot’evka, Aleksandrovka and Uspenskaia) in Balashov District of Saratov province, we and our families, while under the authority of the squire, a retired colonel, Prince Vasil’chikov, have always enjoyed the blessings of the all-merciful God: fertile land.
The monarch’s mercy–which has no precedent in the chronicles of all peoples in the universe–has now changed the attitude of our squire, who has reduced us 1,500 peasants to a pitiable condition. … [sic] After being informed of the Imperial manifesto on the emancipation of peasants from serfdom in 1861 (which was explained to us by the constable of township 2 of Balashov District), we received this [news] with jubilation, as a special gift from heaven, and expressed our willingness to obey the square’s will in every respect during the coming two-year [transition] period [and to remain] on the fertile land which we occupy, where we could realise our life. … [sic]
But from this moment, our squire ordered that the land be cut off from the entire township. But this is absolutely intolerable for us: it not only denies us profit, but threatens us with a catastrophic future. He began to hold repeated meetings and [tried to] force us to sign that we agreed to accept the above land allotment. But, upon seeing so unexpected a change, and bearing in mind the gracious manifesto, we refused. Then Prince Vasil’chikov, with terrible threats, went to the city of Saratov, and soon afterwards the squires, Prince Prozorovskii, Golitsyn, Colonel Globbe, and the peace arbitrator Baishev came to our township office. After assembling the entire township, they tried to force us into making illegal signatures accepting the land cut-offs. But when they saw that this did not succeed, they had a company of soldiers sent in and said that they had been sent–by the Tsar!–to restore peace between us and the squires. We heard this and, despite the unsuitability of the land, we were ready to accept it–at first as 3 dessiatines per soul, than later 4 dessiatines.[1] But we did not give the demanded signatures, suspecting here a scheme by the squires’ accomplices. Then [Col.] Globbe came from their midst, threatened us with exile to Siberia, and ordered the soldiers to strip the peasants and to punish seven people by flogging in the most inhuman manner. They still have not regained consciousness.
These inhuman acts and intolerable oppression have forced us to fall to the sacred feet of Your Imperial Excellency: 1,500 voices most humbly ask for just, most august defense, which can save weeping families from certain death, and [we ask] that You issue a decree [on our case].
________________________________________
[1] A dessiatine equalled 2.7 acres.
At Home with the Russian Gentry: Fathers and Daughters
Sonya Kovalevsky
(1862)
In such cases, the governess had recourse to the most extreme measures: she sent me to my father with orders to relate my guilt to him myself. I feared this more than all other punishments.
In reality father was not at all severe with us; but I saw him rarely–only at dinner. He never permitted himself the slightest familiarity with us except when one of the children was ill. Then he was completely changed. We simply adored him at such times, and retained the memory of them for a long while. But on ordinary occasions, when all were well, he stuck to the rule that “a man must be severe,” and therefore was very sparing of his caresses.
Hence, when the governess used to say, “Go to your father; make your boast to him of how you have been behaving,” I felt genuine despair. I cried and resisted, but the governess was implacable, and taking me by the hand, she led me, or, to speak more correctly, she dragged me through the long suite of rooms to the door of the study, left me to my fate, and went away.
I knock, but very softly. Several moments, which seem to me interminable, elapse.
There is nothing to be done; I knock again.
“Who’s there? Come in,” calls father’s voice at last from the study.
I enter, but halt in the semi-darkness on the threshold. Father sits at his writing-table with his back to the door, and does not see me.
“Who’s there? What’s wanted?” he cries impatiently.
“It is I, papa. Margarita Frantzovna has sent me,” I gulp out in reply.
Then for the first time father divines what is the matter.
“Ah, ah! you have been naughty again, of course,” he says, trying to communicate to his voice as stern an intonation as possible. “Come, tell your story. What have you been doing?”
After I told it, he responded, “What a horrid, naughty little girl you are. I am very much displeased with you,” he says, and pauses because he does not know what else to say. “Go, stand in the corner,” he pronounces judgment at last, because, out of all his pedagogic wisdom, his memory has retained nothing beyond the fact that naughty children are made to stand in the corner.
And so you may picture to yourself how I, a big girl of twelve–I, who a few minutes previously had been going through the most complicated dramas with the heroine of a romance perused on the sly,–I am obliged to go and stand in the corner like a foolish little child.
The Liberal Dilemma: Extension of the Franchise–A Yes Vote
John Bright
(1866)
Well, then, there is this question that will not sleep–the question of the admission of the people of this country to the rights which are guaranteed to them, and promised to them by everything that we comprehend as the Constitution of this United Kingdom. …
I have always thought that it was one of the great objects of statesmen in our time not to separate the people into sections and classes, but rather to unite them all in one firm and compact body of citizenship, equally treated by the law, and equally loyal to the law and to the government of the country. …
… Sir, I protest against … the theory that the people of this country have an unreasonable and violent desire to shake or overturn institutions which they may not theoretically approve of. … I am perfectly content to live under the institutions which the intelligence, and the virtue, and the experience of my countrymen fairly represented in Parliament shall determine upon. …
The House of Commons is in reality the only guarantee we have for freedom. If you looked at any other country, and saw nothing but a monarch, he might be a good king and might do his best, but you would see that there is no guarantee for freedom–you know not who will be his successor. If you saw a country with no crown, but with a handful of nobles, administering the government of the country, you would say there is no guarantee there for freedom, because a number of individuals acting together have not the responsibility, or the feeling of responsibility, that one man has, and they do things which one man would not dare to do. … It is only the existence of that House which makes the institution they are so fond of safe and permanent at all–and they are afraid that the five millions somehow or other will get into it. Now, I beg to tell them that the five millions will get into it, though they may not get into it all at once; and perhaps few men desire that they should, for I am opposed myself to great and violent changes, which create needless shocks, and which are accepted, if they are accepted, with great alarm.
But I will undertake to say that some portion, a considerable and effective portion, of those five millions will before many years are passed be freely allowed to vote for members of the House of Commons. It is not the democracy which these gentlemen are always afraid of that is the peril of this country. It was not democracy in 1832 that was the peril. It was the desperate antagonism of the class that then had power to the just claims and rights of the people. …
England has long been famous for the enjoyment of personal freedom by her people. They are free to think, they are free to speak, they are free to write; and England has been famed of late years, and is famed now the world over, for the freedom of her industry and the greatness and the freedom of her commerce. I want to know then why it is that her people should not be free to vote.
Revolutionary Socialism Turns to Social Democracy: The Eisenach Program
German Social Democrats
(1869)
1. The Social-Democratic Labour party aims at the establishment of a free Democratic State.
2. Every member of the party pledges himself to insist with all his might on the following principles:–
(a) The present political and social conditions are in the highest degree unjust and therefore to be opposed with the utmost energy.
(b) The struggle for the emancipation of the working-classes is not a struggle for class privileges and prerogatives, but for equal rights and equal duties and for the abolition of all class domination.
(c) The economic dependence of the worker on the capitalist is the basis of his servitude in all its forms, and the Social-Democratic party aims, by the abolition of the present method of production (the wages system) at assuring, by means of co-operative labour, that every worker shall receive the full product of his work.
(d) Political freedom is the indispensable basis of the economic emancipation of the working-classes. The social question is therefore inseparable from the political question; its solution depends upon the solution of the political question and is only possible in a democratic State.
(e) In consideration of the fact that the political and economic emancipation of the working-class is only possible if this class wages war in common and united, the Social-Democratic Labour party adopts a united organisation which yet makes it possible for every one of its members to make his influence felt for the benefit of the whole.
(f) Considering that the emancipation of labour is neither a local nor a national but a social question, which embraces all countries in which there is a modern society, the Social-Democratic Labour party regards itself, as far as the laws of association permit, as a branch of the “International,” and adopts its aims.
3. The following are to be regarded as the most urgent questions of propaganda:–
(a) Equal universal and direct suffrage by secret ballot for all men over twenty, in the elections for the Reichstag, the Diets of the several Federal States, the provincial and local assemblies, and all other representative bodies. The deputies are to be paid salaries.
(b) The introduction of direct legislation (Initiative and Referendum) by the people.
(c) Abolition of all privileges of class, property, birth, and creed.
(d) Substitution of a National Militia for standing armies.
(e) Separation of Church and State and secularisation of schools.
(f) Compulsory education in Elementary Schools and gratuitous instruction in all public educational establishments.
(g) Independence of the Courts, introduction of the jury system, industrial courts, public and oral procedure, and gratuitous jurisdiction.
(h) Abolition of all legal restriction of the Press, the right of association and combination, the introduction of a normal working day, the restriction of female labour, and the abolition of child labour.
(i) Abolition of all indirect taxation and the introduction of a single direct progressive income tax and a tax on inheritance.
(j) State help for co-operative undertakings and State credit for free productive co-operative associations, with democratic guarantees.
A Papal Condemnation of Modernity
Pope Pius IX
(1864)
15. Every man is free to embrace and profess the religion he shall believe true, guided by the light of reason.
18. Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which it is possible to be equally pleasing to God as in the Catholic Church.
20. The ecclesiastical power must not exercise its authority without the permission and assent of the civil government.
39. The commonwealth is the origin and source of all rights, and possesses rights which are not circumscribed by any limits.
41. The civil power, even when exercised by an unbelieving sovereign, possesses an indirect and negative power over religious affairs.
43. The civil power has a right to break, and to declare and render null, the conventions (commonly called Concordats) concluded with the Apostle See, relative to the exercise of rights pertaining to the ecclesiastical immunity, without the consent of the Holy See, and even contrary to its protests.
44. The civil authority may interfere in matters relating to religion, morality, and spiritual government.
47. The most approved theory of civil society requires that popular schools open to the children of all classes, and, generally, all public institutes intended for instruction in letters and philosophy, and for conducting the education of the young, should be freed from all ecclesiastical authority, government, and interference, and should be completely subject to the civil and political power, in conformity with the will of rulers and the prevalent opinions of the age. …
53. The laws for the protection of religious establishments, and securing their rights and duties, ought to be abolished; nay, more, the civil government may lend its assistance to all who desire to quit the religious life they have undertaken, and to break their vows. The government may also suppress religious orders.
55. The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.
63. It is allowable to refuse obedience to legitimate princes; nay, more, to rise in insurrection against them.
79. Moreover, it is false that the civil freedom granted to every mode of worship, and the full power given to all of overtly and publicly manifesting their opinions and their ideas, whatsoever their nature, conduce more easily to corrupt the morals and minds of the people, and facilitate the propagation of the pest of indifferentism.
80. The Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself to, and agree with, progress, liberalism, and civilization, as lately introduced.
An Eyewitness Account of the Paris Commune
Louise Michel
(1871)
In Montmartre, in the Eighteenth Arrondissement, we organized the Montmartre Vigilance Committee. Few of its members still survive, but during the Siege the committee made the reactionaries tremble. Every evening, we would burst out onto the streets from our headquarters at 41, chaussee Clignancourt, sometimes simply to talk up the Revolution, because the time for duplicity had passed. We knew how little the reactionary regime, in its death throes, valued its promises and the lives of its citizens, and the people had to be warned. …
The members of the men’s Montmartre Vigilance Committee were remarkable persons. Never have I seen minds so direct, so unpretentious, and so elevated. Never have I seen individuals so clearheaded. I don’t know how this group managed to do it. There were no weaknesses. Something good and strong supported people.
The women were courageous also, and among them, too, there were some remarkable minds. I belonged to both committees, and the leanings of the two groups were the same. Sometime in the future the women’s committee should have its own history told. Or perhaps the two should be mingled, because people didn’t worry about which sex they were before they did their duty. That stupid question was settled. …
Ultimately the Montmartre Vigilance Committees were mowed down, like all revolutionary groups. The rare members still alive know how proud we were there and how fervently we flew the flag of the Revolution. Little did it matter to those who were there whether they were beaten to the ground unnoticed in battle or died alone in the sunlight. It makes no difference how the millstone moves so long as the bread is made.
Everything was beginning, or rather, beginning again, after the long lethargy of the Empire. The first organization of the Rights of Women had begun to meet on the rue Thevenot with Mmes Jules Simon, Andre Leo, and Maria Deraismes. At the meetings of the Rights of Women group, and at other meetings, the most advanced men applauded the idea of equality. I noticed–I had seen it before, and I saw it later–that men, their declarations notwithstanding, although they appeared to help us, were always content with just the appearance. This was the result of custom and the force of old prejudices, and it convinced me that we women must simply take our place without begging for it. The issue of political rights is dead. Equal education, equal trades, so that prostitution would not be the only lucrative profession open to a woman–that is what was real in our program. The Russian revolutionaries are right; evolution is ended and now revolution is necessary or the butterfly will die in its cocoon.
Heroic women were found in all social positions. At the professional school of Mme Poulin, women of all social levels organized the Society for the Victims of the War. They would have preferred to die rather than surrender, and dispensed their efforts the best way they could, while demanding ceaselessly that Paris continue to resist the Prussian siege. …
… [B]efore dawn on March 18 the Versailles reactionaries sent in troops to seize the cannon now held by the National Guard. One of the points they moved toward was the Butte of Montmartre, where our cannon had been taken. The soldiers of the reactionaries captured our artillery by surprise, but they were unable to haul them away as they had intended, because they had neglected to bring horses with them.
Learning that the Versailles soldiers were trying to seize the cannon, men and women of Montmartre swarmed up the Butte in a surprise maneuver. Those people who were climbing believed they would die, but they were prepared to pay the price.
The Butte of Montmartre was bathed in the first light of day, through which things were glimpsed as if they were hidden behind a thin veil of water. Gradually the crowd increased. The other districts of Paris, hearing of the events taking place on the Butte of Montmartre, came to our assistance.
The women of Paris covered the cannon with their bodies. When their officers ordered the soldiers to fire, the men refused. The same army that would be used to crush Paris two months later decided now that it did not want to be an accomplice of the reaction. They gave up their attempt to seize the cannon from the National Guard. They understood that the people were defending the Republic by defending the arms that the royalists and imperialists would have turned on Paris in agreement with the Prussians. When we had won our victory, I looked around and noticed my poor mother, who had followed me to the Butte of Montmartre, believing that I was going to die.
On this day, the eighteenth of March, the people wakened. If they had not, it would have been the triumph of some king; instead it was a triumph of the people. The eighteenth of March could have belonged to the allies of kings, or to foreigners, or to the people. It was the people’s. …
Several of our side perished. Turpin, who was wounded near me on the eighteenth in the predawn attack on 6, rue des Rosiers, died at Lariboisiere several days later. He told me to commend his wife to Georges Clemenceau, the mayor of the Eighteenth Arrondissement, and I carried out his dying wish.
I have never heard Clemenceau’s testimony at the inquiry into the events of March 18; we weren’t able to read newspapers when he gave his evidence. Clemenceau’s indecisiveness, for which people reproach him, comes from the illusion he holds that he should wait for parliamentarianism to bring progress. But parliamentarianism is dead, and Clemenceau’s illusion is some kind of infection he caught from the Bordeaux Assembly. When that assembly became the Versailles government, he fled from it. Properly, his place is in the streets, and when his anger is finally roused, he will go there. That is what remains of his revolutionary temperament. His indignation at some infamy will bring him out of his illusions, as he came out of the Bordeaux Assembly. …
If the reaction had had as many enemies among women as it did among men, the Versailles government would have had a more difficult task subduing us. Our male friends are more susceptible to faintheartedness than we women are. Asupposedly weak woman knows better than any man how to say: “It must be done.” She may feel ripped open to her very womb, but she remains unmoved. Without hate, without anger, without pity for herself or others, whether her heart bleeds or not, she can say, “It must be done.” Such were the women of the Commune. During Bloody Week, women erected and defended the barricade at the Place Blanche–and held it till they died. …
The Marxist Analysis of The Civil War in France: The Paris Commune
Karl Marx
(1871)
The direct antithesis to the empire was the Commune. The cry of “social republic” with which the Revolution of February was ushered in by the Paris proletariat, did but express a vague aspiration after a republic that was not only to supersede the monarchical form of class rule, but class rule itself. The Commune was the positive form of that republic. …
The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time. Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible and at all times revocable agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workmen’s wages. The vested interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of the Central Government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the state was laid into the hands of the Commune. …
[N]o sooner do the working men anywhere take the subject into their own hands with a will, than uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology of the mouthpieces of present society. … The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilisation! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labour of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labour, into mere instruments of free and associated labour. But this is communism, “impossible” communism! …
The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par decret du peuple [by decree of the people]. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realise, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. In the full consciousness of their historic mission, and with the heroic resolve to act up to it, the working class can afford to smile at the coarse invective of the gentlemen’s gentlemen with the pen and inkhorn, and at the didactic patronage of well-wishing bourgeois-doctrinaires, pouring forth their ignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility.
When the Paris Commune took the management of the revolution in its own hands; when plain working men for the first time dared to infringe upon the governmental privilege of their “natural superiors,” and, under circumstances of unexampled difficulty, performed their work modestly, conscientiously, and efficiently–performed it at salaries the highest of which barely amounted to one-fifth of what, according to high scientific authority, is the minimum required for a secretary to a certain metropolitan school-board–the old world writhed in convulsion of rage at the sight of the Red Flag, the symbol of the Republic of Labour, floating over the Hotel de Ville. …
An Austrian Girl is Introduced to the Realities of the Work Place
Adelheid Popp
(1883)
I didn’t give up hope, and one day I decided to put the few kreuzers I had for my lunch into the collection box for the Holy Father. On the same day I found a purse containing twelve guilders. I could scarcely contain my joy, and I thanked all the saints for this favor. It never occurred to me that some other poor devil might have been driven to despair by the loss of the purse. To me twelve guilders was such a great amount that I never thought that a poor person could have lost it. I didn’t know anything about the responsibility of handing in things you found to the police. All I saw was the merciful hand of the saints in the purse lying in the way. That evening I joyously embraced my mother; I was so happy I couldn’t speak; I could only get out the words “twelve guilders, twelve guilders.” There was nothing but joy in our room now; and as if to crown our good luck, the next day I was summoned to report to a sandpaper and emery board factory, where I’d asked about work a few days earlier and they had taken down my name.
My new workplace was on the third floor of a building that was used exclusively for industrial purposes. Not having known the bustle of a factory, I had never felt so uncomfortable. Everything displeased me–the dirty, sticky work; the unpleasant glass dust; the crowd of people; the crude tone; and the whole way that the girls and even married women behaved.
The owner’s wife–the “gracious lady,” as she was called–was the actual manager of the factory, and she talked just like the girls. She was a nice-looking woman, but she drank brandy, took snuff, and made unseemly rude jokes with the workmen. The owner was very ill, and when he came himself, there was always a violent scene. I pitied him. He seemed to me to be so good and noble, and I gathered from the behavior and whole manner of his wife that he must be unhappy. At his instructions I received a different, much more pleasant job. Up to then my job had been to hang the papers, which were smeared with glue and sprinkled with glass, unto lines strung rather high across the workroom. This work exhausted me greatly, and the owner must have noticed that it wasn’t suitable for me, because he instructed that from then on I was to keep count of the papers that were ready for processing. This work was clean and I liked it a lot better. Of course when there wasn’t anything to count, I had to do other kinds of work. …
They [the other working women] often spoke of a Herr Berger, who was the company’s traveling representative and was expected back about then. All the women raved about him, so I was curious to see the man. I had been there for two weeks when he came. Everything was in a dither, and the only talk was of the looks of the traveler they so admired. Accompanied by the owner’s wife, he came into the room where I worked. I didn’t like him at all. That afternoon I was called into his office; Herr Berger sent me on an errand and made a silly remark about my “beautiful hands.” It was already dark when I returned; I had to pass through an empty anteroom that wasn’t lighted; it was half-dark since it got light only through the glass door leading into the workroom. Herr Berger was in the anteroom when I came. He took me by the hand and inquired sympathetically about my circumstance. I answered him truthfully and told of our poverty. He spoke a few words, taking pity on me and promising to use his influence to get me higher wages. Of course I was delighted with the prospect opening up to me, for I was getting only two and a half guilders a week, for which I had to work twelve hours a day. I stammered a few words of thanks and assured him that I would prove myself worthy of his solicitude. Before I even knew what was happening, Herr Berger had kissed me. He tried to calm my fright with the words, “It was just a fatherly kiss.” He was twenty-six years old, and I was almost fifteen, so fatherliness was out of the question.
Beside myself, I hurried back to my work. I didn’t know how I should interpret the incident; I thought the kiss was disgraceful, but Herr Berger had spoken so sympathetically and had held out the prospect of higher wages! At home I did tell of the promise, but I said nothing about it in front of my brother. But my mother and my brother were happy that I had found such an influential protector.
The next day I was overwhelmed with reproaches from one of my coworkers, a young blond girl whom I liked most of all. She reproached me for having taken her place with the traveler; up to now, if he had something to do or an errand to run, she had done it; he loved her, she protested through tears and sobs, and now I’d put an end to everything. The other girls joined in too; they called me a hypocrite, and the gracious lady herself asked me how I’d liked the kisses of the “handsome traveler.” The incident of the previous evening had been observed through the glass door, and they interpreted it in a way very insulting to me.
I was defenseless against their taunts and sneers and longed for the hour when I could go home. It was Saturday, and when I received my wages, I went home with the intention of not returning Monday.
When I spoke of the matter at home, I was severely scolded. It was strange. My mother, who was always so intent on raising me to be a respectable girl, who always gave me instructions and warnings not to talk to men (“You should only allow yourself to be kissed by the man you’re going to marry,” she used to impress upon me)–in this instance my mother was against me. She said I was going too far. A kiss was nothing bad, and if I was getting more wages as a result, then it would be silly to give up my job. In the end she held my books responsible for my “overexcitement.” My mother got so mad about my “pigheadedness” that all the splendid things I’d been lent– The Book for Everyone [Das Buch Fur Alle], Over Land and Sea [Uber Land und Meer], and Chronicle of the Times [Chronik der Zeit ] (that’s how far advanced I was in literature)–were thrown out the door. I collected them all again, but I didn’t dare read in the evening, although I’d usually been allowed to read longer on Saturdays.
That was a sad Sunday! I was depressed, and what’s more I was scolded the whole day. …
Modern Anti-Semitism Defined
Richard Wagner
(1878)
All of a sudden, there is “the modern world.” This does not apparently refer to the world of today, the time in which we live, or–as modern German puts it so beautifully–”nowadays.” No, in the heads of our latest culture bearers, it signifies a world that has never yet existed, namely a “modern” world such as the world has never known at any time. Thus, a new world that previous worlds do not even approach and that therefore must be measured completely and arbitrarily according to its own standards. To the Jews, who, as a national entity, until half a century ago stood completely outside our cultural strivings, this present-day world, which they have entered so suddenly and which they appropriate to themselves with increasing force, this world must in fact seem a wholly new and hitherto nonexistent one. …
It is extraordinary how difficult … [it] seems to be for Jews [to learn proper German, as opposed to Yiddish]. We may suppose that they went too hastily to work in appropriating what was too alien to them and that their unripe knowledge of our language, that is, their jargon, may have led them astray. It belongs to another discussion to illuminate the character of language falsification and what we owe to Jewish journalism for the intrusion of “the modern” into our cultural development. To elaborate further on the present theme, however, we must point out the weighty destiny under which our language had to labor for so long and how it took the most ingenious instincts of our greatest poets and sages to restore it to its productive character. And how this remarkable, linguistic-literary process of development was encountered by decadents who frivolously abandon the deadly seriousness of their predecessors and proclaim themselves “Moderns.” …
For the Moderns to explain what we ought to think about this term “modern” is not so easy, especially if they concede that it is something quite lamentable and even dangerous, particularly to us Germans. We will not suppose this because we are assuming that our Jewish fellow citizens mean well by us. Shall we, on this assumption, believe that they don’t know what they are saying and only talk twaddle? It is useless here to trace the historical paths of the concept “modern,” a term originally coined for the plastic arts of Italy to differentiate them from those of the classical age. It suffices that we have come to know the significance of “modishness” for the French national character. With an idiosyncratic pride, the Frenchman can call himself “modern,” for he creates fashion and thereby dominates the external appearance of the entire world.
If, presently, the Jews, by dint of their “colossal efforts, in common with liberal Christians,” are making us into articles of fashion, then let the God of their fathers reward them for “doing so well by us” poor German slaves of French fashion! For the time being, it still appears otherwise, however. For, in spite of all their power, they have no remedy for their lack of originality. And this applies particularly to the employment of that power that they insist none can deny them: “the power of the quill.” They can deck themselves out with foreign feathers [quills], just as they can with the delicious names under which our new Jewish fellow citizens come to us–as surprising as they are enrapturing–and this while we poor old peasants and burghers have to satisfy ourselves forever with quite wretched names like “Schmidt,” “Muller,” “Weber,” “Wagner,” etc. …
The Gotha Program: Social Reformism over Social Revolution
German Social Democratic Party
(1875)
1. Labor is the source of all wealth and of all civilization; and since it is only through society that generally productive labor is possible, the whole product of labor, where there is a general obligation to work, belongs to society,–that is, to all its members, by equal right, and to each according to his reasonable needs.
In the society of to-day the means of production are a monopoly of the capitalistic class; the dependence of the working class, which results from this, is the cause of misery and servitude in all its forms.
The emancipation of labor requires the conversion of the means of production into the common property of society and the social regulation of all labor and its application for the general good, together with the just distribution of the product of labor.
The emancipation of labor must be the work of the laboring class itself, opposed to which all other classes are reactionary groups.
2. Proceeding from these principles, the socialist labor party of Germany endeavors by every lawful means to bring about a free State and a socialistic society, to effect the destruction of the iron law of wages by doing away with the system of wage labor, to abolish exploitation of every kind, and to extinguish all social and political inequality.
The socialist labor party of Germany, although for the time being confining its activity within national bounds, is fully conscious of the international character of the labor movement, and is resolved to meet all the obligations which this lays upon the laborer, in order to bring the brotherhood of all mankind to a full realization.
The socialist labor party of Germany, in order to prepare the way for the solution of the social question, demands the establishment of socialistic productive associations with the support of the State and under the democratic control of the working people. These productive associations, for both industry and agriculture, are to be created to such an extent that the socialistic organization of all labor may result therefrom.
[In addition to the demand for universal suffrage for all above twenty years of age, secret ballot, freedom of the press, free and compulsory education, etc.,] the socialist labor party of Germany demands the following reforms in the present social organization: (1) the greatest possible extension of political rights and freedom in the sense of the above-mentioned demands; (2) a single progressive income tax, both State and local, instead of all the existing taxes, especially the indirect ones, which weigh heavily upon the people; (3) unlimited right of association; (4) a normal working day corresponding with the needs of society, and the prohibition of work on Sunday; (5) prohibition of child labor and all forms of labor by women which are dangerous to health or morality; (6) laws for the protection of the life and health of workmen, sanitary control of workmen’s houses, inspection of mines, factories, workshops, and domestic industries by officials chosen by the workmen themselves, and an effective system of enforcement of the same; (7) regulation of prison labor.
A Scathing Denunciation of Socialist Reformism
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
(1876)
“The German Workers’ Party, in order to pave the way to the solution of the social question, demands the establishment of producers’ co-operative societies with state aid under the democratic control of the toiling people. The producers’ co-operative societies are to be called into being for industry and agriculture in such dimensions that the socialist organisation of the total labour will arise from them.”
After the Lassallean “iron law of wages,” the remedy of the prophet. The way to it is “paved” in worthy fashion. In place of the existing class struggle appears a newspaper scribbler’s phrase: “the social question,” to the “solution” of which one ” paves the way.” Instead of the revolutionary process of transformation of society, the “socialist organisation of the total labour” “arises” from the “state aid” that the state gives to the producers’ co-operative societies and which the state, not the worker, “calls into being.” This is worthy of Lassalle’s imagination that one can build a new society by state loans just as well as a new railway!
From the remnants of a sense of shame, “state aid” has been put–under the democratic control of the “toiling people.”
In the first place the majority of the “toiling people” in Germany consists of peasants and not of proletarians.
Secondly, “democratic” is in German “volksherrschaftlich,” ["by the rule of the people"]. But what does “control by the rule of the people of the toiling people” mean? And particularly in the case of a toiling people which, through these demands that it puts to the state, expresses its full consciousness that it neither rules nor is ripe for ruling! …
… The chief offence does not lie in having inscribed these specific nostrums in the programme, but in that in general a retrograde step from the standpoint of a class movement to that of a sectarian movement is being taken.
That the workers desire to establish the conditions of co-operative production on a social, and first of all on a national, scale in their own country, only means that they are working to revolutionise the present conditions of production, and has nothing in common with the foundation of co-operative societies with state aid. But as far as the present co-operative societies are concerned they are of value only in so far as they are the independent creations of the workers and not proteges either of the government or of the bourgeoisie.
I come now to the democratic section.
A. “The free basis of the state . ”
First of all, according to II, the German Workers’ Party strives for the “free state.”
Free state–what is this?
It is by no means the aim of the workers, who have got rid of the narrow mentality of humble subjects, to set the state free. In the German empire the “state” is almost as “free” as in Russia. Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ standing above society into one completely subordinated to it, and today also the forms of the state are more free or less free to the extent that they restrict the “freedom of the state.”
The German Workers’ Party–at least if it adopts the programme–shows that its socialist ideas are not even skin-deep, in that, instead of treating existing society (and this holds good of any future one) as the basis of the existing state (or of the future state in the case of future society) it treats the state rather as an independent entity that possesses its own intellectual, moral and free basis. …
The Mayor of Vienna Connects Christianity to Anti-Semitism
Karl Lueger
(1887)
At this meeting the first speaker was the Hungarian anti-Semitic leader Dr. Komlossy, who was received with an ovation lasting several minutes, and, constantly interrupted by cries of assent, made a strongly anti-Semitic speech. … Lueger, as the second speaker, was meanwhile sitting near the chairman, Psenner, and asked him anxiously what he should speak on so as not to fall foul of Komlossy. Psenner’s advice was that he could become the hero of the evening only if he outdid Komlossy in his anti-Semitism. Lueger appreciated this at once and, amid storms of applause, made a speech which, as Psenner said, set the seal on his transformation from a Democrat into an anti-Semite. …
(2) For my part, I like to ignore the small differences which might exist between one or other of the parties about the method of the struggle; I have very little regard for words and names, and much more for the cause. Whether Democrat or anti-Semite, the matter really comes to one and the same thing. The Democrats in their struggle against corruption come up against the Jews at every step, and the anti-Semites, if they want to carry out their economic programme, have to overcome not only the bad Jews but the bad Christians also. …
All my party comrades share my opinion that it is the first duty of a Democrat to take the side of the poor, oppressed people and to even harmful domination of a small fraction of the population. To be sure, the Manchester-Liberal papers have the habit of describing a Democrat in somewhat different terms. They claim, for instance, that it would be the duty of such a Democrat to come forward as an enemy of the Christian religion, to mock and ridicule its believers and priests. But we know that the motive of such a manoeuvre is solely to mislead the people, which we may deduce from the remarkable fact that were anybody to come forward against the Jewish religion and ridicule its doctrines and believers he would be branded by the same organs as a reactionary obscurantist. However, this strange conception can be seen even more clearly in an economic question. Quite shamelessly the Liberal organs threaten the confiscation of the property of the Church and claim that the goods of the “dead hand” are harmful. By this means an attempt is made to divert the attention of the people from the property of the “living hand” which, in my view, harms the people in the most grievous way. But what a yell of rage would go up from the Liberal press if one were to substitute the slogan “confiscation of Church property” with the slogan “confiscation of the goods of the conscious, living hand!” He who would dare this would risk at once being portrayed as injuring the sacred rights of property, as an anarchist, a communist who wanted to subvert the social order and destroy all existing things. And now I ask: is the title of property of the conscious, living hand stronger or more sacred than the title to the property of the Church? Surely not. And so it is more than extraordinary if one were to confiscate the property of the comparatively poor priests and through this help the rich of another denomination to increase their wealth!
A Papal Encyclical Analyzes the Modern World
Pope Leo XIII
(1891)
Let it be laid down, in the first place, that humanity must remain as it is. It is impossible to reduce human society to a level. The socialists may do their utmost, but all striving against nature is vain. There naturally exist among mankind innumerable differences of the most important kind; people differ in capability, in diligence, in health, and in strength; an unequal fortune is a necessary result of inequality in condition. Such inequality is far from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the community; social and public life can only go on by the help of various kinds of capacity and the playing of many parts; and each man, as a rule, chooses the part which peculiarly suits his case.
As regards bodily labor, even had man never fallen from “the state of innocence,” he would not have been wholly unoccupied; but that which would then have been his free choice and delight became afterwards compulsory, and the painful expiation of his sin. “Cursed be the earth in thy work; in thy labor thou shall eat of it all the days of thy life.” In like manner, the other pains and hardships of life will have no end or cessation on this earth; for the consequences of sin are bitter and hard to bear, and they must be with man as long as life lasts. To suffer and to endure, therefore, is the lot of humanity; let men try as they may, no strength and no artifice will ever succeed in banishing from human life the ills and troubles which beset it. If any there be who pretend differently,–who hold out to a hard-pressed people freedom from pain and trouble, undisturbed repose, and constant enjoyment,–they cheat the people and impose upon them; and their lying promises will only make the evil worse than before. There is nothing more useful than to look at the world as it really is,–and at the same time to look elsewhere for a remedy to its troubles.
The great mistake that is made in the matter now under consideration, is to possess one’s self of the idea that class is naturally hostile to class; that rich and poor are intended by nature to live at war with one another. So irrational and so false is this view that the exact contrary is the truth. Just as the symmetry of the human body is the result of the disposition of the members of the body, so in a State it is ordained by nature that these two classes should exist in harmony and agreement, and should, as it were, fit into one another, so as to maintain the equilibrium of the body politic. Each requires the other; capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital. Mutual agreement results in pleasantness and good order; perpetual conflict necessarily produces confusion and violence.
Now, in preventing such strife as this, and in making it impossible, the efficacy of Christianity is marvelous and manifold. First of all, there is nothing more powerful than religion (of which the Church is the interpreter and guardian) in drawing rich and poor together, by reminding each class of its duties to the other, and especially of the duties of justice. Thus religion teaches the laboring man and the workman to carry out honestly and well all equitable agreements freely made; never to injure capital, or to attack the person of an employer; never to employ violence in representing his own cause, or to engage in riot or disorder; and to have nothing to do with men of evil principles, who work upon the people with artful promises, and raise foolish hopes which usually end in disaster and in repentance when too late.
Religion teaches the rich man and the employer that their work people are not their slaves; that they respect in every man his dignity as a man and as a Christian; that labor is nothing to be ashamed of, if we listen to right reason and to Christian philosophy, but is an honorable employment, enabling a man to sustain his life in an upright and creditable way; and that it is shameful and inhuman to treat men like chattels to make money by, or to look upon them merely as so much muscle or physical power.
If we turn now to things exterior and corporeal, the first concern of all is to save the poor workers from the cruelty of grasping speculators, who use human beings as mere instruments for making money. It is neither justice nor humanity so to grind men down with excessive labor as to stupefy their minds and wear out their bodies. Finally, work which is suitable for a strong man cannot reasonably be required from a woman or a child. And, in regard to children, great care should be taken not to place them in workshops and factories until their bodies and minds are sufficiently mature. For just as severe weather destroys the buds of spring, so too early an experience of life’s hard work blights the young promise of a child’s powers and makes any real education impossible.
We now approach a subject of very great importance, and one on which, if extremes are to be avoided, right ideas are absolutely necessary. Wages, we are told, are fixed by free consent; and therefore the employer, when he pays what was agreed upon, has done his part, and is not called upon for anything further. The only way, it is said, in which injustice could happen would be if the master refused to pay the whole of the wages, or the workman would not complete the work undertaken; when this happens the State should intervene, to see that each obtains his own,–but not under any other circumstances. …
The Narodnik Executive Committee Reveals the Rationale for Assassination
The Narodnik Executive Committee
(1881)
Your Majesty: March 10, 1881
Although the Executive Committee understands fully the grief that you must experience at this moment, it believes that it has no right to yield to the feeling of natural delicacy which would perhaps dictate the postponements of the following explanation to another time. There is something higher than the most legitimate human feeling, and that is, duty to one’s country,–the duty for which a citizen must sacrifice himself and his own feelings, and even the feelings of others. In obedience to this all-powerful duty we have decided to address you at once, waiting for nothing, as will wait for nothing the historical process that threatens us with rivers of blood and the most terrible convulsions. …
You are aware, your Majesty, that the government of the late Tsar could not be reproached with the lack of energy. It hanged the innocent and the guilty, and filled prisons and remote provinces with exiles. Scores of socalled “leaders” were captured and hanged, and died with the courage and tranquillity of martyrs; but the movement did not cease,–on the contrary it grew and strengthened. The revolutionary movement, your Majesty, is not dependent upon any particular individuals; it is a process of the social organism; and the scaffolds raised for its more energetic exponents are as powerless to save the outgrown order of things as the cross that was erected for the Redeemer was powerless to save the ancient world from the triumph of Christianity. The government, of course, may yet capture and hang an immense number of separate individuals, it may break up a great number of separate revolutionary groups; but all this will not change, in the slightest degree, the condition of affairs. …
A dispassionate glance at the grievous decade through which we have just passed will enable us to forecast accurately the future progress of the revolutionary movement, provided the policy of the government does not change. The movement will continue to grow and extend; deeds of a terroristic nature will increase in frequency and intensity. Meanwhile the number of the discontented in the country will grow larger and larger; confidence in the government, on the part of the people, will decline; and the idea of a revolution–of its possibility and inevitability–will establish itself in Russia more and more firmly. A terrible explosion, a bloody chaos, a revolutionary earthquake throughout Russia, will complete the destruction of the old order of things. …
From such a state of affairs there can be only two modes of escape: either a revolution,–absolutely inevitable and not to be averted by any punishments; or a voluntary turning of the supreme power to the people. In the interest of our native land, in the hope of preventing the useless waste of energy, in the hope of averting the terrible miseries that always accompany revolution, the Executive Committee approaches your Majesty with the advice to take the second course. Be assured, so soon as the supreme power ceases to rule arbitrarily, so soon as it firmly resolves to accede to the demands of the people’s conscience and consciousness, you may, without fear, discharge the spies that disgrace the administration, send your guards back to their barracks, and burn the scaffolds that are demoralizing the people. The Executive Committee will voluntarily terminate its own existence, and the organizations formed about it will disperse, in order that their members may devote themselves to the work of promoting culture among the people of their native land. …
We set no conditions for you; do not let our proposition irritate you. The conditions that are prerequisite to a change from revolutionary activity to peaceful labor are created, not by us, but by history. These conditions are, in our opinion, two.
1. A general amnesty to cover all past political crimes; for the reason that they were not crimes but fulfillments of civil duty.
2. The summoning of representatives of the whole Russian people to examine the existing framework of social and governmental life, and to remodel it in accordance with the people’s wishes.
We regard it as necessary, however, to remind you that the legalization of the supreme power, by the representatives of the people, can be valid only in case the elections are perfectly free. We declare solemnly, before the people of our native land and before the whole world, that our party will submit unconditionally to the decisions of a National Assembly elected in the manner above indicated, and that we will not allow ourselves, in future, to offer violent resistance to any government that the National Assembly may sanction.
The Dreyfus Affair Awakens Anti-Semitism in France
Civilita Cattolica
(1897)
The emancipation of the Jews was the corollary of the so-called principles of 1789, the yoke of which weighs on the neck of all Frenchmen. These French Jews grew in number by the immigration of German Jews, and now they total 130,000.
They got control of Masonry (Dreyfus is a Jew and a Mason as well), and Masonry is notoriously the master of the French State. This is the way they keep the Republic in their hands; it is more Hebrew than French. … Of 260 billions that constitute the wealth of France, the Jews possess 80. They direct home as well as foreign policy. The abandonment of Egypt [a reference to the concession to the British of De Lesseps' Suez Canal] was the work of these Jews who, at the behest of the government of London, corrupted the press, the government and parliament.
The condemnation of Dreyfus was a terrible blow for Israel. It branded the forehead of all Jews in the world, most of all in their French colonies. This mark they swore to wipe off. But how? With their usual subtlety, they invented a case of miscarriage of justice. The plot was hatched in Basle at the Zionist Congress, held under the pretext of discussing the deliverance of Jerusalem. The Protestants joined in common cause with the Jews and established a Syndicate. The money came mostly from Germany. Pecuniae obediunt omnia is the principle of the Jews. They bought consciences and those newspapers which were for sale in every country of Europe. …
The Jew was created by God to serve as a spy wherever treason is in preparation. Moreover, ethnic solidarity ties the Jews to each other and prevents them from becoming loyal citizens in spite of naturalization. The Dreyfus affair reveals this fact clearly. Thus anti-Semitism will become, as it should, economic, political, and national. The Jews allege an error of justice. The true error was, however, that of the Constituante which accorded them French nationality. That law has to be revoked. … Not only in France, but in Germany, Austria, and Italy as well, the Jews are to be excluded from the nation.
Then the old harmony will be re-established and the peoples will again find their lost happiness.
“J’Accuse” the French Army
Emile Zola
(1898)
Dreyfus knows several languages: a crime. No compromising papers were found in his possession: a crime. He sometimes visited his native country: a crime. He is industrious and likes to find out about everything: a crime. He is calm: a crime. He is worried: a crime. …
I accuse Lieutenant-Colonel du Paty de Clam of having been the diabolical, but I would fain believe the unwitting, artisan of the miscarriage of justice, and thereafter of having defended his unhallowed work for three years by the most clumsy and culpable machinations.
I accuse General Mercier of having become, at all events through weakness, an accomplice in one of the greatest iniquities of the age.
I accuse General Billot of having had in his hands sure proofs of the innocence of Dreyfus and of having hushed them up, of having incurred the guilt of crimes against humanity and justice, for political ends and to save the face of the General Staff.
I accuse General de Boisdeffre and General Gonse of having been participators in the same crime, actuated, the one no doubt by clerical partisanship, the other, it may be, by that esprit de corps which would make the Army and the War Office the sacred Ark of the Covenant.
I accuse General de Pellieux and Major Ravary of conducting a disgraceful inquiry, by which I mean an inquiry characterized by the most monstrous partiality, of which we have, in the report of the latter of these two men, an imperishable monument of stupid audacity.
I accuse the three handwriting experts, MM. Belhomme, Varinard, and Couard, of drawing up misleading and lying reports, unless, indeed, a medical examination should reveal them to be suffering from some pathological abnormality of sight and judgment.
I accuse the War Office of conducting an abominable campaign in the Press, and particularly in the newspapers l’Eclair and l’Echo de Paris, in order to mislead public opinion and to conceal their own misdeeds.
I accuse the first Court-Martial of acting contrary to law by condemning an accused man on the strength of a secret document; and I accuse the second Court-Martial of having, in obedience to orders, concealed that illegality, and of committing in its turn the crime of knowingly acquitting a guilty man.
In bringing these charges, I am not unaware that I render myself liable to prosecution under Clauses 30 and 31 of the Act of the 29th of July, which deals with defamation of character in the public Press. But I do so of my own free will and with my eyes open.
As for those whom I accuse, I do not know them, I have never seen them. I entertain for them neither hatred nor ill-will. They are so far as I am concerned mere entities, spirits of social maleficence, and the action to which I have here committed myself is but a revolutionary means of hastening the explosion of Truth and Justice.
I have but one passion, and that is for light, and I plead in the name of that humanity which has so greatly suffered and has a right to happiness. My fiery protest is but the outcry of my soul. Let them drag me, then, into a Court of Justice and let the matter be thrashed out in broad daylight. I am ready.
Bloody Sunday: Tsarist Repression at Its Worst
Father Georgi Gapon
(1905)
Sire: We, workingmen and inhabitants of St. Petersburg of various classes, our wives and our children and our helpless old parents, come to Thee, Sire, to seek for truth and defense. We have become beggars; we have been oppressed; we are burdened by toil beyond our powers; we are scoffed at; we are not recognized as human beings; we are treated as slaves who must suffer their bitter fate and who must keep silence. We suffered, but we are pushed farther into the den of beggary, lawlessness, and ignorance. We are choked by despotism and irresponsibility, and we are breathless. We have no more power, Sire; the limit of patience has been reached. There has arrived for us that tremendous moment when death is better than the continuation of intolerable tortures. We have left off working, and we have declared to the masters that we shall not begin to work until they comply with our demands. We beg but little: we desire only that without which life is not life, but hard labor and eternal torture. The first request which we made was that our masters should discuss our needs with us; but this they refused, on the ground that no right to make this request is recognized by law. They also declared to be illegal our requests to diminish the working hours to eight hours daily, to agree with us about the prices for our work, to consider our misunderstandings with the inferior administration of the mills, to increase the wages for the labor of women and of general laborers, so that the minimum daily wage should be one ruble per day, to abolish overtime work, to give us medical attention without insulting us, to arrange the workshops so that it might be possible to work there, and not find in them death from awful draughts and from rain and snow. All these requests appeared to be, in the opinion of our masters and of the factory and mill administrations, illegal. Everyone of our requests was a crime, and the desire to improve our condition was regarded by them as impertinence, and as offensive to them.
Sire, here are many thousands of us, and all are human beings only in appearance. In reality in us, as in all Russian people, there is not recognized any human right, not even the right of speaking, thinking, meeting, discussing our needs, taking measures for the improvement of our condition. We have been enslaved, and enslaved under the auspices of Thy officials, with their assistance, and with their co-operation. Everyone of us who dares to raise a voice in defense of working-class and popular interests is thrown into jail or is sent into banishment. For the possession of good hearts and sensitive souls we are punished as for crimes. Even to pity a beaten man–a man tortured and without rights–means to commit a heavy crime. …
Russia is too great. Its necessities are too various and numerous for officials alone to rule. National representation is indispensable. It is indispensable that people should assist and should rule themselves. To them only are known their real necessities. Do not reject their assistance, accept it, order immediately the convocation of representatives of the Russian land from all ranks, including representatives from the workingmen. Let there be capitalists as well as workingmen–official and priest, doctor and teacher–let all, whatever they may be, elect their representatives. Let everyone be equal and free in the right of election, and for this purpose order that the elections for the Constitutional Assembly be carried on under the condition of universal, equal and secret voting. This is the most capital of our requests. In it and upon it everything is based. This is the principal and only plaster for our painful wounds, without which our wounds will fester and will bring us rapidly near to death. Yet one measure alone cannot heal our wounds. Other measures are also indispensable. Directly and openly as to a Father we speak to Thee, Sire, about them, in person, for all the toiling classes of Russia. …
II
With naive belief in thee as father of thy people, I was going peacefully to thee with the children of these very people. Thou must have known, thou didst know this. The innocent blood of workers, their wives and children, lies forever between thee, O soul destroyer, and the Russian people. Moral connection between thee and them may never be any more. The mighty river during its overflowing thou art already unable to stem by any half measures, even by a Zemsky Sobor (Popular Assembly). Bombs and dynamite, the terror by individuals and by masses, against thy breed and against the robbers of rightless people–all this must be and shall absolutely be. Asea of blood–unexampled–will be shed. Because of thee, because of thy whole family, Russia may perish. Once for all, understand this and remember, better soon with all thy family abdicate the throne of Russia and give thyself up to the Russian people for trial. Pity thy children and the Russian lands, O thou offerer of peace for other countries and blood drunkard for thine own!
Otherwise let all blood which has to be shed fall upon thee, Hangman, and thy kindred!
GEORGE GAPON.
Postscriptum–Know that this letter is justifying document of the coming revolutionary terroristic occurrences in Russia. G. G.
Liberalism Transformed: A Defense of Social Welfare
Leonard Hobhouse
(1911)
On all sides we find the State making active provision for the poorer classes and not by any means for the destitute alone. We find it educating the children, providing medical inspection, authorizing the feeding of the necessitous at the expense of the ratepayers, helping them to obtain employment through free Labour Exchanges, seeking to organize the labour market with a view to the mitigation of unemployment, and providing old age pensions for all whose incomes fall below thirteen shillings a week, without exacting any contribution. Now, in all this, we may well ask, is the State going forward blindly on the paths of broad and generous but unconsidered charity? Is it and can it remain indifferent to the effect on individual initiative and personal or parental responsibility? Or may we suppose that the wiser heads are well aware of what they are about, have looked at the matter on all sides, and are guided by a reasonable conception of the duty of the State and the responsibilities of the individual? Are we, in fact–for this is really the question–seeking charity or justice?
We said above that it was the function of the State to secure the conditions upon which mind and character may develop themselves. Similarly we may say now that the function of the State is to secure conditions upon which its citizens are able to win by their own efforts all that is necessary to a full civic efficiency. It is not for the State to feed, house, or clothe them. It is for the State to take care that the economic conditions are such that the normal man who is not defective in mind or body or will can by useful labour feed, house, and clothe himself and his family. The “right to work” and the right to a “living wage” are just as valid as the rights of person or property. That is to say, they are integral conditions of a good social order.
An Eerie Prescient Vision of the Coming War
Jean Jaures
(1911)
But no matter what we do, gentlemen, we remain surrounded by an atmosphere of suspicion and defiance from which, it seems to me, the clouds of war may descend upon us at any minute. As far as it is our responsibility, as far as it is the responsibility of a great people, we must constantly apply ourselves to dissipate this atmosphere of defiance and to combat the causes of the renewed danger of conflicts. It is our primary duty to reject the pessimism and the fatalism of those who say that war is inevitable.
Gentlemen, I do not disregard the forces for war in this world; but one also has to see and to recognize the forces for peace and to salute them. In its own way, war fosters peace–since the horrors of a modern war are frightening. Gentlemen, when one sometimes speaks lightly of the possibility of this terrible catastrophe one forgets the hitherto unknown extent of the horror and greatness of the disaster that would occur. …
The present-day armies of each nation represent entire peoples, as in the times of primitive barbarism; but this time they would be let loose amidst all the complexity and wealth of human civilization. Each of these nations would employ instruments of terrifying destruction created by modern science. Do not imagine that it will be a short war, consisting of a few thunderbolts and flashes of lightning. On the contrary, there will be slow and formidable collisions like the ones which have taken place over there in Manchuria between the Russians and the Japanese. Untold numbers of human beings will suffer from the sickness, the distress, the pain, the ravages of this multiple explosion. The sick will die of fever; commerce will be paralyzed; factories will stop working; oceans, which steamboats nowadays cross in every direction, will again be empty and silent as in former times.
This terrible spectacle will over-stimulate all human passions. Listen to the words of a man who is passionately attached to the ideals of his party and who is convinced that we must revolutionize our form of property holding, but who also believes that it will be the greatness of this movement to proceed in an evolutionary manner, without unleashing the destructive hatreds which have hitherto accompanied all great movements for social reform throughout history. But we must watch out, for it is in the fever of wars that passions for social reform are aroused to a paroxysm of violence. It was during the War of 1870 and the siege of Paris that convulsions seized that city; it was during the Russo-Japanese War that the fever broke out in Russia. Therefore, the conservatives should be the ones who desire peace more than any others, for once peace is broken the forces of chaos will be let loose. …
Primary Sources – Unit Fourteen – The West and the World
European Imperialism in Africa: A Veteran Explains the Rules of the Game
Sir Henry Stanley
(1909)
Some explorers say: “One must not run through a country, but give the people time to become acquainted with you, and let their worst fears subside.”
Now on the expedition across Africa I had no time to give, either to myself or to them. The river bore my heavy canoes downward; my goods would never have endured the dawdling requirement by the system of teaching every tribe I met who I was. To save myself and my men from certain starvation, I had to rush on and on, right through. But on this expedition, the very necessity of making roads to haul my enormous six-ton wagons gave time for my reputation to travel ahead of me. My name, purpose, and liberal rewards for native help, naturally exaggerated, prepared a welcome for me, and transformed my enemies of the old time into workmen, friendly allies, strong porters, and firm friends. I was greatly forbearing also; but, when a fight was inevitable, through open violence, it was sharp and decisive. Consequently, the natives rapidly learned that though everything was to be gained by friendship with me, wars brought nothing but ruin.
When a young white officer quits England for the first time, to lead blacks, he has got to learn to unlearn a great deal. We must have white men in Africa; but the raw white is a great nuisance there during the first year. In the second year, he begins to mend; during the third year, if his nature permits it, he has developed into a superior man, whose intelligence may be of transcendent utility for directing masses of inferior men.
My officers were possessed with the notion that my manner was “hard,” because I had not many compliments for them. That is the kind of pap which we may offer women and boys. Besides, I thought they were superior natures, and required none of that encouragement, which the more childish blacks almost daily received.
Imperial Conquest: The Nation’s Savior
Le Petit Journal
(1883)
The future and wealth of France depend above all on the extension and prosperity of our colonies. … When factories produce more than consumers need, work must stop for a time, and workers, condemned to inactivity for a more or less long period, must live off their savings and suffer without there being any possibility to institute a remedy for the evil. … The reasons for the abnormal situation can be boiled down to a lack of markets for our products….Once the French genius is put to colonization … we will find a draining of our overflow of our factories, and at the same time we will be able to secure, at the source of production, the primary materials needed in our factories.
The “Poet Laureate of Empire” Issues a Word of Warning
Rudyard Kipling
(1897)
Recessional
God of our fathers, known of old–
Lord of our far-flung battle line–
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine–
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget–lest we forget!
The tumult and the shouting die–
The Captains and the Kings depart–
Still stands thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, …
Far-called, our navies melt away–
On dune and headland sinks the fire–
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget …
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe–
Such boasting as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the Law–
Lord God of Hosts, …
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard–
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy Mercy on thy People, Lord!
An Immigrant’s Tale
Rose Schneiderman
(ca. 1890s)
Mother had been here only a short time when I noticed that she looked older and more old-fashioned than father. It was so with most of our women, especially those who wore wigs or kerchiefs on their heads. So I thought that if I could persuade her to leave off her kerchief she would look younger and more up to date. So, one day, when we two were alone in the house, I asked her playfully to take off her kerchief and let me do her hair, just to see how it would look.
She consented reluctantly. She had never before in her married life had her hair uncovered before anyone. I was surprised how different she looked. I handed her our little mirror. She glanced at herself, admitted frankly that it looked well and began hastily to put on her kerchief.
“Mamma,” I coaxed, “please don’t put the kerchief on again–ever!”
At first she would not even listen to me. I began to coax and reason. I pointed out that wives often looked so much older because they were so old-fashioned, that the husbands were often ashamed to go out with them.
Mother put her finger on my lips.
“But father trims his beard,” I still argued. Her face looked sad. “Is that why,” she said, “I too must sin?”
An Academic Nationalist Lectures the Next Generation of Germany’s Leaders
Heinrich von Treitschke
(ca. 1880s)
The next essential function of the State is the conduct of war. The long oblivion into which this principle had fallen is a proof of how effeminate the science of government had become in civilian hands. In our century this sentimentality was dissipated by Clausewitz, but a one-sided materialism arose in its place, after the fashion of the Manchester school, seeing in man a biped creature, whose destiny lies in buying cheap and selling dear. It is obvious that this idea is not compatible with war, and it is only since the last war [1870-71] that a sounder theory arose of the State and its military power.
Without war no State could be. All those we know of arose through war, and the protection of their members by armed force remains their primary and essential task. War, therefore, will endure to the end of history, as long as there is multiplicity of States. The laws of human thought and of human nature forbid any alternative, neither is one to be wished for. The blind worshipper of an eternal peace falls into the error of isolating the State, or dreams of one which is universal, which we have already seen to be at variance with reason.
Even as it is impossible to conceive of a tribunal above the State, which we have recognized as sovereign in its very essence, so it is likewise impossible to banish the idea of war from the world. It is a favourite fashion of our time to instance England as particularly ready for peace. But England is perpetually at war; there is hardly an instant in her recent history in which she has not been obliged to be fighting somewhere. The great strides which civilization makes against barbarism and unreason are only made actual by the sword. Between civilized nations also war is the form of litigation by which States make their claims valid. The arguments brought forward in these terrible law suits of the nations compel as no argument in civil suits can ever do. Often as we have tried by theory to convince the small States that Prussia alone can be the leader in Germany, we had to produce the final proof upon the battlefields of Bohemia and the [river] Main [in 1866].
Moreover war is a uniting as well as a dividing element among nations; it does not draw them together in enmity only, for through its means they learn to know and to respect each other’s peculiar qualities.
It is important not to look upon war always as a judgment from God. Its consequences are evanescent; but the life of a nation is reckoned by centuries, and the final verdict can only be pronounced after the survey of whole epochs.
William II Offers Characteristic Bombast
William II
(1897)
The voyage on which you are starting and the task you have to perform have nothing essentially novel about them. They are the logical consequences of the political labors of my late grandfather and his great Chancellor,[1] and of our noble father’s achievements with the sword on the battlefield. They are nothing more than the first effort of the reunited and reestablished German Empire to perform its duties across the seas. In the astonishing development of its commercial interests the empire has attained such dimensions that it is my duty to follow the new German Hansa, and to afford it the protection it has a right to demand from the empire and the emperor. Our German brethren in holy orders, who have gone out to work in peace, and who have not shrunk from risking their lives in order to carry our religion to foreign soil and among foreign nations, have placed themselves under my protection, and we have now to give permanent support and safety to these brethren, who have been repeatedly harassed and often hard pressed.
For this reason, the enterprise which I have intrusted to you, and which you will have to carry out conjointly with the comrades and the ships already on the spot, is essentially of a defensive and not of an offensive nature. Under the protecting banner of our German war flag, the rights we are justified in claiming are to be secured to German commerce, German merchants, and German ships,–the same rights that are accorded by foreigners to all other nations. Our commerce is not new, for the Hansa was, in old times, one of the mightiest enterprises the world has ever seen, and the German towns were able to fit out fleets such as the broad expanse of the sea had hardly ever borne before.
The Hansa decayed, however, and could not but decay, for the one condition, namely imperial protection, was wanting. Now things are altered. As the first preliminary condition, the German Empire has been created. As the second preliminary condition, German commerce is flourishing and developing, and it can develop and prosper securely only if it feels safe under the power of the empire. Imperial power means naval power, and they are so mutually dependent that the one cannot exist without the other.
As a sign of imperial and of naval power, the squadron, strengthened by your division, will now have to act in close intercourse and good friendship with all the comrades of the foreign fleets out there, for the protection of our home interests against everybody who tries to injure Germany. That is your vocation and your task. May it be clear to every European out there, to the German merchant, and, above all, to the foreigner whose soil we may be on, and with whom we shall have to deal, that the German Michael[2] has planted his shield, adorned with the eagle of the empire, firmly on that soil, in order, once and for all, to afford protection to those who apply to him for it. May our countrymen abroad, whether priests or merchants or of any other calling, be firmly convinced that the protection of the German Empire, as represented by the imperial ships, will be constantly afforded them.
Should, however, any one attempt to affront us, or to infringe our good rights, then strike out with mailed fist, and, if God will, weave round your young brow the laurel which nobody in the whole German Empire will begrudge you.
[1] William I and Bismark; the latter, of course, William II forced from office.
[2] The symbol of Germany
Primary Sources – Unit Fifteen – The Great Break: War and Revolution
The Bismarckian Alliance System at Work: The Reinsurance Treaty
Otto von Bismarck (1887)
The Imperial Courts of Germany and of Russia, animated by an equal desire to strengthen the general peace by an understanding destined to assure the defensive position of their respective States, have resolved to confirm the agreement established between them by a special arrangement, in view of the expiration on June 15/27, 1887, of the validity of the secret Treaty and Protocol, signed in 1881 and renewed in 1884 by the three Courts of Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. …
Article I. In case one of the High Contracting Parties should find itself at war with a third great Power, the other would maintain a benevolent neutrality towards it, and would devote its efforts to the localization of the conflict. This provision would not apply to a war against Austria or France in case this war should result from an attack directed against one of these two latter Powers by one of the High Contracting Parties.
Article II. Germany recognizes the rights historically acquired by Russia in the Balkan Peninsula, and particularly the legitimacy of her preponderant and decisive influence in Bulgaria and in Eastern Rumelia. The two Courts engage to admit no modification of the territorial status quo of the said peninsula without a previous agreement between them, and to oppose, as occasion arises, every attempt to disturb this status quo or to modify it without their consent.
Article III. The two Courts recognize the European and mutually obligatory character of the principle of the closing of the Straits of the Bosphorus and of the Dardanelles, founded on international law, confirmed by treaties, and summed up in the declaration of the second Plenipotentiary of Russia at the session of July 12 of the Congress of Berlin (Protocol 19).
They will take care in common that Turkey shall make no exception to this rule in favor of the interests of any Government whatsoever, by lending to warlike operations of a belligerent power the portion of its Empire constituted by the Straits. In case of infringement, or to prevent it if such infringement should be in prospect, the two Courts will inform Turkey that they would regard her, in that event, as putting herself in a state of war towards the injured Party, and as depriving herself thenceforth of the benefits of the security assured to her territorial status quo by the Treaty of Berlin.
Article IV. The present Treaty shall remain in force for the space of three years, dating from the day of the exchange of ratifications.
Article V. The High Contracting Parties mutually promise secrecy as to the contents and the existence of the present Treaty and of the Protocol annexed thereto. …
Bismarck‘s Worst Nightmare: A Franco-Russian Rapprochement
Russian and French Governments
(1892)
(1) Draft of Military Convention
France and Russia, being animated by an equal desire to preserve peace, and having no other object than to meet the necessities of a defensive war, provoked by an attack of the forces of the Triple Alliance against the one or the other of them, have agreed upon the following provisions:
1. If France is attacked by Germany, or by Italy supported by Germany, Russia shall employ all her available forces to attack Germany.
If Russia is attacked by Germany, or by Austria supported by Germany, France shall employ all her available forces to fight Germany.
2. In case the forces of the Triple Alliance, or of one of the Powers composing it, should mobilize, France and Russia, at the first news of the event and without the necessity of any previous concert, shall mobilize immediately and simultaneously the whole of their forces and shall move them as close as possible to their frontiers.
3. The available forces to be employed against Germany shall be on the part of France, 1,300,000 men, on the part of Russia, 700,000 or 800,000 men.
These forces shall engage to the full, with all speed, in order that Germany may have to fight at the same time on the East and on the West.
4. The General Staffs of the Armies of the two countries shall cooperate with each other at all times in the preparation and facilitation of the execution of the measures above foreseen.
They shall communicate to each other, while there is still peace, all information relative to the armies of the Triple Alliance which is or shall be within their knowledge.
Ways and means of corresponding in times of war shall be studied and arranged in advance.
5. France and Russia shall not conclude peace separately.
6. The present Convention shall have the same duration as the Triple Alliance.
7. All the clauses above enumerated shall be kept rigorously secret. …
(2) General de Boisdeffre’s interview with the Tsar regarding the Military Convention. “Mobilization is a declaration of war.
Saint Petersburg, August 18, 1892
This morning, Tuesday, I received from the Minister of War a letter dated August 5/17, in which … he made known to me that the Emperor had approved in principle the project as a whole. [The draft of the Military Convention.] … The Emperor had evidently held that the basis of the entente would have to be precisely and officially fixed before his audience.
We have now, awaiting the exchange of ratifications with ministeries signatures, an official basis for a definite convention, a basis that can be considered as absolutely sure and decisive when one knows the reserve and the prudence of the Russian Government and the firmness of the Emperor in his engagements.
At eleven o’clock, I was received by the Emperor. His Majesty declared to me immediately that he had read, re-read, and studied the project of the convention, that he gave it his full approbation, taking it as a whole, and that he thanked the French Government for accepting some changes of wording that he had requested.
His Majesty added that the convention contained, to his mind, some political articles which he desired to have examined by the Minister of Foreign Affairs; that there might be, as a result, some minor changes of wording to be made. Finally, His Majesty repeated that the project gave him entire satisfaction and that everything seemed to him to be adjusted to the best interests of the two countries.
I did not believe it necessary to take up again the defence of the first text, since the new text had received the approval of the Government. I only said to the Emperor that the French Government had wished to testify once more through this concession to its confidence in him. The Emperor did not fail to tell me of his strong desire that we guard the secret absolutely….
The Emperor spoke of his desire for peace. I remarked to him that we were no less pacific than His Majesty. “I know it,” he responded. “You have given proof of it for twenty-two years. I believe, moreover, that at this moment, peace is not threatened. The German Emperor has enough internal troubles, and England has as many. Moreover, with our convention, I estimate that our situation will be favorable. I surely desire to have at least two more years of peace, for it is necessary for us to complete our armament, our railways, and to recover from want and from the cholera. In fine, it is necessary to hope that peace will be maintained for a long time yet, and let us wish for it.”
The Emperor then spoke of mobilization under Article 2. I ventured to remark that mobilization was the declaration of war; that to mobilize was to oblige one’s neighbor to do so also; that the mobilization entailed the execution of strategic transportation and of concentration. Without that, to allow the mobilization of a million men on one’s frontier without doing the same simultaneously was to deny to one’s self all possibility of stirring later. It would be like the situation an individual would be in if he had a pistol in his pocket and would allow his neighbor to point a gun at his forehead without drawing his own. “That is the way I understand it,” the Emperor responded. …
What Is to Be Done with Russia?
Vladimir I. Lenin
(1903)
The history of the revolutionary movement is so little known among us that the name “Narodnaya Volya” [People's Will, the original populist revolutionary movement of the earlier generation] is used to denote any idea of a militant centralized organisation which declares determined war upon tsarism. … [N]o revolutionary trend, if it seriously thinks of struggle, can dispense with such an organization. The mistake the Narodnaya Volya committed was not in striving to enlist all the discontented in the organisation and to direct this organisation to resolute struggle against autocracy; on the contrary, that was its great historical merit. The mistake was in relying on a theory which in substance was not a revolutionary theory at all, and the Narodnaya Volya members either did not know how, or were unable, to link their movement inseparably with the class struggle in the developing capitalist society. Only a gross failure to understand Marxism … could prompt the opinion that the rise of a mass, spontaneous working-class movement relieves us of the duty of creating as good an organisation of revolutionaries as the Zemlya i Volya[1] had, or, indeed, an incomparably better one. On the contrary, this movement imposes the duty upon us; for the spontaneous struggle of the proletariat will not become its genuine “class struggle” until this struggle is led by a strong organisation of revolutionaries.
We have always protested, and will, of course, continue to protest against confining the political struggle to conspiracy. But this does not, of course, mean that we deny the need for a strong revolutionary organisation. … In form such a strong revolutionary organisation in an autocratic country may also be described as a “conspiratorial” organisation, because the French word conspiration is the equivalent of the Russian wordzagovor (“conspiracy”), and such an organisation must have the utmost secrecy. Secrecy is such a necessary condition for this kind of organisation that all the other conditions (number and selection of members, functions, etc.) must be made to conform to it. It would be extremely naive indeed, therefore, to fear the charge that we Social-Democrats desire to create a conspiratorial organisation. …
The objection may be raised that such a powerful and strictly secret organisation, which concentrates in its hands all the threads of secret activities, an organisation which of necessity is centralised, may too easily rush into a premature attack, may thoughtlessly intensify the movement before the growth of political discontent, the intensity of the ferment and anger of the working class, etc., have made such an attack possible and necessary. Our reply to this is: Speaking abstractly, it cannot be denied, of course, that a militant organisationmay thoughtlessly engage in battle, which may end in defeat entirely avoidable under other conditions. But we cannot confine ourselves to abstract reasoning on such a question, because every battle bears within itself the abstract possibility of defeat, and there is no way of reducing this possibility except by organised preparation for battle. If, however, we proceed from the concrete conditions at present obtaining in Russia, we must come to the positive conclusion that a strong revolutionary organisation is absolutely necessary precisely for the purpose of giving stability to the movement and of safeguarding it against the possibility of making thoughtless attacks. Precisely at the present time, when no such organisation yet exists, and when the revolutionary movement is rapidly and spontaneously growing, we already observe two opposite extremes (which, as it is to be expected, “meet”). These are: the utterly unsound Economism [concentrating on gaining economic improvements for the workers] and the preaching of moderation, and the equally unsound “excitative terror” which strives “artificially to call forth symptoms of the end of the movement, which is developing and strengthening itself, when this movement is as yet nearer to the start than the end … “[2]
Only a centralised, militant organisation that consistently carries out a Social-Democratic policy, that satisfies, so to speak, all revolutionary instincts and strivings, can safeguard the movement against making thoughtless attacks and prepare attacks that hold out the promise of success.
A further objection may be raised, that the views on organisation here expounded contradict the “democratic principle.” …
… For the present, we shall examine more closely the “principle” that the Economists advance. Everyone will probably agree that “the broad democratic principle” presupposes the two following conditions: first, full publicity, and secondly, election to all offices. It would be absurd to speak of democracy without publicity, moreover, without a publicity that is not limited to the membership of the organisation. We call the German Socialist Party a democratic organisation because all its activities are carried out publicly; even its party congresses are held in public. But no one would call an organisation democratic that is hidden from every one but its members by a veil of secrecy. What is the use, then, of advancing “the broad democratic principle” when the fundamental condition for this principle cannot be fulfilled by a secret organisation? “The broad principle” proves itself simply to be a resounding but hollow phrase. Moreover, it reveals a total lack of understanding of the urgent tasks of the moment in regard to organisation. Everyone knows how great the lack of secrecy is among the “broad” masses of our revolutionaries. We have heard the bitter complaints of B–v on this score and his absolutely just demand for a “strict selection of members” ( Rabocheye Dyelo, No. 6, p. 42). Yet, persons who boast a keen “sense of realities” urge, in a situation like this, not the strictest secrecy and the strictest (consequently, more restricted) selection of members, but “the broad democratic principle”! This is what you call being wide of the mark.
Nor is the situation any better with regard to the second attribute of democracy, the principle of election. In politically free countries [Lenin cites Germany as an example], this condition is taken for granted. …
Try to fit this picture into the frame of our autocracy! Is it conceivable in Russia for all “who accept the principles of the Party programme and render the Party all possible support” to control every action of the revolutionary working in secret? Is it possible for all to elect one of these revolutionaries to any particular office, when, in the very interests of the work, the revolutionary must conceal his identity from nine out of ten of these “all”? Reflect somewhat over the real meaning of the high-sounding phrases [about democracy] … and you will realise that “broad democracy” in Party organisation, amidst the gloom of the autocracy and the domination of gendarmerie, is nothing more than a useless and harmful toy. It is a useless toy because, in point of fact, no revolutionary organisation has ever practised, or could practise, broad democracy, however much it may have desired to do so. It is a harmful toy because any attempt to practise “the broad democratic principle” will simply facilitate the work of the police in carrying out large-scale raids, will perpetuate the prevailing primitiveness, and will divert the thoughts of the practical workers from the serious and pressing task of training themselves to become professional revolutionaries to that of drawing up detailed “paper” rules for election systems. Only abroad, where very often people with no opportunity for conducting really active work gather, could this “playing at democracy” develop here and there, especially in small groups. …
[1] Land and Freedom, the most militant of the (Populist) revolutionary groups that arose out of Narodnaya Volya before 1881
[2] Lenin here is quoting the veteran populist revolutionary Vera Zasulich.
An Unanswerable Demand: The Austro-Hungarian Ultimatum to Serbia
The Austro-Hungarian Government
(1914)
On the 31st of March, 1909, the Serbian Minister in Vienna, on the instructions of the Serbian Government, made the following declaration to the Imperial and Royal Government:
“Serbia recognizes that the fait accompli regarding Bosnia has not affected her rights, and consequently she will conform to the decisions that the Powers may take in conformity with Article 25 of the Treaty of Berlin. In deference to the advice of the Great Powers, Serbia undertakes to renounce from now onwards the attitude of protest and opposition which she has adopted with regard to the annexation since last autumn. She undertakes, moreover, to modify the direction of her policy with regard to Austria-Hungary and to live in future on good neighborly terms with the latter.”
The history of recent years, and in particular the painful events of the 28th June last, have shown the existence of a subversive movement with the object of detaching a part of the territories of Austria-Hungary from the Monarchy. The movement which had its birth under the eye of the Serbian Government has gone so far as to make itself manifest on both sides of the Serbian frontier in the shape of acts of terrorism and a series of outrages and murders.
Far from carrying out the formal undertakings contained in the declaration of the 31st March, 1909, the Royal Serbian Government has done nothing to repress these movements. It has permitted the criminal machinations of various societies and associations directed against the Monarchy, and has tolerated unrestrained language on the part of the press, the glorification of the perpetrators of outrages, and the participation of officers and functionaries in subversive agitation. It has permitted an unwholesome propaganda in public instruction, in short, it has permitted all manifestations of a nature to incite the Serbian population to hatred of the Monarchy and contempt of its institutions.
This culpable tolerance of the Royal Serbian Government had not ceased at the moment when the events of the 28th June last proved its fatal consequences to the whole world.
It results from the depositions and confessions of the criminal perpetrators of the outrage of the 28th June that the Sarajevo assassinations were planned in Belgrade; that the arms and explosives with which the murderers were provided had been given to them by Serbian officers and functionaries belonging to the Narodna Odbrana;[1] and finally that the passage into Bosnia of the criminals and their arms was organized and effected by the chiefs of the Serbian frontier service.
The above-mentioned results of the magisterial investigation do not permit the Austro-Hungarian Government to pursue any longer the attitude of expectant forbearance which they have maintained for years in the face of the machinations hatched in Belgrade, and thence propagated in the territories of the Monarchy. The results, on the contrary, impose on them the duty of putting an end to the intrigues which form a perpetual menace to the tranquillity of the Monarchy.
To achieve this end the Imperial and Royal Government see themselves compelled to demand from the Royal Serbian Government a formal assurance that they condemn this dangerous propaganda against the Monarchy; in other words, the whole series of tendencies, the ultimate aim of which is to detach from the Monarchy territories belonging to it; and that they undertake to suppress by every means this criminal and terrorist propaganda.
In order to give a formal character to this undertaking the Royal Serbian Government shall publish on the front page of their Official Journal of the 13/26 July the following declaration:
“The Royal Government of Serbia condemn the propaganda directed against Austria-Hungary–i.e. the general tendency of which the final aim is to detach from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy territories belonging to it, and they sincerely deplore the fatal consequences of these criminal proceedings.
“The Royal Government regret that Serbian officers and functionaries participated in the above-mentioned propaganda and thus compromised the good neighborly relations to which the Royal Government were solemnly pledged by their declaration of March 31,1909.
“The Royal Government, who disapprove and repudiate all idea of interfering or attempting to interfere with the destinies of the inhabitants of any part whatsoever of Austria-Hungary, consider it their duty formally to warn officers and functionaries and the whole population of the kingdom, that henceforward they will proceed with the utmost rigor against persons who may be guilty of such machinations, which they will use all their efforts to anticipate and suppress.”
This declaration shall simultaneously be communicated to the Royal Army as an order of the day by His Majesty the King and shall be published in the Official Bulletin of the Army.
The Royal Serbian Government further undertake:
1. To suppress any publication which incites to hatred and contempt of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the general tendency of which is directed against its territorial integrity;
2. To dissolve immediately the society styled “Narodna Odbrana,” to confiscate all its means of propaganda, and to proceed in the same manner against other societies and their branches in Serbia which engage in propaganda against the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The Royal Government shall take the necessary measures to prevent the societies dissolved from continuing their activities under another name and form;
3. To eliminate without delay from public instruction in Serbia, both as regards the teaching body and also as regards the methods of instruction, everything that serves, or might serve, to foment the propaganda against Austria-Hungary;
4. To remove from the military service, and from the administration in general, all officers and functionaries guilty of propaganda against the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy whose names and deeds the Austro-Hungarian Government reserve to themselves the right of communicating to the Royal Government;
5. To accept the collaboration in Serbia of representatives of the Austro-Hungarian Government for the suppression of the subversive movement directed against the territorial integrity of the Monarchy;
6. To take judicial proceedings against accessories to the plot of the 28th June who are on Serbian territory; delegates of the Austro-Hungarian Government will take part in the investigation relating thereto;
7. To proceed without delay to the arrest of Major Voija Tankositch and of the individual named Milan Ciganovitch, a Serbian State employee, who have been compromised by the results of the magisterial inquiry at Sarajevo;
8. To prevent by effective measures the cooperation of the Serbian authorities in the illicit traffic in arms and explosives across the frontier, to dismiss and punish severely the officials of the frontier service in Schabatz and Loznica guilty of having assisted the perpetrators of the Sarajevo crime by facilitating their passage across the frontier;
9. To furnish the Imperial and Royal Government with explanations regarding the unjustifiable utterances of high Serbian officials, both in Serbia and abroad, who, notwithstanding their official position, have not hesitated since the crime of 28th June to express themselves in interviews in terms of hostility to the Austro-Hungarian Government; and finally,
10. To notify the Imperial and Royal Government without delay of the execution of the measures comprised under the preceding heads.
The Austro-Hungarian Government expect the reply of the Royal Government by 6 o’clock on Saturday evening the 25th of July.
[1] “National Defense,” a prominent Serbian nationalist organization considered by the Habsburg authorities responsible for promoting anti-Austrian terrorism
[2]
The British Rationale for Entering World War I
Sir Edward Grey
(1914)
In the present crisis, it has not been possible to secure the peace of Europe; because there has been little time, and there has been a disposition–at any rate in some quarters on which I will not dwell–to force things rapidly to an issue, at any rate, to the great risk of peace, and, as we now know, the result of that is that the policy of peace, as far as the Great Powers generally are concerned, is in danger. I do not want to dwell on that, and to comment on it, and to say where the blame seems to us to lie, which powers were most in favor of peace, which were most disposed to risk or endanger peace, because I would like the House to approach this crisis in which we are now, from the point of view of British interests, British honor, and British obligations, free from all passion, as to why peace has not been preserved. …
We have great and vital interests in the independence–and integrity in the least part–of Belgium. If Belgium is compelled to submit to allow her neutrality to be violated, of course the situation is clear. Even if by agreement she admitted the violation of her neutrality, it is clear she could only do so under duress. The smaller states in that region of Europe ask but one thing. Their one desire is that they should be left alone and independent. The one thing they fear is, I think, not so much that their integrity but that their independence should be interfered with. If in this war which is before Europe the neutrality of one of those countries is violated, if the troops of one of the combatants violate its neutrality and no action be taken to resist it, at the end of the war, whatever the integrity may be, the independence will be gone.
No, Sir, if it be the case that there has been anything in the nature of an ultimatum to Belgium, asking her to compromise or violate her neutrality, whatever may have been offered to her in return, her independence is gone if that holds. If her independence goes, the independence of Holland will follow. I ask the House from the point of view of British interests, to consider what may be at stake. If France is beaten in a struggle of life or death, beaten to her knees, loses her position as a great power, becomes subordinate to the will and power of one greater than herself–consequences which I do not anticipate, because I am sure that France has the power to defend herself with all the energy and ability and patriotism which she has shown so often–still, if that were to happen, and if Belgium fell under the same dominating influence, and then Holland, and then Denmark, then would not Mr. Gladstone’s words come true, that just opposite to us there would be a common interest against the unmeasured aggrandizement of any power? …
We are going to suffer, I am afraid, terribly in this war whether we are in it or whether we stand aside. …
… I do not believe for a moment, that at the end of this war, even if we stood aside and remained aside, we should be in a position, a material position to use our force decisively to undo what had happened in the course of the war, to prevent the whole of the west of Europe opposite to us–if that has been the result of the war–falling under the domination of a single power, and I am quite sure that our moral position would be such as to have lost us all respect. …
Mobilization: A French Soldier Remembers
Henri Desagneaux
(1914)
2 August, Sunday
Mobilized as a reserve lieutenant in the Railway Transport Service, I am posted to [assigned to] Gray. At 6 in the morning, after some painful good-byes, I go to Nogentle-Perreux station. The train service is not yet organized. There are no more passenger or goods trains. The mobilization timetable is now operative but nobody at the station has any idea when a train is due.
Sad day, sad journey. At 7 A.M. a train comes, it arrives at its terminus–Troyes–at 2 P.M. I didn’t bring anything to eat, the refreshment room has already sold out. The rush of troops is beginning and consuming everything in its path. Already you find yourself cut off from the world, the newspapers don’t come here any more. But, on the other hand, how much news there is! Everyone has his bit of information to tell–and it’s true! …
At last in the afternoon I catch the first train which comes along: a magnificent row of first-class carriages (a Paris-Vienna de-luxe; all stock is mobilized) which is going no one knows precisely where, except that it is in the direction of the Front. The compartments and corridors are bursting at the seams with people from all classes of society. The atmosphere is friendly, enthusiastic, but the train is already clearly suffering from this influx from every stratum of society! The blinds are torn down, luggage-racks and mirrors broken, and the toilets emptied of their fittings; it’s (typical) French destruction.
At midnight, I am at Vesoul; nothing to eat there either; no train for Gray. I go to sleep on a bench in the refreshment room.
The most fantastic rumours are going around; everyone is seeing spies unbolting railway track or trying to blow up bridges.
The World of the Trenches: A Deadly Life
Alfons Ankenbrand
1915)
Souchez, March 11th, 1915
“So fare you well, for we must now be parting,” so run the first lines of a soldier-song which we often sang through the streets of the capital. These words are truer than ever now, and these lines are to bid farewell to you, to all my nearest and dearest, to all who wish me well or ill, and to all that I value and prize.
Our regiment has been transferred to this dangerous spot, Souchez. No end of blood has already flowed down this hill. Aweek ago the 142nd attacked and took four trenches from the French. It is to hold these trenches that we have been brought here. There is something uncanny about this hill-position. Already, times without number, other battalions of our regiment have been ordered here in support, and each time the company came back with a loss of twenty, thirty or more men. In the days when we had to stick it out here before, we had 22 killed and 27 wounded. Shells roar, bullets whistle; no dug-outs, or very bad ones; mud, clay, filth, shell-holes so deep that one could bathe in them.
This letter has been interrupted no end of times. Shells began to pitch close to us–great English 12-inch ones–and we had to take refuge in a cellar. One such shell struck the next house and buried four men, who were got out from the ruins horribly mutilated. I saw them and it was ghastly!
Everybody must be prepared now for death in some form or other. Two cemeteries have been made up here, the losses have been so great. I ought not to write that to you, but I do so all the same, because the newspapers have probably given you quite a different impression. They tell only of our gains and say nothing about the blood that has been shed, of the cries of agony that never cease. The newspaper doesn’t give any description either of how the “heroes” are laid to rest, though it talks about “heroes’ graves” and writes poems and such-like about them. Certainly in Lens I have attended funeral-parades where a number of dead were buried in one large grave with pomp and circumstance. But up here it is pitiful the way one throws the dead bodies out of the trench and lets them lie there, or scatters dirt over the remains of those which have been torn to pieces by shells.
I look upon death and call upon life. I have not accomplished much in my short life, which has been chiefly occupied with study. I have commended my soul to the Lord God. It bears His seal and is altogether His. Now I am free to dare anything. My future life belongs to God, my present one to the Fatherland, and I myself still possess happiness and strength.
Good Soldier Schweik Describes the Austrian Officer Corps
Jaroslav Hasek
(1921)
Apparently by way of encouraging the rank and file as a whole, he asked where the young recruit came from, how old he was, and whether he had a watch. The young recruit had a watch, but as he thought that he was going to get another one from the old gentleman, he said he hadn’t got one, whereupon the aged general gave a fatuous smile, such as Franz Josef used to put on … and said, “That’s fine, that’s fine,’” whereupon he honored a corporal, who was standing near, by asking him whether his wife was well.
“Beg to report, sir,” bawled the corporal, “I’m not married.”
Whereupon the general, with a patronizing smile, repeated, “That’s fine, that’s fine.”
Then the general, lapsing still further into senile infantility, asked Captain Sagner to show him how the troops number off in twos from the right, and after a while, he heard them yelling, “One–two, one–two, one–two.”
The aged general was very fond of this. At home he had two orderlies, and he used to line them up in front of him and make them number off: “One–two, one–two.”
Austria had lots of generals like this.
The Homefront in Vienna
Anna Eisenmenger
(1918)
Ten dekagrammes [3 1/2 ounces] of horse-flesh per head are to be given out to-day for the week. The cavalry horses held in reserve by the military authorities are being slaughtered for lack of fodder, and the people of Vienna are for a change to get a few mouthfuls of meat of which they have so long been deprived. Horse-flesh! I should like to know whether my instinctive repugnance to horse-flesh as food is personal, or whether my dislike is shared by many other housewives. My loathing of it is based, I believe, not on a physical but on a psychological prejudice.
I overcame my repugnance, rebuked myself for being sentimental, and left the house. A soft, steady rain was falling, from which I tried to protect myself with galoshes, waterproof, and umbrella. As I left the house before seven o’clock and the meat distribution did not begin until nine o’clock, I hoped to get well to the front of the queue.
No sooner had I reached the neighbourhood of the big market hall than I was instructed by the police to take a certain direction. I estimated the crowd waiting here for a meagre midday meal at two thousand at least. Hundreds of women had spent the night here in order to be among the first and make sure of getting their bit of meat. Many had brought with them improvised seats–a little box or a bucket turned upside down. No one seemed to mind the rain, although many were already wet through. They passed the time chattering, and the theme was the familiar one: What have you had to eat? What are you going to eat? One could scent an atmosphere of mistrust in these conversations: they were all careful not to say too much or to betray anything that might get them into trouble.
At length the sale began. Slowly, infinitely slowly, we moved forward. The most determined, who had spent the night outside the gates of the hall, displayed their booty to the waiting crowd: a ragged, quite freshly slaughtered piece of meat with the characteristic yellow fat. [Others] alarmed those standing at the back by telling them that there was only a very small supply of meat and that not half the people waiting would get a share of it. The crowd became very uneasy and impatient, and before the police on guard could prevent it, those standing in front organized an attack on the hall which the salesmen inside were powerless to repel. Everyone seized whatever he could lay his hands on, and in a few moments all the eatables had vanished. In the confusion stands were overturned, and the police forced back the aggressors and closed the gates. The crowds waiting outside, many of whom had been there all night and were soaked through, angrily demanded their due, whereupon the mounted police made a little charge, provoking a wild panic and much screaming and cursing. At length I reached home, depressed and disgusted, with a broken umbrella and only one galosh.
We housewives have during the last four years grown accustomed to standing in queues; we have also grown accustomed to being obliged to go home with empty hands and still emptier stomachs. Only very rarely do those who are sent away disappointed give cause for police intervention. On the other hand, it happens more and more frequently that one of the pale, tired women who have been waiting for hours collapses from exhaustion. The turbulent scenes which occurred to-day inside and outside the large market hall seemed to me perfectly natural. In my dejected mood the patient apathy with which we housewives endure seemed to me blameworthy and incomprehensible.
A British Feminist Analyzes the Impact of the War on Women
Helena Swanwick
(1916)
How has the war affected women? How will it affect them? Women, as half the human race, are compelled to take their share of evil and good with men, the other half. The destruction of property, the increase of taxation, the rise of prices, the devastation of beautiful things in nature and art–these are felt by men as well as by women. Some losses doubtless appeal to one or the other sex with peculiar poignancy, but it would be difficult to say whose sufferings are the greater, though there can be no doubt at all that men get an exhilaration out of war which is denied to most women. When they see pictures of soldiers encamped in the ruins of what was once a home, amidst the dead bodies of gentle milch cows, most women would be thinking too insistently of the babies who must die for need of milk to entertain the exhilaration which no doubt may be felt at “the good work of our guns.” When they read of miles upon miles of kindly earth made barren, the hearts of men may be wrung to think of wasted toil, but to women the thought suggests a simile full of an even deeper pathos; they will think of the millions of young lives destroyed, each one having cost the travail and care of a mother, and of the millions of young bodies made barren by the premature death of those who should have been their mates. The millions of widowed maidens in the coming generation will have to turn their thoughts away from one particular joy and fulfilment of life. While men in war give what is, at the present stage of the world’s development, the peculiar service of men, let them not forget that in rendering that very service they are depriving a corresponding number of women of the opportunity of rendering what must, at all stages of the world’s development, be the peculiar service of women. After the war, men will go on doing what has been regarded as men’s work; women, deprived of their own, will also have to do much of what has been regarded as men’s work. These things are going to affect women profoundly, and one hopes that the reconstruction of society is going to be met by the whole people–men and women–with a sympathetic understanding of each other’s circumstances. When what are known as men’s questions are discussed, it is generally assumed that the settlement of them depends upon men only; when what are known as women’s questions are discussed, there is never any suggestion that they can be settled by women independently of men. Of course they cannot. But, then, neither can “men’s questions” be rightly settled so. In fact, life would be far more truly envisaged if we dropped the silly phrases “men’s and women’s questions”; for, indeed, there are no such matters, and all human questions affect all humanity.
Now, for the right consideration of human questions, it is necessary for humans to understand each other. This catastrophic war will do one good thing if it opens our eyes to real live women as they are, as we know them in workaday life, but as the politician and the journalist seem not to have known them. When war broke out, a Labour newspaper, in the midst of the news of men’s activities, found space to say that women would feel the pinch, because their supply of attar of roses would be curtailed. It struck some women like a blow in the face. When a great naval engagement took place, the front page of a progressive daily was taken up with portraits of the officers and men who had won distinction, and the back page with portraits of simpering mannequins in extravagantly fashionable hats; not frank advertisement, mind you, but exploitation of women under the guise of news supposed to be peculiarly interesting to the feeble-minded creatures. When a snapshot was published of the first women ticket collectors in England, the legend underneath the picture ran “Super-women”! It took the life and death of Edith Cavell[1] to open the eyes of the Prime Minister to the fact that there were thousands of women giving life and service to their country. “A year ago we did not know it,” he said, in the House of Commons. Is that indeed so? Surely in our private capacities as ordinary citizens, we knew not only of the women whose portraits are in the picture papers (mostly pretty ladies of the music hall or of society), but also of the toiling millions upon whose courage and ability and endurance and goodness of heart the great human family rests. Only the politicians did not know, because their thoughts were too much engrossed with faction fights to think humanly; only the journalists would not write of them, because there was more money in writing the columns which are demanded by the advertisers of feminine luxuries. Anyone who has conducted a woman’s paper knows the steady commercial pressure for that sort of “copy.” …
The Need for Production
It is often forgotten that for full prosperity a country needs to be producing as much wealth as possible, consistently with the health, freedom, and happiness of its people. To arrive at this desired result, it is quite clear that as many people as possible should be employed productively, and it is one of the unhappy results of our economic anarchy that employers have found it profitable to have a large reserve class of unemployed and that wage-earners have been driven to try and diminish their own numbers and to restrict their own output. To keep women out of the “labour market” (by artificial restrictions, such as the refusal to work with them, or the refusal to allow them to be trained, or the refusal to adapt conditions to their health requirements) is in truth anti-social. But it is easy to see how such antisocial restrictions have been forced upon the workers, and it is futile to blame them. A way must be found out of industrial war before we can hope that industry will be carried on thriftily. Men and women must take counsel together and let the experience of the war teach them how to solve economic problems by co-operation rather than conflict. Women have been increasingly conscious of the satisfaction to be got from economic independence, of the sweetness of earned bread, of the dreary depression of subjection. They have felt the bitterness of being “kept out”; they are feeling the exhilaration of being “brought in.” They are ripe for instruction and organisation in working for the good of the whole. …
Readjustment of Employment
Most people were astonished in 1914 at the rapidity with which industry and social conditions adapted themselves to the state of war, and there are those who argue that, because the fears of very widespread and continued misery at the outbreak of the war were not justified, we need not have any anxiety about any widespread and continued misery at the establishment of peace. Certainly depression or panic are worse than useless, and a serene and cheerful heart will help to carry the nation beyond difficulties. But comfortable people must beware of seeming to bear the sorrows of others with cheerfulness, and a lack of preparation for easily foreseen contingencies will not be forgiven by those who suffer from carelessness or procrastination. We know quite well what some, at least, of our problems are going to be, and the fool’s paradise would lead straight to revolution.
It would be wise to remember that the dislocation of industry at the outbreak of the war was easily met; first, because the people thrown out by the cessation of one sort of work were easily absorbed by the increase of another sort; second, because there was ample capital and credit in hand; third, because the State was prepared to shoulder many risks and to guarantee stability; fourth, because there was an untapped reservoir of women’s labour to take the place of men’s. The problems after the war will be different, greater, and more lasting. …
Because it will obviously be impossible for all to find work quickly (not to speak of the right kind of work), there is almost certain to be an outcry for the restriction of work in various directions, and one of the first cries (if we may judge from the past) will be to women: “Back to the Home!” This cry will be raised whether the women have a home or not. … We must understand the unimpeachable right of the man who has lost his work and risked his life for his country, to find decent employment, decent wages and conditions, on his return to civil life. We must also understand the enlargement and enhancement of life which women feel when they are able to live by their own productive work, and we must realise that to deprive women of the right to live by their work is to send them back to a moral imprisonment (to say nothing of physical and intellectual starvation), of which they have become now for the first time fully conscious. And we must realise the exceeding danger that conscienceless employers may regard women’s labour as preferable, owing to its cheapness and its docility, and that women, if unsympathetically treated by their male relatives and fellow workers, may be tempted to continue to be cheap and docile in the hands of those who have no desire except that of exploiting them and the community. The kind of man who likes “to keep women in their place” may find he has made slaves who will be used by his enemies against him. Men need have no fear of free women; it is the slaves and the parasites who are a deadly danger.
The demand for equal wage for equal work has been hotly pressed by men since the war began, and it is all to the good so far as it goes. But most men are still far from realising the solidarity of their interests with those of women in all departments of life, and are still too placidly accepting the fact that women are sweated over work which is not the same as that of men. They don’t realise yet that starved womanhood means starved manhood, and they don’t enough appreciate the rousing and infectious character of a generous attitude on the part of men, who, in fighting the women’s battles unselfishly and from a love of right, would stimulate the women to corresponding generosity. There are no comrades more staunch and loyal than women, where men have engaged their truth and courage. But men must treat them as comrades; they must no longer think only of how they can “eliminate female labour”; they must take the women into their trade unions and other organisations, and they must understand that the complexities of a woman’s life are not of her invention or choosing, but are due to her function as mother of men.
The sexual side of a woman’s life gravely affects the economic side, and we can never afford to overlook this. As mothers and home-makers women are doing work of the highest national importance and economic value, but this value is one which returns to the nation as a whole and only in small and very uncertain part to the women themselves. The fact that a woman is a wife too much engrossed with faction fights to think humanly; only the journalists would not write of them, because there was more money in writing the columns and mother diminishes her value in the “labour market,” and even the fact that she is liable to become a wife and mother has done so in the past. Unless men are prepared to socialise the responsibilities of parenthood, one does not see how women’s labour is ever to be organized for the welfare of the whole, nor does one see how women are to perform their priceless functions of motherhood as well as possible if they are to be penalised for them in the future as they have been in the past. …
Enfranchisement and Emancipation
The course and conduct of the war, throwing upon women greater and greater responsibilities, bringing home to them how intimately their own lives and all they hold dear and sacred are affected by the government of the country, will tend greatly to strengthen and enlarge their claim for a share in the government. The growth of what was known as “militancy,” in the last few years of the British suffrage movement, was the disastrous result of the long denial of justice, the acrid fruit of government which had become coercion, because it was no longer by consent. Now that, for two years past, the women of Great Britain have made common cause with their men in this time of stress, the heat of the internal conflict has died down, and one hears on all sides that prominent anti-suffragists have become ardent suffragists, while others have declared their resolve at any rate never again to oppose the enfranchisement of women. The battle of argument was won long ago, but we are not, as a people, much given to theory; custom has a very strong hold over us. The shock of war has loosened that hold, and now almost every one who used to oppose, when asked whether women should be given votes, would reply: “Why not? They have earned them!” I cannot admit that representation is a thing that people should be called upon to “earn,” nor that, if essential contribution to the nation is to count as “earning,” the women have not earned the vote for just as long as the men. …
What the war has put in a fresh light, so that even the dullest can see, is that if the State may claim women’s lives and those of their sons and husbands and lovers, if it may absorb all private and individual life, as at present, then indeed the condition of those who have no voice in the State is a condition of slavery, and Englishmen don’t feel quite happy at the thought that their women are still slaves, while their Government is saying they are waging a war of liberation. Many women had long ago become acutely aware of their ignominious position, but the jolt of the war has made many more aware of it. …
[1] A British nurse executed by the Germans as an alleged spy
A New Diplomacy: The Fourteen Points
Woodrow Wilson
(1918)
1. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at. Diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.
2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters.
3. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions.
4. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced.
5. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims. In determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the Government whose title is to be determined.
6. The evacuation of all Russian territory.
7. Belgium must be evacuated and restored. Without this healing act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired.
8. All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored; and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine should be righted.
9. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.
10. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development.
11. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be evacuated; occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea; and international guarantees of the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of the several Balkan states should be entered into.
12. Nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an unmolested opportunity of autonomous development, and the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations.
13. An independent Polish state should be erected which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea.
14. A general association of nations must be formed, for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.
The April Theses: A Blueprint for Revolution
Vladimir I. Lenin
(1917)
I did not arrive in Petrograd until the night of April 3, and therefore at the meeting on April 4 I could, of course, deliver the report on the tasks of the revolutionary proletariat only on my own behalf, and with reservations as to insufficient preparation.
The only thing I could do to make things easier for myself–and for honest opponents–was to prepare the thesesin writing. I read them out, and gave the text to Comrade Tsereteli. I read them twice very slowly: first at a meeting of Bolsheviks and then at a meeting of both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
I publish these personal theses of mine with only the briefest explanatory notes, which were developed in far greater detail in the report.
Theses
1) In our attitude towards the war, which under the new government of Lvov and Co.[1] unquestionably remains on Russia’s part a predatory imperialist war owing to the capitalist nature of that government, not the slightest concession to “revolutionary defencism” is permissible.
The class-conscious proletariat can give its consent to a revolutionary war, which would really justify revolu tionary defencism, only on condition: (a) that the power pass to the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants aligned with the proletariat; (b) that all annexations be renounced in deed and not in word; (c) that a complete break be effected in actual fact with all capitalist interests. …
The most widespread campaign for this view must be organised in the army at the front. …
2) The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution–which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie–to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants.
This transition is characterised, on the one hand, by a maximum of legally recognised rights (Russia is now the freest of all the belligerent countries in the world); on the other, by the absence of violence towards the masses, and, finally, by their unreasoning trust in the government of capitalists, those worst enemies of peace and socialism.
This peculiar situation demands of us an ability to adapt ourselves to the special conditions of Party work among unprecedentedly large masses of proletarians who have just awakened to political life.
3) No support for the Provisional Government; the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear, particularly of those relating to the renunciation of annexations. Exposure in place of the impermissible, illusion-breeding “demand” that this government, a government of capitalists, should cease to be an imperialist government.
4) Recognition of the fact that in most of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies our Party is in a minority, so far a small minority, as against a bloc of all the pettybourgeois opportunist elements, from the Popular Socialists and the Socialist-Revolutionaries … who have yielded to the influence of the bourgeoisie and spread that influence among the proletariat.
The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government, and that therefore our task is, as long as this government yields to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses.
As long as we are in the minority we carry on the work of criticising and exposing errors and at the same time we preach the necessity of transferring the entire state power to the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, so that the people may overcome their mistakes by experience.
5) Not a parliamentary republic–to return a parliamentary republic from the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies would be a retrograde step–but a Republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies throughout the country, from top to bottom.
Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy.
The salaries of all officials, all of whom are elective and displaceable at any time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker.
6) The weight of emphasis in the agrarian programme to be shifted to the Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ Deputies.
Confiscation of all landed estates.
Nationalisation of alllands in the country, the land to be disposed of by the local Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. …
7) The immediate amalgamation of all banks in the country into a single national bank, and the institution of control over it by the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies.
8) It is not our immediate task to “introduce” socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the controlof the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies. …
[1] The liberal government proclaimed after the fall of tsarism
Revolutionary Peace is Decreed
Vladimir I. Lenin
(1917)
The Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, created by the Revolution of October 24-25 (November 6-7) and supported by the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, proposes to all combatant peoples and to their governments to begin immediate negotiations for an honest democratic peace.
The Government regards as an honest or democratic peace, which is yearned for by the overwhelming majority of the workers and the toiling classes of all the fighting countries, who are exhausted, tormented and tortured by the War, which the Russian workers and peasants demanded most definitely and insistently after the overthrow of the Tsarist monarchy,–an immediate peace without annexations (i.e., without the seizure of foreign land, without the forcible taking over of foreign nationalities) and without contributions.
Such a peace the Government of Russia proposes to all the fighting peoples to conclude immediately, expressing its readiness to take without the least delay immediately all the decisive steps, up to the final confirmation of all the conditions of such a peace by the authorized assemblies of peoples’ representatives of all countries and all nations.
As annexation or seizure of alien lands the Government understands, in conformity with the conception of justice, of democracy in general and of the toiling classes in particular, any addition to a large or strong state of a small or weak nationality, without the precisely, clearly and voluntarily expressed agreement and desire of this nationality, irrespective of when this forcible annexation took place, and also irrespective of how advanced or how backward is the nation which is violently annexed or violently held within the frontiers of another state. Irrespective, finally, of whether this nation lives in Europe or in faraway transoceanic countries.
If any nation is kept within the frontiers of another state by violence, if it is not granted the right, despite its expressed desire,–regardless of whether this desire is expressed in the press, in people’s meetings, in the decisions of parties or in riots and uprisings against national oppression,–to vote freely, with the troops of the annexationist or stronger nation withdrawn, to decide without the least compulsion the question of the form of its state existence, then the holding of such a nation is annexation, i.e., seizure and violence.
To continue this war in order to decide how to divide between strong and rich nations the weak nationalities which they have seized, the Government considers the greatest crime against humanity; and it solemnly avows its decision immediately to sign conditions of peace which will stop this War on the terms which have been outlined, equally just for all nationalities, without exception.
Along with this the Government states that it does not regard the above mentioned conditions of peace as ultimative, i.e., it is willing to consider any other conditions of peace, insisting only that these be presented as quickly as possible by one of the fighting countries, and on the fullest clarity, on the absolute exclusion of any ambiguity and secrecy in proposing conditions of peace.
The Government abolishes secret diplomacy, announcing its firm intention to carry on all negotiations quite openly before the whole people, proceeding immediately to the full publication of the secret treaties, ratified or concluded by the Government of landlords and capitalists between February and October 25, 1917. All the contents of these secret treaties, inasmuch as they are directed, as usually happened, toward the obtaining of advantages and privileges for Russian landlords and capitalists, toward the maintenance or the increase of Great Russian annexations, the Government declares unconditionally and immediately annulled.
Turning with its proposal to the Governments and peoples of all countries to begin immediately open negotiations for the conclusion of peace, the Government expresses its readiness to carry on these negotiations by means of written communications, by telegraph, by means of negotiations between representatives of different countries or at a conference of such representatives. To facilitate such negotiations the Government will nominate its plenipotentiary representative in neutral countries.
The Government proposes to all Governments and peoples of all combatant countries immediately to conclude an armistice, considering it desirable that this armistice should be concluded for a period of not less than three months, in the course of which time it would be quite possible both to complete negotiations for peace with the participation of representatives of all nationalities or nations which have been drawn into the War or have been forced to participate in it and to convoke authoritative assemblies of peoples’ representatives of all countries for the final confirmation of the peace conditions.
Turning with these proposals of peace to the Governments and the peoples of all the combatant countries, the Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of Russia also appeals especially to the class-conscious workers of the three leading nations of humanity and the largest states which are participating in the war, England, France and Germany. The workers of these countries rendered the greatest services to the cause of progress and socialism, and the great examples of the Chartist Movement in England, a number of revolutions of world significance, carried out by the French proletariat, finally the heroic struggle against the Exceptional Law in Germany and the long, stubborn, disciplined work of creating mass proletarian organizations in Germany (which was a model for the workers of the whole world),–all these examples of proletarian heroism and historic creation serve us as a guaranty that the workers of the above mentioned countries understand the problems which now fall on them, of liberating humanity from the horrors of war and its consequences, that these workers by their decisive and devotedly energetic activity will help us to bring successfully to its end the cause of peace and, along with this, the cause of freeing the toiling and exploited masses of the population from slavery and exploitation of every kind.
PRESIDENT OF THE SOVIET OF PEOPLES’ COMMISSARS,
VLADIMIR ULIANOV-LENIN.
The Bolshevik Seizure of Power at the Local Level
Alexis Babine
(1917)
October 27, 1917. An appeal has been published in the local papers to all good citizens to resist the expected Bolshevik attempt to overthrow the existing government in Saratov. Owing to the unpopularity of Kerensky and his rule and to the physical and moral flabbiness of our Christian citizens, only 150 persons are said to have answered the call to defend the city and to have entrenched themselves in the city duma building.
October 28, 1917. Some patriot has written on one of the macadam sidewalks of the Linden Park in chalk: “Down with the Jew Kerensky.” It is rumored that the soldiers are planning a Jewish pogrom. Last night and the night before, crowds were gathering around the newsstands awaiting and discussing the latest telegrams. The crowds behaved in an orderly way. This morning streets were full of dirty-looking workers armed with foreign muskets, and of armed soldiers. Soldiers are as opposed to Kerensky as they are to a new monarch. My landlady’s lawyer reports that all city banks are closed. She sent her jewelry and other valuables to some poor relations of hers for safekeeping. As a local millionaire, she fears an attack from the Bolshevik mob. She has no weapons and hardly a decent hatchet in the house. The front door was locked for the day, and an order has been given to the janitor to keep the iron yard gate securely barred. In case of need the house could make a good fortress and be defended against any number of the common rabble by spirited, well-armed inhabitants. …
November 15, 1917. The Soviet’s general and indiscriminate amnesty of all political and criminal prisoners, with all jails thrown open and court records burned, has filled the country with dangerous elements. The younger and the more enterprising jailbirds immediately after their liberation joined the Communist party. In many cases they were given responsible administrative positions and furnished the Bolsheviks with the fittest possible material for fighting and exterminating the enemies of the party, i.e., all idle and flabby lovers of law and order.
December 17, 1917. A peaceful demonstration was announced yesterday by various city and private organizations in favor of the Constituent Assembly, to take place today. The Bolsheviks replied by sponsoring an armed demonstration, turning out all their artillery and infantry, which have just defiled past our house, carrying red flags with the usual inscriptions and howling revolutionary songs as far as today’s bitter cold allowed. Many ugly faces turned up toward the upper story of our house. One armed scoundrel shook his fist at the spectators at a window, and another made a show of slipping in a cartridge, with a suggestive gesture.
The peaceful demonstration, under the circumstances, was indefinitely postponed.
Practical Advice for Dealing with Class Enemies
Vladimir I. Lenin
(1918)
The Paris Commune gave a great example of how to combine initiative, independence, freedom of action and vigour from below with voluntary centralism free from stereotyped forms. Our Soviets are following the same road. But they are still “shy,” they have not yet got into their stride, have not yet “bitten into” their new, great, creative task of building the socialist system. The Soviets must set to work more boldly and display greater initiative. Every “commune,” every factory, every village, every consumers’ society, every committee of supply, must compete with its neighbours as a practical organiser of accounting and control of labour and distribution of products. The programme of this accounting and control is simple, clear and intelligible to all; it is: everyone to have bread; everyone to have sound footwear and whole clothing; everyone to have warm dwellings; everyone to work conscientiously; not a single rogue (including those who shirk their work) should be allowed to be at liberty, but kept in prison, or serve his sentence of compulsory labour of the hardest kind; not a single rich man who violates the laws and regulations of socialism to be allowed to escape the fate of the crook, which should, in justice, be the fate of the rich man. “He who does not work, neither shall he eat”–this is thepractical commandment of socialism. This is how things should be organised practically. These are the practicalsuccesses our “communes” and our worker- and peasant-organisers should be proud of. And this appliesparticularly to the organisers among the intellectuals (particularly, because they are too much, far too much in the habit of being proud of their general instructions and resolutions).
Thousands of practical forms and methods of accounting and controlling the rich, the rogues and the idlers should be devised and put to a practical test by the communes themselves, by small units in town and country. Variety is a guarantee of vitality here, a pledge of success in achieving the single common aim–to cleanse the land of Russia of all sorts of harmful insects, of crook-fleas, of bedbugs–the rich, and so on and so forth. In one place half a score of rich, a dozen crooks, half a dozen workers who shirk their work (in the hooligan manner in which many compositors in Petrograd, particularly in the Party printing shops, shirk their work) will be put in prison. In another place they will be put to cleaning latrines. In a third place they will be provided with “yellow tickets” after they have served their time, so that all the people shall have them under surveillance, as harmful persons, until they reform. In a fourth place, one out of every ten idlers will be shot on the spot. In a fifth place mixed methods may be adopted, and by probational release, for example, the rich, the bourgeois intellectuals, the crooks and hooligans who are corrigible will be given an opportunity to reform quickly. The more variety there will be, the better and richer will be our general experience, the more certain and rapid will be the success of socialism, and the easier will it be for practice to devise–for only practice can devise–the best methods and means of struggle.
In what commune, in what district of a large town, in what factory and in what village are there no starving people, no unemployed, no idle rich, no scoundrelly lackeys of the bourgeoisie, saboteurs who call themselves intellectuals? Where has most been done to raise the productivity of labour, to build good new houses for the poor, to put the poor in the houses of the rich, to regularly provide a bottle of milk for every child of every poor family? It is on these points that competition should unfold itself between the communes, communities, producers-consumers’ societies and associations, and Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. This is the work in which organising talent should reveal itself in practice and be promoted to work in the administration of the state. There is a great deal of this talent among the people. It is merely suppressed. It must be given an opportunity to display itself. It, and it alone, with the support of the masses, can save Russia and save the cause of socialism.
Primary Sources – Unit Sixteen – The Age of Anxiety
Impressionism Defined
Emile Blemont (1876)
What is an Impressionist painter? We have been given no satisfactory definition, but it seems that the artists who group themselves, or who are grouped, under this name pursue a similar end through different methods of work. Their aim is to reproduce with absolute sincerity, without contrivance or palliation, by a treatment simple and broad, the impression awakened in them by the aspects of reality.
Art is not for them a minute and punctilious imitation of what was once called “the beauties of nature.” They are not concerned to reproduce more or less slavishly beings and things, or laboriously to reconstruct, minor detail by minor detail, a general picture. They do not imitate; they translate, they interpret, they apply themselves to extricate the consequence of the many lines and colors that the eye perceives in a view.
They are not analysts but synthesizers, and we believe that they are right in this; for if analysis is the scientific method par excellence, synthesis is the true method of operation for art. They have no other law than the necessary relations of things; they think, like Diderot, that the idea of beauty rests in the perception of these relations. And, as there are perhaps no two men in the world who perceive exactly the same relations in the same object, they see no reason to change, according to this or that convention, their personal and direct sensation of things.
In principle, in theory, we believe therefore that we can approve them wholeheartedly.
In practice, it is another matter. One does not always do what one wants to do, as it should be done; one does not always attain the end one sees clearly.
God Is Dead, the Victim of Science
Friedrich Nietzsche (1882)
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, “I seek God! I seek God!” As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Why, did he get lost? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances.
“Whither is God?” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him–you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever will be born after us–for the sake of this deed he will be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.”
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke and went out. “I come too early,” he said then; “my time has not come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering–it has not yet reached the ears of man. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars–and yet they have done it themselves.”
It has been related further that on that same day the madman entered divers churches and there sang hisrequiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said to have replied each time, “What are the churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?” …
The Interpretation of Dreams: Psychoanalysis Is Born
Sigmund Freud (1900)
An intelligent and refined young woman, who in real life is distinctly reserved, one of those people of whom one says that “still waters run deep,” relates the following dream: ” I dreamt that I arrived at the market too late, and could get nothing from either the butcher or the greengrocer woman. “ Surely a guileless dream, but as it has not the appearance of a real dream I induce her to relate it in detail. Her report then runs as follows: She goes to the market with her cook, who carries the basket. The butcher tells her, after she has asked him for something: “That is no longer to be obtained,” and wants to give her something else, with the remark: “That is good, too.” She refuses, and goes to the greengrocer woman. The latter tries to sell her a peculiar vegetable, which is bound up in bundles, and is black in colour. She says: “I don’t know that, I won’t take it.”
The connection of the dream with the preceding day is simple enough. She had really gone to the market too late, and had been unable to buy anything. The meatshop was already closed, comes into one’s mind as a description of the experience. But wait, is not that a very vulgar phrase which–or rather, the opposite of which–denotes a certain neglect with regard to a man’s clothing?[1] The dreamer has not used these words; she has perhaps avoided them; but let us look for the interpretation of the details contained in the dream.
When in a dream something has the character of a spoken utterance–that is, when it is said or heard, not merely thought–and the distinction can usually be made with certainty–then it originates in the utterances of waking life, which have, of course, been treated as raw material, dismembered, and slightly altered, and above all removed from their context. In the work of interpretation we may take such utterances as our starting-point. Where, then, does the butcher’s statement, That is no longer to be obtained, come from? From myself; I had explained to her some days previously “that the oldest experiences of childhood are no longer to be obtained as such, but will be replaced in the analysis by ‘transferences’ and dreams.” Thus, I am the butcher; and she refuses to accept these transferences to the present of old ways of thinking and feeling. Where does her dream utterance, I don’t know that, I won’t take it, come from? For the purposes of the analysis this has to be dissected. “I don’t know that” she herself had said to her cook, with whom she had a dispute the previous day, but she had then added: Behave yourself decently. Here a displacement is palpable; of the two sentences which she spoke to her cook, she included the insignificant one in her dream; but the suppressed sentence, “Behave yourself decently!” alone fits in with the rest of the dream-content. One might use the words to a man who was making indecent overtures, and had neglected “to close his meat-shop.” That we have really hit upon the trail of the interpretation is proved by its agreement with the allusions made by the incident with the greengrocer woman. A vegetable which is sold tied up in bundles (a longish vegetable, as she subsequently adds), and is also black: what can this be but a dreamcombination of asparagus and black radish? I need not interpret asparagus to the initiated; and the other vegetable, too (think of the exclamation: “Blacky, save yourself!”), seems to me to point to the sexual theme at which we guessed in the beginning, when we wanted to replace the story of the dream by “the meat-shop is closed.” We are not here concerned with the full meaning of the dream; so much is certain, that it is full of meaning and by no means guileless.[2]
[1] Its meaning is “Your fly is undone.” (Trans.)
[2] For the curious, I may remark that behind the dream there is hidden a phantasy of indecent, sexually provoking conduct on my part, and of repulsion on the part of the lady. If this interpretation should seem preposterous, I would remind the reader of the numerous cases in which physicians have been made the object of such charges by hysterical women, with whom the same phantasy has not appeared in a distorted form as a dream, but has become undisguisedly conscious and delusional.–With this dream the patient began her psychoanalytical treatment. It was only later that I learned that with this dream she repeated the initial trauma in which her neurosis originated, and since then I have noticed the same behaviour in other persons who in their childhood were victims of sexual attacks, and now, as it were, wish in their dreams for them to be repeated. [Freud's footnote]
Science and Art Compared
Max Weber (1905)
In the field of science only he who is devoted solelyto the work at hand has “personality.” And this holds not only for the field of science; we know of no great artist who has ever done anything but serve his work and only his work. As far as his art is concerned, even with a personality of Goethe’s rank, it has been detrimental to take the liberty of trying to make his “life” into a work of art. And even if one doubts this, one has to be a Goethe in order to dare permit oneself such liberty. Everybody will admit at least this much: that even with a man like Goethe, who appears once in a thousand years, this liberty did not go unpaid for. In politics matters are not different, but we shall not discuss that today. In the field of science, however, the man who makes himself the impresario of the subject to which he should be devoted, and steps upon the stage and seeks to legitimate himself through “experience,” asking: How can I prove that I am something other than a mere “specialist” and how can I manage to say something in form or in content that nobody else has ever said?– such a man is no “personality.” Today such conduct is a crowd phenomenon, and it always makes a petty impression and debases the one who is thus concerned. Instead of this, an inner devotion to the task, and that alone, should lift the scientist to the height and dignity of the subject he pretends to serve. And in this it is not different with the artist.
In contrast with these preconditions which scientific work shares with art, science has a fate that profoundly distinguishes it from artistic work. Scientific work is chained to the course of progress; whereas in the realm of art there is no progress in the same sense. It is not true that the work of art of a period that has worked out new technical means, or, for instance, the laws of perspective, stands therefore artistically higher than a work of art devoid of all knowledge of those means and laws–if its form does justice to the material, that is, if its object has been chosen and formed so that it could be artistically mastered without applying those conditions and means. A work of art which is genuine “fulfilment” is never surpassed; it will never be antiquated. Individuals may differ in appreciating the personal significance of works of art, but no one will ever be able to say of such a work that it is “outstripped by another work which is also ‘fulfilment.’”
In science, each of us knows that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty, fifty years. That is the fate to which science is subjected; it is the very meaning of scientific work, to which it is devoted in a quite specific sense, as compared with other spheres of culture for which in general the same holds. Every scientific “fulfilment” raises new “questions”; it asks to be “surpassed” and outdated. Whoever wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this fact. Scientific works certainly can last as “gratifications” because of their artistic quality, or they may remain important as a means of training. Yet they will be surpassed scientifically–let that be repeated–for it is our common fate and, more, our common goal. We cannot work without hoping that others will advance further than we have. In principle, this progress goes on ad infinitum. And with this we come to inquire into the meaning of science. For, after all, it is not self-evident that something subordinate to such a law is sensible and meaningful in itself. Why does one engage in doing something that in reality never comes, and never can come, to an end? …
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the “disenchantment of the world.” Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherlines of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental, nor is it accidental that today only within the smallest and intimate circles, in personal human situations, in pianissimo, that something is pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic pneuma, which in former times swept through the great communities like a firebrand, welding them together. If we attempt to force and to “invent” a monumental style in art, such miserable monstrosities are produced as the many monuments of the last twenty years. If one tries intellectually to construe new religions without a new and genuine prophecy, then, in an inner sense, something similar will result, but with still worse effects. And academic prophecy, finally, will create only fanatical sects but never a genuine community.
To the person who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man, one must say: may he rather return silently, without the usual publicity build-up of renegades, but simply and plainly. The arms of the old churches are opened widely and compassionately for him. After all, they do not make it hard for him. …
A Scientist Devotes Her Life to Her Work
Marya Sklodowska (1893)
I have already rented my room on the sixth floor in a clean and decent street which suits me very well. Tell Father that in that place where I was going to take a room there was nothing free, and that I am very satisfied with this room. It should not be cold here, especially as the floor is of wood and not tiles. Compared to my last year’s room it is a veritable palace.
I hardly need to say that I am delighted to be back in Paris. It was very hard for me to separate again from Father, but I could see that he was well, very lively, and that he could do without me–especially as you are living in Warsaw. As for me, it is my whole life that is at stake. It seemed to me, therefore, that I could stay on here without having remorse on my conscience.
Just now I am studying mathematics unceasingly, so as to be up to date when the courses begin. I have three mornings a week taken by lessons with one of my French comrades who is preparing for the examination I have just passed. Tell Father that I am getting used to this work, that it does not tire me as much as before, and that I do not intend to abandon it.
It seems that life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be obtained.
It is difficult for me to tell you about my life in detail; it is so monotonous and, in fact, so uninteresting. Nevertheless I have no feeling of uniformity and I regret only one thing, which is that the days are so short and that they pass so quickly. One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done, and if one didn’t like the work it would be very discouraging.
A Disillusioned German Veteran Seeks His Proper Place
Anonymous (ca. 1919)
I simply can’t live without my people … I can’t live without my corps … I have no other training, no wife or children, only my men … What place would I have in the world without my soldier’s greatcoat; what good would I be in this world without you?
When blood whirled through the brain and pulsed through the veins as before a longed-for night of love, but far hotter and crazier … The baptism of fire! The air was so charged then with an overwhelming presence of men that every breath was intoxicating, that they could have cried without knowing why. Oh, hearts-of-men, that are capable of this!
A Manifesto for the Twentieth Century?
The British Labour Party (1918)
The End of a Civilization
We need to beware of patchwork. The view of the Labour party is that what has to be reconstructed after the war is not this or that government department, or this or that piece of social machinery; but, so far as Britain is concerned, society itself. …
What this war is consuming is not merely the security, the homes, the livelihood and the lives of millions of innocent families, and an enormous proportion of all the accumulated wealth of the world, but also the very basis of the peculiar social order in which it has arisen. The individualist system of capitalist production, based on the private ownership and competitive administration of land and capital, which has in the past couple of centuries become the dominant form, with its reckless “profiteering” and wage-slavery; with its glorification of the unhampered struggle for the means of life and its hypocritical pretence of the “survival of the fittest”; with the monstrous inequality of circumstances which it produces and the degradation and brutalization, both moral and spiritual, resulting therefrom, may, we hope, indeed have received a death-blow. With it must go the political system and ideas in which it naturally found expression. We of the Labour party, whether in opposition or in due time called upon to form an administration, will certainly lend no hand to its revival. On the contrary, we shall do our utmost to see that it is buried with the millions whom it has done to death. …
The Pillars of the House
We need not here recapitulate, one by one, the different items in the Labour party’s program, which successive party conferences have adopted. These proposals, some of them in various publications worked out in practical detail, are often carelessly derided as impracticable, even by the politicians who steal them piecemeal from us! … The war, which has scared the old political parties right out of their dogmas, has taught every statesman and every government official, to his enduring surprise, how very much more can be done along the lines that we have laid down than he had ever before thought possible. What we now promulgate as our policy, whether for opposition or for office, is not merely this or that specific reform, but a deliberately thought out, systematic, and comprehensive plan for that immediate social rebuilding which any ministry, whether or not it desires to grapple with the problem, will be driven to undertake. The Four Pillars of the house that we propose to erect, resting upon the common foundation of the democratic control of society in all its activities, may be termed, respectively:
(a) The Universal Enforcement of the National Minimum;
(b) The Democratic Control of Industry;
(c) The Revolution in National Finance; and
(d) The Surplus Wealth for the Common Good.
The Universal Enforcement of a National Minimum
The first principle of the Labour party–in significant contrast with those of the capitalist system, whether expressed by the Liberal or by the Conservative party–is the securing to every member of the community, in good times and bad alike (and not only to the strong and able, the well-born or the fortunate), of all the requisites of healthy life and worthy citizenship. …
The Legislative Regulation of Employment
Thus it is that the Labour party to-day stands for the universal application of the policy of the national minimum [wage].
Securing Employment for All
The Labour party insists [that] … it is one of the foremost obligations of the government to find, for every willing worker, whether by hand or by brain, productive work at standard rates.
It is accordingly the duty of the government to adopt a policy of deliberately and systematically preventing the occurrence of unemployment, instead of (as heretofore) letting unemployment occur, and then seeking, vainly and expensively, to relieve the unemployed. …
Social Insurance Against Unemployment
In so far as the government fails to prevent unemployment–whenever it finds it impossible to discover for any willing worker, man or woman, a suitable situation at the standard rate–the Labour party holds that the government must, in the interest of the community as a whole, provide him or her with adequate maintenance, either with such arrangements for honorable employment or with such useful training as may be found practicable, according to age, health and previous occupation. …
The Democratic Control of Industry
… Unlike the Conservative and Liberal Parties, the Labour party insists on democracy in industry as well as in government. It demands the progressive elimination from the control of industry of the private capitalist, individual or joint-stock; and the setting free of all who work, whether by hand or by brain, for the service of the community, and of the community only. And the Labour party refuses absolutely to believe that the British people will permanently tolerate any reconstruction or perpetuation of the disorganization, waste and inefficiency involved in the abandonment of British industry to a jostling crowd of separate private employers, with their minds bent, not on the service of the community, but–by the very law of their being–only on the utmost possible profiteering. …
Immediate Nationalization
The Labour party stands not merely for the principle of the common ownership of the nation’s land, to be applied as suitable opportunities occur, but also, specifically, for the immediate nationalization of railways, mines and the production of electrical power. …
In quite another sphere the Labour party sees the key to temperance reform in taking the entire manufacture and retailing of alcoholic drink out of the hands of those who find profit in promoting the utmost possible consumption. …
Local Government
The Labour party is alive to the evils of centralization and the drawbacks of bureaucracy. To counteract these disadvantages it intends that the fullest possible scope shall be given, in all branches of social reconstruction, to the democratically elected local governing bodies. ..
A Revolution in National Finance
… For the raising of the greater part of the revenue now required the Labour party looks to the direct taxation of the incomes above the necessary cost of family maintenance; and for the requisite effort to pay off the national debt, to the direct taxation of private fortunes both during life and at death. The income tax and super-tax ought at once to be thoroughly reformed in assessment and collection, in abatements and allowances and in graduation and differentiation, so as to levy the required total sum in such a way as to make the real sacrifice of all the taxpayers as nearly as possible equal. …
The Street of To-morrow
The house which the Labour party intends to build, the Four Pillars of which have now been described, does not stand alone in the world. Where will it be in the Street of To-morrow? If we repudiate, on the one hand, the imperialism that seeks to dominate other races, or to impose our own will on other parts of the British Empire, so we disclaim equally any conception of a selfish and insular “non-interventionism,” unregarding of our special obligations to our fellow-citizens overseas; of the corporate duties of one nation to another; of the moral claims upon us of the non-adult races, and of our own indebtedness to the world of which we are part. We look for an ever increasing intercourse, a constantly developing exchange of commodities, a steadily growing mutual understanding, and a continually expanding friendly co-operation among all the peoples of the world. With regard to that great Commonwealth of all races, all colors, all religions and all degrees of civilization, that we call the British Empire, the Labour party stands for its maintenance and its progressive development on the lines of local autonomy and “Home Rule All Round”; the fullest respect for the rights of each people, whatever its color, to all the democratic self-government of which it is capable, and to the proceeds of its own toil upon the resources of its own territorial home; and the closest possible co-operation among all the various members of what has become essentially not an empire in the old sense, but a Britannic Alliance. …
An Economist Analyzes the Versailles Treaty and Finds It Lacking
John Maynard Keynes
(1920)
The Treaty includes no provisions for the economic rehabilitation of Europe,–nothing to make the defeated Central Empires into good neighbors, nothing to stabilize the new States of Europe, nothing to reclaim Russia; nor does it promote in any way a compact of economic solidarity amongst the Allies themselves; no agreement was reached at Paris for restoring the disordered finances of France and Italy, or to adjust the systems of the Old World and the New.
The Council of Four paid no attention to these issues, being preoccupied with others,–Clemenceau to crush the economic life of his enemy, Lloyd George to do a deal and bring home something which would pass muster for a week, the President to do nothing that was not just and right. It is an extraordinary fact that the fundamental economic problems of a Europe starving and disintegrating before their eyes, was the one question in which it was impossible to arouse the interest of the Four. Reparation was their main excursion into the economic field, and they settled it as a problem of theology, of politics, of electoral chicane, from every point of view except that of the economic future of the States whose destiny they were handling.
… For the immediate future events are taking charge, and the near destiny of Europe is no longer in the hands of any man. The events of the coming year will not be shaped by the deliberate acts of statesmen, but by the hidden currents, flowing continually beneath the surface of political history, of which no one can predict the outcome. In one way only can we influence these hidden currents,–by setting in motion those forces of instruction and imagination which change opinion. The assertion of truth, the unveiling of illusion, the dissipation of hate, the enlargement and instruction of men’s hearts and minds, must be the means.
In this autumn of 1919, in which I write, we are at the dead season of our fortunes. The reaction from the exertions, the fears, and the sufferings of the past five years is at its height. Our power of feeling or caring beyond the immediate questions of our own material well-being is temporarily eclipsed. The greatest events outside our own direct experience and the most dreadful anticipations cannot move us.
We have been moved already beyond endurance, and need rest. Never in the lifetime of men now living has the universal element in the soul of man burnt so dimly.
A Defense of Democracy in an Undemocratic Age
Thomas G. Masaryk
(1927)
Democracy was begotten of revolution. Our own Republic and democracy are no exceptions to this rule. Revolution is justified in self-defense for which the necessity arises when every other means has failed. In revolution, as in war, self-defense is morally permissible. Revolution is permissible when–as during the World War–administrative and political chaos threaten; and it is justified if it brings reform and improvement. But democracy does not mean perpetual revolution. The war, and the upheavals it brought on, stimulated revolutionary fancies. But war fever and the excitement of revolution die down. Men are compelled to resume steady and peaceful work; and, for some of them, it is not easy. Political and social Utopianism, such as the notion that the State is omniscient and all powerful, has swollen the demands upon it so inordinately that disillusionment has entailed dejection and weariness; and, as usual, men are apt to blame others, not themselves, for failure. We shall have to overcome the revolutionary spirit as we overcame militarism. Bloodshed is an evil inheritance of the past. We desire a State, a Europe and a mankind without war and without revolution. In a true democracy, war and revolution will be obsolete and inadequate, for democracy is a system of life. Life means work and a system of work; and work, unostentatious work, is peace. Work, bodily and mental, will get the better both of the aristocratic and the revolutionary spirit. Even Marx and Engels had to revise the view of revolution which they put forward in 1848, to recognize that machinery, invention, technical progress, applied science and work are the surest and most efficient means of social revolution, and to declare themselves in favor of Parliamentarism.
Democracy, say its opponents contemptuously, consists of perpetual compromise. Its partisans admit the impeachment, and take it as a compliment. Compromise, not of principles but of practice, is necessary in political life as in all fields of human activity. Even the extremest extremists as, for example, Lenin when in power, make compromises. The policy of cultured and conscientious statesmen and parties is not, however, to reach a compromise between opposites but to carry out a program based on knowledge and on the understanding of history and of the situation of their State and nation in Europe and in the world. … For the maintenance and development of democracy the thought and cooperation of all are needed; and, as none is infallible, democracy, conceived as tolerant cooperation, signifies the acceptance of what is good no matter from what quarter it may come. What is hateful is the readiness of puny, short-sighted men, without aim or conviction, to make compromise an end in itself, to waver between opinion and opinion, to seek haltingly a middle course which usually runs from one wall to another.
I defend democracy, moreover, against dictatorial absolutism, whether the right to dictate be claimed by the proletariate, the State or the Church. I know the argument that dictatorship is justified, since conscience and right, reason and science, are absolute; and I am not unfamiliar with talk about the dictatorship of “the heart.” Logic, mathematics, and some moral maxims may be absolute, that is to say, not relative as they would be if all countries, parties and individuals had a special morality, mathematics and logic of their own; but there is a difference between the epistemological absolutism of theory, and practical, political absolutism. The most scientific policy depends upon experience and induction. It can claim no infallibility. It offers no eternal truths and can form no warrant for absolutism. …
Daily Life in Berlin: A Working Woman’s Description
Deutscher Textilarbeitverband
(1930)
At six o’clock my alarm clock wakes me up and thus begins my workday. Washing and dressing are my first jobs; as for grooming, there’s not much to do in that regard because I have short hair. Then I put on water for coffee and get some bread and butter ready for my husband and me. With that I’m ready and it’s also time to wake my husband because he has a half hour bike ride to his workplace. While he’s getting dressed, I get his bicycle ready. I pump air in the tires and fasten on his lunchbox. He drinks his coffee and soon he’s on his way. I go to the front window and wave him good-bye. Now it’s 7:45 and I must quickly bring a little order to the place. I have only a small apartment, but it nonetheless takes some doing in order to make it look right. At 8:15 I also have to leave. I work in the colored-pattern weaving section from 8:30 to 12:30 without stop. I eat my breakfast about 9. But I don’t let my looms stop; they continue working, for when one works by contract, one has to keep going in order to earn something. At 12:30 it’s time for lunch and I return home quickly. After eating, I clean the hall and stairs, and meanwhile it’s 1:45 and time to go. Work then goes from 2 to 5 without stop. But when it’s five, I go back to my little place with a happy heart. Then my husband soon returns, and I have always taken great pains to have his dinner ready on time. Then I wash the dishes and my husband reads me the newspaper. When I’m ready, we go for a walk. If I had children, I’d probably have to stay home. In addition I go to women’s meetings of the union or SPD.[1] I never miss a general meeting of the SPD and so it goes one day after another until the weekend.
Saturday I get home from work at about 1 and quickly warm up the soup that I made Friday evening. Today I have to clean thoroughly, because for the rest of the week it only gets done superficially. After we have bathed and had some coffee, my husband goes to perform his union duties, and I help him. He is the first president of the metal workers’ union. When he’s finished, we go home well satisfied. After dinner we quietly read the union paper. Happy because we don’t have to work the next day, we go to bed. I usually wake up at 8:30 Sunday morning and we have a pleasant breakfast. Then I start preparing lunch. Today I have time to make a really elaborate meal. After that we fix ourselves up nicely and go for a walk. We attend union events or public associations of which my husband is a member. We always return home with the consciousness of having served a good cause. We go to sleep with the intention to struggle further for the trade unions, for trade unions are the stronghold of the workers’ movement.
[1] SPD is the abbreviation for the German Social Democratic Party.
The Great Depression Hits Germany
Rhein-Mainische Wirtschafts-Zeitung
(1931-1932)
City of Mainz Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Annual Report for 1931
The year 1931 saw a further rapid decline of the German economy. This downward trend has been in evidence since 1927. … No more needs to be said about the desperate condition of the Germany economy. No further proof is required than the findings of the report issued by the Geneva committee of experts, which determined that one-third of the economy and those individuals dependent on it is lying idle, the unemployment figures have reached new, undreamed-of highs, and the number of business failures and shutdowns is growing day by day….
Annual Report for 1932
The catastrophically low level of the German economy which we detailed in the previous annual report persisted during the first half of this reporting year as well. The fourth presidential emergency decree of December 8 [1931] did make the attempt to slow the further decline of the economy, but it soon became clear that the planned artificial and far-reaching encroachment on natural economic relationships could not produce the desired result. The concerns over this encroachment, which we emphatically expressed in our last report, have since proved well founded. Existing contractual agreements in all areas of the market, be it in the area of housing, money and interest, or salaries and wages, were all loosened and changed, while good faith was not taken into account. As a result a considerable insecurity has taken hold not only in the economic sphere, but among the entire population in general. All initiatives falter because of despondent attitudes, and commerce appears to have come to a standstill altogether. This critical situation has been intensified by the failure to solve the reparations problem. …
The situation in the field of public finances continues to be of concern. The situation at the community level is hopeless. [Local government finances] bear the main brunt of unemployment, since over the course of time more and more unemployed individuals drift from unemployment insurance to public crisis relief and finally into general welfare recipient status. It is of the utmost urgency to relieve the local communities of this pressure by coordinating the entire system of unemployment relief. The economy in general would stand to benefit from the restoration of the financial health of local communities. …
The Great Depression in Britain: The “Special Areas”
Parliament
(1934)
25. The Special Areas are in their present unfortunate position owing to the decline of the main industries, coal mining, ship building and iron and steel, which attracted such large numbers of workers to them during the nineteenth century under more prosperous conditions. It seems unlikely that these industries will again employ the numbers engaged in them even up to ten years ago. During the period of prosperity large communities with full equipment of railways, roads, houses, schools and other municipal and social services were created. Many millions of pounds were spent in building up these services. A large proportion of the inhabitants have been associated with the Areas for several generations; they are bound to the Areas by ties of home and family and religion, by local patriotism and, especially in Wales, by a fervent national spirit and, sometimes, a distinctive language. It is natural, therefore, that wherever one goes in these Areas one should be met by the demand that something should be done to attract fresh industries to the Area. This is the general request, and I regard it as at once the most important and the most difficult of my duties to try to satisfy it. I have given more time and personal attention to this side of my work than to any other, but it must be frankly admitted that up to the present the results have been negligible. Many of the negotiations I have initiated with this end in view were necessarily confidential, and it would only prejudice the present slender chances of success if I were to give a full account of them. The following paragraphs will, however, indicate the main lines on which I have been working.
26. In the first place I approached a number of the larger and more prosperous firms in the country in the hope that I might persuade them to open new branches of their industry in one or other of the Special Areas. Without exception they were sympathetic to my representations, but except in one case they had good reasons which made it impossible for them to accede to my request. …
29. Some hundreds of new factories have been established in recent years in the Midlands and South, but very few in the Special Areas. Why is this so? The main reasons appear to fall in the following categories:–
(1) Inaccessibility to markets. This applies particularly to Cumberland. …
(2) High rates. These probably have a deterrent effect on employers out of proportion to their real significance. …
(3) Fear of industrial unrest. This fear is very general and is bred from past disputes mainly in the coalmining industry. It prevails particularly with regard to South Wales, but the facts scarcely warrant the attitude adopted. Statistics apart from those of coal-mining do not justify the fear which undoubtedly exists in the minds of many employers. …
(4) The fact that the areas are, and for some years have been, suffering from industrial depression. This factor, coupled with the common application to them of the term “depressed” or “distressed” areas, has itself a deterrent effect. While it is true that “trade brings trade,” the converse unfortunately is equally true. Unemployment undermines business confidence and reduces purchasing power. A vicious circle is thus set up. …
(5) Difficulty in obtaining finance to start new industries. …
255. … Probably the most serious human problem of the Special Areas is that presented by unemployment among young men between 18 and 21. …
256. Many of these young persons have done practically no work; they have been brought up in a home where the father has been continuously out of work, and they have little or no conception that a man’s ordinary occupation should be such as will provide the means of subsistence for himself and for his family. They have seen their own families and their friends kept for years by the State, and they have come to accept this as a normal condition of life. It is hardly surprising in the circumstances that young persons with this background and upbringing should be ready victims of all manner of demoralizing influences. In short, these young persons present in my view the most tragic aspect of the problem of the Special Areas and one fraught with great danger to the State.
A United Stance Against Fascism
French Popular Front
(1936)
I. Defense of Freedom
1. A general amnesty.
2. Measures against the Fascist Leagues:
(a) The effective disarmament and dissolution of all semi-military formations, in accordance with the law.
(b) The enforcement of legal measures in cases of incitement to murder or any attempt against the safety of the State.
3. Measures for the cleansing of public life, especially by forbidding deputies to combine their parliamentary functions with certain other forms of activity.
4. The Press:
(a) The repeal of the infamous laws and decrees restricting freedom of opinion.
(b) Reform of the Press by the following legislative measures:
(i) Measures effectively repressing libel and blackmail.
(ii) Measures which will guarantee the normal means of existence to newspapers, and compel publication of their financial resources.
(iii) Measures ending the private monopoly of commercial advertising and the scandals of financial advertising, and preventing the formation of newspaper trusts.
(c) Organization by the State of radio broadcasts with a view to assuring the accuracy of news and equality of political and social organizations in radio programs.
5. Trade Union Liberties:
(a) Application and observance of trade-union freedom for all.
(b) Recognition of women’s labor rights.
6. Education and freedom of conscience:
(a) Measures safeguarding the development of public education by the necessary grants …
(b) Measures guaranteeing to all concerned, pupils and teachers, complete freedom of conscience …
7. Colonies: formation of a parliamentary committee of inquiry into the political, economic and cultural situation in France’s territories overseas, especially French North Africa and Indo-China.
II. Defense of Peace
… 2. International collaboration within the framework of the League of Nations for collective security, by defining the aggressor and by joint application of automatic sanctions in cases of aggression.
3. Ceaseless endeavor to pass from armed peace to disarmed peace, first by a convention of limitation, and then by the general, simultaneous, and effectively controlled reduction of armaments.
4. Nationalization of war industries and suppression of private trade in armaments.
5. Repudiation of secret diplomacy …
7. Extension of the system of pacts open to all nations, particularly in eastern Europe, on the lines of the Franco-Soviet Pact.
III. Economic Demands
1. Restoration of purchasing power destroyed or reduced by the crisis. … [Proposals follow for unemployment insurance, old age pensions, etc.]
2. Against the robbery of investors and for the better organization of credit. … [Proposals follow for banking and stockmarket regulation.]
IV . Financial Purification
Control of the trade in armaments, in conjunction with the nationalization of armaments industries. Prevention of waste in the civil and military departments. … [Proposals follow for "democratic reform of the system of taxation so as to relax the fiscal burden blocking economic recovery" and for raising taxes on the wealthy.]
Primary Sources – Unit Seventeen – Dictatorships and the Second World War
Lenin: A Revolutionary Prude, a Chauvinist Pig, or Both?
Clara Zetkin
(1920)
“The record of your sins, Clara, is even worse. I have been told that at the evenings arranged for reading and discussion with working women, sex and marriage problems come first. They are said to be the main objects of interest in your political instruction and educational work. I could not believe my ears when I heard that. The first state of proletarian dictatorship is battling with the counterrevolutionaries of the whole world. The situation in Germany itself calls for the greatest unity of all proletarian revolutionary forces, so that they can repel the counter-revolution which is pushing on. But active Communist women are busy discussing sex problems and the forms of marriage–’past, present and future.’ They consider it their most important task to enlighten working women on these questions. It is said that a pamphlet on the sex question written by a Communist authoress from Vienna enjoys the greatest popularity. What rot that booklet is! … The mention of Freud’s hypotheses is designed to give the pamphlet a scientific veneer, but it is so much bungling by an amateur. Freud’s theory has now become a fad. I mistrust sex theories expounded in articles, treatises, pamphlets, etc.–in short, the theories dealt with in that specific literature which sprouts so luxuriantly on the dung heap of bourgeois society. I mistrust those who are always absorbed in the sex problems, the way an Indian saint is absorbed in the contemplation of his navel. It seems to me that this superabundance of sex theories, which for the most part are mere hypotheses, and often quite arbitrary ones, stems from a personal need. It springs from the desire to justify one’s own abnormal or excessive sex life before bourgeois morality and to plead for tolerance towards oneself. … “
I interposed that where private property and the bourgeois social order prevail, questions of sex and marriage gave rise to manifold problems, conflicts and suffering for women of all social classes and strata. As far as women are concerned, the war and its consequences exacerbated the existing conflicts and suffering to the utmost precisely in the sphere of sexual relations. Problems formerly concealed from women were now laid bare. To this was added the atmosphere of incipient revolution. The world of old emotions and thoughts was cracking up. Former social connections were loosening and breaking. The makings of new relations between people were appearing. Interest in the relevant problems was an expression of the need for enlightnment and a new orientation. …
“Youth’s altered attitude to questions of sex is of course ‘fundamental,’ and based on theory. Many people call it ‘revolutionary’ and ‘communist.’ They sincerely believe that this is so. I am an old man, and I do not like it. I may be a morose ascetic, but quite often this so-called ‘new sex life’ of young people–and frequently of the adults too–seems to me purely bourgeois and simply an extension of the good old bourgeois brothel. All this has nothing in common with free love as we Communists understand it. No doubt you have heard about the famous theory that in communist society satisfying sexual desire and the craving for love is as simple and trivial as ‘drinking a glass of water.’ A section of our youth has gone mad, absolutely mad, over this ‘glass-of-water theory.’ It has been fatal to many a young boy and girl. Its devotees assert that it is a Marxist theory. I want no part of the kind of Marxism which infers all phenomena and all changes in the ideological superstructure of society directly and blandly from its economic basis, for things are not as simple as all that. A certain Frederick Engels has established this a long time ago with regard to historical materialism.
“I consider the famous ‘glass-of-water’ theory as completely unMarxist and, moreover, as anti-social. It is not only what nature has given but also what has become culture, whether of a high or low level, that comes into play in sexual life. Engels pointed out in his Origin of the Familyhow significant it was that the common sexual relations had developed into individual sex love and thus became purer. The relations between the sexes are not simply the expression of a mutual influence between economics and a physical want deliberately singled out for physiological examination. It would be rationalism and not Marxism to attempt to refer the change in these relations directly to the economic basis of society in isolation from its connection with the ideology as a whole. To be sure, thirst has to be quenched. But would a normal person normally lie down in the gutter and drink from a puddle? Or even from a glass whose edge has been greased by many lips? But the social aspect is more important than anything else. The drinking of water is really an individual matter. But it takes two people to make love, and a third person, a new life, is likely to come into being. This deed has a social complexion and constitutes a duty to the community. …
“Young people are particularly in need of joy and strength. Healthy sports, such as gymnastics, swimming, hiking, physical exercises of every description and a wide range of intellectual interests are what they need, as well as learning, study and research, and as far as possible collectively. This will be far more useful to young people than endless lectures and discussions on sex problems and the so-called living by one’s nature. Mens sana in corpore sano. Be neither monk nor Don Juan, but not anything in between either, like a German philistine. You know the young comrade X. He is a splendid lad, and highly gifted. For all that, I am afraid that he will never amount to anything. He has one love affair after another. This is not good for the political struggle and for the revolution. I will not vouch for the reliability or the endurance of women whose love affair is intertwined with politics, or for the men who run after every petticoat and let themselves in with every young female. No, no, that does not go well with revolution.”
Lenin sprang to his feet, slapped the table with his hand and paced up and down the room.
A Revolutionary Retreat: The New Economic Policy
Vladimir I. Lenin
(1922)
First, the New Economic Policy is important for us primarily as a means of testing whether we are really establishing a link with the peasant economy. In the preceding period of development of our revolution, when all our attention and all our efforts were concentrated mainly on, or almost entirely absorbed by, the task of repelling invasion, we could not devote the necessary attention to this link; we had other things to think about. To some extent we could and had to ignore this bond when we were confronted by the absolutely urgent and overshadowing task of warding off the danger of being immediately crushed by the gigantic forces of world imperialism. …
Retreat is a difficult matter, especially for revolutionaries who are accustomed to advance; especially when they have been accustomed to advance with enormous success for several years; especially if they are surrounded by revolutionaries in other countries who are They consider it their most important task to enlighten working women on these questions. It is said that a longing for the time when they can launch an offensive. Seeing that we were retreating, several of them burst into tears in a disgraceful and childish manner, as was the case at the last extended plenary meeting of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. Moved by the best communist sentiments and communist aspirations, several of the comrades burst into tears because–oh horror!–the good Russian Communists were retreating. Perhaps it is now difficult for me to understand this West-European mentality, although I lived for quite a number of years in those marvellous democratic countries as an exile. Perhaps from their point of view this is such a difficult matter to understand that it is enough to make one weep. We, at any rate, have no time for sentiment. It was clear to us that because we had advanced so successfully for many years and had achieved so many extraordinary victories (and all this in a country that was in an appalling state of ruin and lacked the material resources!), to consolidate that advance, since we had gained so much, it was absolutely essential for us to retreat. We could not hold all the positions we had captured in the first onslaught. On the other hand, it was because we had captured so much in the first onslaught, on the crest of the wave of enthusiasm displayed by the workers and peasants, that we had room enough to retreat a long distance, and can retreat still further now, without losing our main and fundamental positions. On the whole, the retreat was fairly orderly, although certain panic-stricken voices, among them that of the Workers’ Opposition (this was the tremendous harm it did!), caused losses in our ranks, caused a relaxation of discipline, and disturbed the proper order of retreat. The most dangerous thing during a retreat is panic. When a whole army (I speak in the figurative sense) is in retreat, it cannot have the same morale as when it is advancing. At every step you find a certain mood of depression. We even had poets who wrote that people were cold and starving in Moscow, that “everything before was bright and beautiful, but now trade and profiteering abound.” We have had quite a number of poetic effusions of this sort.
Of course, retreat breeds all this. That is where the serious danger lies; it is terribly difficult to retreat after a great victorious advance, for the relations are entirely different. During a victorious advance, even if discipline is relaxed, everybody presses forward on his own accord. During a retreat, however, discipline must be more conscious and is a hundred times more necessary, because, when the entire army is in retreat, it does not know or see where it should halt. It sees only retreat; under such circumstances a few panicstricken voices are, at times, enough to cause a stampede. The danger here is enormous. When a real army is in retreat, machine-guns are kept ready, and when an orderly retreat degenerates into a disorderly one, the command to fire is given, and quite rightly, too.
Lenin’s “Last Testament”
Vladimir I. Lenin
(1922Ã1923)
I would urge strongly that at this Congress a number of changes be made in our political structure.
I want to tell you the considerations to which I attach most importance.
At the head of the list I set an increase in the number of Central Committee members to a few dozen or even a hundred. It is my opinion that without this reform our Central Committee would be in great danger if the course of events were not quite favourable for us (and that is something we cannot count on).
Then, I intend to propose that the Congress should on certain conditions invest the decisions of the State Planning Commission with legislative force, meeting, in this respect, the wishes of Comrade Trotsky–to a certain extent and on certain conditions.
As for the first point, i.e., increasing the number of C.C. members, I think it must be done in order to raise the prestige of the Central Committee, to do a thorough job of improving our administrative machinery and to prevent conflicts between small sections of the C.C. from acquiring excessive importance for the future of the Party. …
… Our Party relies on two classes and therefore its instability would be possible and its downfall inevitable if there were no agreement between those two classes. In that event this or that measure, and generally all talk about the stability of our C.C., would be futile. No measures of any kind could prevent a split in such a case. But I hope that this is too remote a future and too improbable an event to talk about.
I have in mind stability as a guarantee against a split in the immediate future, and I intend to deal here with a few ideas concerning personal qualities.
I think that from this standpoint the prime factors in the question of stability are such members of the C.C. as Stalin and Trotsky. I think relations between them make up the greater part of the danger of a split, which could be avoided, and this purpose, in my opinion, would be served, among other things, by increasing the number of C.C. members to 50 or 100.
Comrade Stalin, having become secretary-general, has boundless power concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that power with sufficient caution. Comrade Trotsky, on the other hand, as his struggle against the C.C. on the question of the People’s Commissariat for Communications has already proved, is distinguished not only by outstanding ability. He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present C.C., but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work.
These two qualities of the two outstanding leaders of the present C.C. can inadvertently lead to a split, and if our Party does not take steps to avert this, the split may come unexpectedly.
I shall not give any further appraisals of the personal qualities of other members of the C.C. I shall just recall that the October episode with Zinoviev and Kamenev was, of course, no accident, but neither can the blame for it be laid upon them personally, any more than nonBolshevism can upon Trotsky.
Speaking of the young C.C. members, I wish to say a few words about Bukharin and Pyatakov. They are, in my opinion, the most outstanding figures (among the youngest ones), and the following must be borne in mind about them: Bukharin is not only a most valuable and major theorist of the Party; he is also rightly considered the favourite of the whole Party, but his theoretical views can be classified as fully Marxist only with great reserve, for there is something scholastic about him (he has never made a study of dialectics, and, I think, never fully understood it). …
Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a secretary-general. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear to be an insignificant trifle. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky it is not a trifle, or it is a trifle which can assume decisive significance.
Stalin’s Rise to Power: A Biased but Accurate Analysis
Leon Trotsky
(1940)
The prestige of the leaders as a whole, not only the personal prestige of Lenin, made up in its totality the authority of the Central Committee. The principle of individual leadership was utterly alien to the Party. The Party singled out the more popular figures for leadership, gave them its confidence and admiration, while always adhering to the view that the actual leadership came from the Central Committee as a whole. This tradition was used to tremendous advantage by the triumvirate, which insisted upon the paramountey of the Central Committee over any individual authority. Stalin, schemer, centrist and eclectic par excellence, master of small doses gradually administered, cynically misused that trust [in the Central Committee] for his own advantage.
At the end of 1925 Stalin still spoke of the leaders in the third person and instigated the Party against them. He received the plaudits of the middle layer of the bureaucracy, which refused to bend its neck to any leader. Yet in reality, Stalin himself was already dictator. He was a dictator, but he did not feel yet that he was leader, and no one recognized him as such. He was a dictator not through the force of his personality, but through the power of the political machine that had broken with the old leaders. As late as the Sixteenth Congress, in 1930, Stalin said: “You ask why we expelled Trotsky and Zinoviev? Because we did not want to have aristocrats in the Party, because we have only one law in the Party, and all the Party members are equal in their rights.” He reiterated this at the Seventeenth Congress in 1934.
He used the Right as a battering ram against the Left Opposition, for only the Right had a definite platform, interests, and principles, that were jeopardized by a triumph of Left policies. But when he saw that the expulsion of the Left Opposition provoked grave misgivings and dissatisfaction in the Party, and irritation with the triumphant Right, Stalin knew how to utilize this dissatisfaction for a blow against the Rightists. The conflict of class forces in this struggle between Right and Left was of less concern to him than his deceptive role as a conciliator or as the pacifying element which presumably would reduce the inevitable number of victims to a minimum and save the Party from a schism. In his role of super-arbiter, he was able to place the responsibility for the severe measures against certain popular Party members now on one, and now on the other wing of the Party. But classes cannot be fooled. As a maneuver, the pro-kulak policy of 1924Ã1928 was worse than criminal; it was absurd. The kulak is nobody’s fool. He judges by taxes, prices, profits, not by phrasemongering and declamations: he judges by deeds, not by words. Maneuvering can never replace the action and reaction of class forces; its usefulness is limited at best; and there is nothing so calculated to disintegrate the revolutionary morale of a mass party as clandestine unprincipled maneuvering. Nor is anything deadlier for the morale and the character of the individual revolutionists. Military trickery can never replace major strategy. …
The “Fundamental Ideas” of Fascism
Benito Mussolini
(1935)
Like all sound political conceptions, Fascism is action and it is thought; action in which doctrine is imminent, and doctrine arising from a given system of historical forces in which it is inserted, and working on them from within. It has therefore a form correlated to contingencies of time and space; but it has also an ideal content which makes it an expression of truth in the higher region of the history of thought. … To know men one must know man; and to know man one must be acquainted with reality and its laws. There can be no conception of the State which is not fundamentally a conception of life: philosophy or intuition, system of ideas evolving within the framework of logic or concentrated in a vision or a faith, but always, at least potentially, an organic conception of the world.
Thus many of the practical expressions of Fascism–such as party organisation, system of education, discipline–can only be understood when considered in relation to its general attitude toward life. … A spiritual attitude. Fascism sees in the world not only those superficial, material aspects in which man appears as an individual, standing by himself, self-centered, subject to natural law which instinctively urges him toward a life of selfish momentary pleasure; it sees not only the individual but the nation and the country; individuals and generations bound together by a moral law, with common traditions and a mission which suppressing the instinct for life closed in a brief circle of pleasure, builds up a higher life, founded on duty, a life free from the limitations of time and space, in which the individual, by self-sacrifice, the renunciation of self-interest, by death itself, can achieve that purely spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists.
The conception is therefore a spiritual one, arising from the general reaction of the century against the placid materialistic positivism of the XIXth century. …
In the Fascist conception of history, man is man only by virtue of the spiritual process to which he contributes as a member of the family, the social group, the nation, and in function of history to which all nations bring their contribution. … Outside history man is a nonentity. Fascism is therefore opposed to all individualistic abstractions based on eighteenth century materialism; and it is opposed to all Jacobinistic utopias and innovations. …
Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as a historic entity. It is opposed to classical liberalism which arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical function when the State became the expression of the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual. And if liberty is to be the attribute of living men and not of abstract dummies invented by individualistic liberalism, then Fascism stands for liberty, and for the only liberty worth having, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State. The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State–a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values–interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people. …
The Fascist “Corporative State”
Italian Fascist Government
(1927)
I. The Italian Nation is an organism endowed with a purpose, a life, and means of action transcending those of the individuals composing it. It is a moral, political and economic unit which finds its integral realisation in the Fascist State.
II. Work in all its various forms–intellectual, technical or manual–is a social duty. On these grounds, and on these grounds alone, it is brought under the supervision of the State. …
III. There is complete freedom of professional or syndical organisation. But syndicates legally recognised and subject to State control alone have the right to represent legally the whole category for which they are constituted; to protect their interests in their relations with the State or other professional associations; to stipulate collective labour contracts binding on all members of the particular category; to impose dues and to exercise on their account public functions delegated to them.
IV. The concrete expression of the solidarity existing between the various factors of production is represented by the collective labour contract which conciliates the opposing interests of employers of labour and of workers, subordinating them to the higher interests of production. …
VI. Legally recognised professional associations ensure legal equality between employers and workers, keep a strict control over production and labour and promote the improvement of both.
The Corporations constitute the unitary organisation of the forces of production and integrally represent their interests.
By virtue of this integral representation, and in view of the fact that the interests of production are the interests of the Nation, the law recognises the Corporations as State organisations.
VII. The Corporative State considers that in the sphere of production private enterprise is the most effective and useful instrument in the interests of the Nation.
In view of the fact that the private organisation of production is a function of national concern, the organiser of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production. Collaboration between the forces of production gives rise to reciprocal rights and duties. The worker, whether technician, clerk or labourer, is an active collaborator in the economic enterprise, the responsibility for the direction of which rests with the employer.
VIII. Professional associations of employers are required to promote by all possible means a continued increase in the quantity of production and a reduction of costs. …
IX. State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or is inadequate or when political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management. …
XI. Professional associations are required to regulate by means of collective contracts the labour relations existing between the categories of employers of labour and of workers represented by them. …
XII. The action of the syndicate, the conciliatory efforts of the Corporations and the decisions of the Labour Courts shall guarantee that wages shall correspond to the normal demands of life, to the possibilities of production and the output of labour.
Wages shall be determined entirely [by] reference to any general rules by agreement between the parties to the collective system.
XIII. The consequences of crises in production and of monetary phenomena should be shared equally by all the different factors of production. …
XIV. When the contract concerns piece-work and the payments due thereunder are made at intervals of more than fifteen days, adequate weekly or fortnightly sums on account are due.
Night work, with the exception of ordinary regular night shifts, must be paid at a higher rate than day work.
In cases where the work is paid at piece-rate, the rate must be such that a diligent workman, of a normal working capacity, will be able to earn a minimum amount over and above the basic wage.
XV. The worker has the right to a weekly day of rest which shall fall on Sunday. …
XVI. Workers in enterprises of continuous activity shall, after the expiry of a year of uninterrupted service, have the right to an annual period of rest with pay.
XVII. In enterprises of continuous activity the worker has the right, in the event of a cessation of labour relations on account of discharge without any fault on his part, to an indemnity proportional to his years of service. Similar indemnity is also due in the event of the death of a worker. …
XIX. Breaches of discipline or the performance of acts which disturb the normal working of the enterprise on the part of the workers, shall be punished according to the gravity of the offence, by fine, suspension from work, or in certain cases of gravity, by immediate discharge without indemnity.
The cases when the employer can impose fines, suspension from work or immediate discharge without payment of indemnity, shall be specified. …
XXII. The State alone can ascertain and control the phenomenon of employment and unemployment of workers, which is a complex of the conditions of production and work.
XXIII. Labour Employment Bureaus founded on a mutual basis are subjected to the control of the Corporations. Employers have the obligation to employ workers whose names are on the register of the said Bureaus and have the right of choice among the names of those who are members of the Party and the Fascist syndicates according to their seniority on the Register.
XXIV. The professional associations of employers are required to exercise a process of selection among the workers with the object of achieving continuous improvement in their technical capacity and moral education.
XXV. The Corporative bodies shall ensure the observance of the laws on the prevention of accidents and the discipline of work on the part of individuals belonging to the federated associations.
XXVI. Insurance is a further expression of the principle of collaboration, and the employer and the worker should both bear a proportional share of its burden. The State, through the medium of Corporations and professional associations, shall see to the coordination and unity, as far as possible, of the system and institutes of insurance.
XXVII. The Fascist State proposes:
1. the perfecting of accident insurance;
2. the improvement and extension of maternity assistance;
3. insurance against industrial diseases and tuberculosis as a step towards insurance against all forms of sickness;
4. the perfecting of insurance against involuntary unemployment;
5. the adoption of special forms of endowment insurance for young workers.
XXVIII. The workers’ associations are required to act as guardians of those they represent in administrative and judicial suits arising out of accident and social insurance. …
The Art of Propaganda: A Master Reveals His Secrets
Adolf Hitler
(1924)
The psyche of the great masses is not receptive to anything that is half-hearted and weak….
To whom should propaganda be addressed? To the scientifically trained intelligentsia or to the less educated masses?
It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses. …
All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. …
The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses. The fact that our bright boys do not understand this merely shows how mentally lazy and conceited they are.
Once we understand how necessary it is for propaganda to be adjusted to the broad mass, the following rule results:
It is a mistake to make propaganda many-sided, like scientific instruction, for instance.
The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way, the result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out. …
The broad mass of a nation does not consist of diplomats, or even professors of political law, or even individuals capable of forming a rational opinion; it consists of plain mortals, wavering and inclined to doubt and uncertainty. As soon as our own propaganda admits so much as a glimmer of right on the other side, the foundation for doubt in our own right has been laid. …
The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling. …
But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success. …
The purpose of propaganda is not to provide interesting distraction for blase young gentlemen, but to convince, and what I mean is to convince the masses. But the masses are slow-moving, and they always require a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them….
[During World War I] at first the claims of the [enemy] propaganda were so impudent that people thought it insane; later, it got on people’s nerves; and in the end, it was believed. …
A Nazi Describes the Early Years
Anonymous
(ca. 1920s)
In the workshops and offices of many large machine factories of the Reich, I became acquainted with Marxism and democracy in both party and labor unions as early as 1904. After the war, once I became aware of the shameful, treasonous action committed by the SPD [Social Democratic Party], Center, Democrats, and so forth against Germany, I instinctively fought against Marxism and its procurers wherever I possibly could. Even in my youth I was antisemitically predisposed and frequently paid for it with house detention because I did not tolerate the impudence and provocations of the Jewish boys. …
1922-23 I lived in a small village in the Catholic region near Ellwang. The only Catholic newspaper of that region delighted in tearing this new party and its leader to shreds. That was reason enough for me to connect with what this man wanted. Inflation raced through the land and ruined me, like many others.
As of January 1924 I lived in Ludwigsburg and from August 1924 on in Zuffenhausen, and was better able to follow the proceedings of the people’s court of justice in Munich. The manly bearing of Adolf Hitler prompted me to seek out like-minded individuals. At first I made the acquaintance of a young lady who accordingly supplied me with the requisite literature, and who later also procured the Volkischer Beobachter[1] for me. Only then did I get a true picture of the events in Munich and thereby became a fervent follower of Adolf Hitler. …
[In 1925] a long period of untiring, nerve-shattering work and stubborn, fanatical struggle began for my comrades and myself. Family life did not exist anymore. I rejected everything that was associated with middle-class clubs. The struggle for the Fuhrer and my job occupied my entire existence.
Ridiculed, laughed at, and scorned by former “friends”; likewise shunned and regarded as abnormal by my closest relatives; those were the immediate consequences. From the day of my entry into the party, there began a boycott of my father’s and brothers’ business by Jews and their cohorts which reached even into so-called German-Nationalist circles. Adding to this was the age difference that existed between me and my comrades which amounted to more than ten or fifteen years, and which my former friends and acquaintances pointed to as evidence of my stupidity and the inexperience of my comrades.
We began to collect and weld together the few faithful into a local group. Each and every one had to propagandize and persuade; we fought for every single individual with passionate, fanatical zeal. We established ties with other local groups and helped organize new locals in order to protect our meetings. It did not take long for our meetings to grow. They were no longer able to disrupt our meetings, although the attitude of many within the establishment police force was exceedingly deplorable in those days. We held meetings in the vicinity of Neustadt especially in the smaller towns, and on many Sundays I had to pay for the travel costs and provisions out of my own pocket because as speaker for the party I had to have a protection force for the meetings in order to have success. …
The first public meeting of the NSDAP in the town of Lambrecht occurred during this period. As the approximately twenty-five-man SA squad of the Neustadt local group marched into the hall, it was already heavily filled with opponents. The Marxists had brought in their heavy cannon–the Reichsbanner[2] leader Schuhmacher from Ludwigshafen. Our now deceased party member K. Faber spoke first, dealing with [Foreign Minister] Stresemann’s politics of illusion. I was supposed to make closing remarks. During the discussion period, Schuhmacher stepped up and railed in the most vile manner until finally a brawl broke out. Everything that was not nailed down was used as a missile: beer bottles, glasses, ashtrays, even the pieces of an entire oven were torn off and hurled at us. … We barricaded ourselves behind a table and threw everything that had been hurled our way back, toward the mob that was jamming the exit and howling and shrieking….
During working hours I found myself employed as workshop accountant in the reddest factory in Mannheim. For eight years prior to the revolution, I was the only one, of about a one-thousand-man labor force, who openly and without reserve wore the party insignia. I had to endure much in those days. I was hated by those of different political views, ridiculed and mocked by intellectuals, shunned by all, then later feared, fought, slandered, and denounced. … It was worse than hell sometimes … but nothing was able to turn me away from an intractable belief in the Fuhrer and ultimate victory. …
[1] The main Nazi newspaper
[2] The paramilitary unit of Social Democratic War veterans
German Workers Accept the Nazi Regime
German Social Democratic Party
(1934)
The reports from the Reich as yet do not provide a uniform picture. …
The following report is from southwestern Germany: “Judging by public attitudes, the regime seems to have the most support among workers. This is especially true for those who earlier had not been part of a political organization. … It also seems that workers submit more readily [than other social classes] to Nazi terror methods and allow themselves to be easily influenced.”
A similar report from Berlin: “Large segments of the working class continue to submit [to the regime]. Faith in Hitler is remarkably strong. The circle of old [Social Democratic] party members is for the most part unshaken and refuses to accept Nazi ideology. … ”
From northern Bavaria similar sentiments: “The mood among workers has changed abruptly. This is especially so among those large-income earners who were never satisfied with their pay; who were abusive toward Social Democracy and blamed it because they didn’t earn more; who never came to a single meeting, and who had no money to spend for a party newspaper. These indifferent egotists actually thought they would effortlessly earn more under Hitler. Now they have got their surprise. They are the ones grumbling the loudest in the factories, because now they earn barely half of their former pay and must make contributions and pay membership dues. …”
A different angle sheds light on the situation in southern Bavaria: “A large segment of the work force is indifferent toward the Third Reich. The percentage of workers in this category is changing, however. Much has to do with the ability and quality of the NSBO (Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellenorganisation, National Socialist Factory Cell Organization] people. In general it can be said that in factories where solid union organizations existed earlier the workers have remained skeptical. It is also evident that underground activity will be difficult to get going here. The workers are indecisive; they are not sure of the goal nor of the path toward it. Many are also afraid of losing their jobs. A not inconsiderable number of those not ‘coordinated’ [gleichgeschaltet] are discouraged and resigned to their fate.”
Much more optimistic is a report from western Saxony: “The situation here has changed markedly since Christmas. The change is a very unfavorable one for the National Socialists. Within factories, at construction sites and other workplaces, there is now much discussion during breaks. One can surmise from this that the workers are basically opposed to the regime. Even [National Socialist] party members are expressing their dissatisfaction and disappointment. … ”
A Berlin report analyzes the reasons for the more confident mood of the workers: “Workers today are not as afraid of unemployment. They do not have to fear losing their jobs from one day to the next because the regime, in its effort to provide work, is exerting heavy pressure on employers to retain even their surplus work force as long as possible. …
… The reports from the period of June 30 almost all express the opinion that of all segments of German society, the working class is most submissive toward the regime, and it is presenting the least opposition.
From East Saxony: The workers in the factories are, without exception, adopting a wait-and-see attitude toward the regime and do not believe the things the Nazis are prophesying. Doubts about the accuracy of the Marxist ideological basis surfaced during this past year amid the ranks of former low-level [Social Democratic] party functionaries. The reports of rapid dwindling of the masses of unemployed were not believed by all. Many are doubting the authenticity of the figures released publicly. In any case, the fact that it was possible to obtain large sums on credit, to create new jobs and new work projects without having serious difficulties surface during the first year has shaken the opinion of many who believed that the National Socialist economic program would collapse. …
The matter-of-fact way in which factory workers are accepting everything that is being thrust on them is frightening. They only grumble when the dozens of different collecting lists and the contribution collectors approach them. There is not even an inner resistance to the Hitler greeting. The fact that one has to greet others by raising the hand [and saying "Heil Hitler"] is regarded as an insignificant act, as is participating in the May 1 events. The number of those who could have excluded themselves from the beginning could have been much higher. There is a fear throughout the ranks that one will have difficulties at work and possibly lose one’s job. This fear induces the workers to act in a certain way. Moreover, these things are probably only demanded of the workers in order to gauge their response. I have encountered only a few who have said, “I can’t stand this rubbish anymore, I’d rather sacrifice my job.”
Nazi Recreation: Summer Camps for Girls
Reich Youth Headquarters
(ca. 1930s)
We are a political Organization of Girls and acknowledge herewith the task which has been set for us by the National Socialist State: to remain alert and ready for our duty and to help with all our strength in the building of a National Socialist Volk. Politics today means to us not only the consideration of daily political occurrences, but Politics means to us also the ideological, spiritual, and cultural forming of the entire German people in the sense of National Socialist Demands. Our educational work is determined by this great political task. It has to readjust itself continually to these demands. Then there will emerge from the community where such work is done the person who is the embodiment of our way, healthy and capable, inwardly strong and womanly, consciously German and consciously National Socialistic.
These recreation camps, where our community becomes closely cemented, are an essential expression of our way. Our chief work in the summer month is therefore consciously the holding of recreation camps in which our political education pattern takes shape. Recreation camps force a cementing of community. Girls from all walks of life, from overpopulated cities as well as the wide open country, stand together under our flag for days and weeks, leaving behind all their ordinary interests in life–school and machine, lecture hall and household–and finding a vigorous and healthful life.
Political education in the recreation camp is not synonymous with scientific discussions, but is rather determined by the experiences shared by the camp community and is shaped accordingly. Our recreation camps are organized more loosely than the leadership schools [Fuhrerinnenschulungen], but in spite of all fun, rigid discipline prevails. Our girls should really be able to leave their daily troubles and cares behind during this week to ten days.
Many who have not yet found us inwardly, acquaint themselves here with the life and the forms of the National Socialist League of Girls and become so attached to it that they cannot dissolve this bond upon their return to everyday life. …
Everything the girls experience here takes on a clear, visible pattern in their joint discussions, in which knowledge of their mission in our state, our educational pattern, and the National Socialist Ideology is imparted. During the domestic evenings [Heimabende] the work done during the forenoon, and the work of the Fuhrer and his assistants, the work of the young creative forces in our ranks, is brought closer to them. During the forenoons devoted to reading, they acquaint themselves with the literature of National Socialism and so absorb lasting values. …
In clear recognition we created these recreation camps not only for the girls already in our ranks, but also for all the others. We want to do our work with a joyful sense of responsibility, with loyal performance of our duty, and with industry. In order not to become tired and sluggish under the burden of work which each working girl carries however, we need a time which permits quiet collection of strength–free time: Our recreation camps, in which the girls are schooled and prepared for their responsibility and duty to the people and the State, are a political necessity.
Borderland
The circular which called us to camps stated: each junior girl leader will give a survey of the historical and native development of her subdistrict [Untergau] and will consider how she would work this out with junior girls [Jungmadel].
Each of us then realized anew how many living witnesses of ancient history, memorials, walls and bulwarks, legends, tales and jokes, songs and old customs are still alive in her subdistrict. We had been in camps for three days now. We had penetrated deeper and deeper into National Socialist ideology, emphasized especially the cultural desire of National Socialism; we had discussed our junior girl activities and had worked on the arrangement of our home; we had sung, gone on a short trip, and participated in practical junior girl sports. Today in our domestic evening we want to hear something about Pomeranian customs and Pomeranian History.[1]
After supper we march silently down to the sea. …
Our Pomeranian coast lies before our eyes. Now Traute, from the village of Leba up on the Polish border, tells us about the immensity of the shore and of the sea. …
Then she suddenly becomes serious: “In our subdistrict we have 200 kilometers of border. Consider what that means: 200 kilometers of border. The Versailles Treaty separates German soil from German soil, blocks our access to the nearest port, and cuts off traffic to the east. Our border city of Lauenburg is flooded with agricultural products. One farm after another in our country gets into great difficulties since, because of the demarcation of the border, there is no longer a market outlet for agricultural products. In Lauenburg itself the greatest amount of unemployment in Pomerania prevails. The Winter relief work tries to alleviate the worst conditions of misery and distress during the winter. Everything is shut down–the factories, the brickyards, and all large plants. These are the effects of the demarcation of the border on our Homeland. …
“And the border itself; visualize a forest, through which a road leads to a railroad station. The road is neutral, the forest is German on the right and Polish on the left. I cannot tell you how one feels on this road; you would have to come and experience it all yourselves.
“But we know that we are on outpost duty there. You can rely on us.” Traute is silent. We all get up, grasp each other’s hand, and our song is solemn now: “Holy Fatherland, in danger thy sons will flock around thee. … ” And then we stand around the flag and look silently toward the East.
[1] Pomerania was one of Germany’s eastern provinces along the Baltic coast. Since 1945 it has been part of Poland.
The Master Race Must Procreate, and Adopt!
Heinrich Himmler
(1936)
As early as December 13, 1934, I wrote to all SS leaders and declared that we have fought in vain if political victory was not to be followed by victory of births of good blood. The question of multiplicity of children is not a private affair of the individual, but his duty towards his ancestors and our people.
The SS has taken the first step in this direction long ago with the engagement and marriage decree of December 1931. However, the existence of sound marriage is futile if it does not result in the creation of numerous descendants.
I expect that here, too, the SS and especially the SS leader corps, will serve as a guiding example.
The minimum amount of children for a good sound marriage is four. Should unfortunate circumstances deny a married couple their own children, then every SS leader should adopt racially and hereditarily valuable children, educate them in the spirit of National Socialism, let them have education corresponding to their abilities.
The organization “Lebensborn eingetragener Verein [Spring of Life, registered society]” serves the SS leaders in the selection and adoption of qualified children. The organization “Lebensborn e. V.” is under my personal direction, is part of the Central Office for Race and Resettlement bureau of the SS, and has the following obligations:
1. Support racially, biologically, and hereditarily valuable families with many children.
2. Place and care for racially and biologically and hereditarily valuable pregnant women, who, after thorough examination of their and the progenitor’s families by the Central Office for Race and Resettlement central bureau of the SS, can be expected to produce equally valuable children.
3. Care for the children.
4. Care for the children’s mothers.
It is the honorable duty of all leaders of the central office to become members of the organization “Lebensborn e. V.” The application for admission must be filed prior to September 23, 1936.
The dues of the SS leaders of the central office, from the Hauptsturmfuehrer [rank of captain] on are determined in the enclosed tables.
I shall personally keep myself informed of the success of my appeal.
Let me remind every SS leader once more that only sacrifices of a personal and material nature have brought us success in the times of the battle, and that the further construction of Germany, to last hundreds and thousands of years, will not be possible unless each and every one of us is ready to keep doing his share in the fulfillment of his obvious duty.
Reichsfuhrer SS
[signed] H. HIMMLER
Sterilization for “The Unfit”: The Hitlerian Nightmare Begins
Nazi German Government
(1933)
1
(1) Whoever suffers from a heritable disease may be made unfruitful (sterilized) through surgical means if, in the experience of medical science, it may, with great likelihood, be expected that his descendants will suffer from serious heritable physical or mental defects.
(2) Whoever suffers from one of the following ailments is considered to be heritably diseased within the meaning of this law:
1. congenital feeble-mindedness
2. schizophrenia
3. manic-depression
4. congenital epilepsy
5. heritable St. Vitus’s dance (Huntington’s Chorea)
6. hereditary blindness
7. hereditary deafness
8. serious heritable malformations.
(3) Further, anyone suffering from chronic alcoholism may also be made unfruitful.
2
(1) Entitled to request [sterilization], is he who is to be made unfruitful. If he should be incapacitated or under guardianship because of feeble-mindedness or not yet 18 years of age, then his legal representative is empowered to make the motion. In the other cases of limited capacity the request must be consented to by the legal representative. If the person is of age and has a nurse, the consent of the latter is necessary.
(2) The request is to be accompanied by a certificate from a physician accredited by the German Reich stating that the one to be sterilized has been enlightened regarding the nature and consequences of sterilization.
(3) The request for sterilization is subject to recall.
3
Sterilization may also be recommended by
1. the official physician,
2. the official in charge of the institution in the case of inmates of a hospital, sanitarium, or prison.
4
The request is to be presented in writing to, or put into writing by the business office of, the Health-Inheritance Court (Erbgesundheitigericht). The facts underlying the request are to be certified to by a medical document or in some other way authenticated. The business office of the court must notify the official physician. …
7
(1) The proceedings before the Health-Inheritance Courts are secret. …
10
… (3) The Supreme Health-Inheritance Court has final jurisdiction.
11
(1) The surgical operation necessary for sterilization may be performed only in a hospital and by a physician accredited by the German Reich. …
18
This law becomes effective January 1, 1934.
The Centerpiece of Nazi Racial Legislation: The Nuremberg Laws
Nazi German Government
(1935)
Article 5
1. A Jew is anyone who descended from at least three grandparents who were racially full Jews. Article 2, par. 2, second sentence will apply.
2. A Jew is also one who descended from two full Jewish parents, if: (a) he belonged to the Jewish religious community at the time this law was issued, or who joined the community later; (b) he was married to a Jewish person, at the time the law was issued, or married one subsequently; (c) he is the offspring from a marriage with a Jew, in the sense of Section 1, which was contracted after the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor became effective … ; (d) he is the offspring of an extramarital relationship, with a Jew, according to Section 1, and will be born out of wedlock after July 31, 1936. …
Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor of 15 September 1935
Thoroughly convinced by the knowledge that the purity of German blood is essential for the further existence of the German people and animated by the inflexible will to safe-guard the German nation for the entire future, the Reichstag has resolved upon the following law unanimously, which is promulgated herewith:
Section 1
1. Marriages between Jews and nationals of German or kindred blood are forbidden. Marriages concluded in defiance of this law are void, even if, for the purpose of evading this law, they are concluded abroad. …
Section 2
Relation[s] outside marriage between Jews and nationals of German or kindred blood are forbidden.
Section 3
Jews will not be permitted to employ female nationals of German or kindred blood in their household.
Section 4
1. Jews are forbidden to hoist the Reich and national flag and to present the colors of the Reich. …
Section 5
1. A person who acts contrary to the prohibition of section 1 will be punished with hard labor.
2. A person who acts contrary to the prohibition of section 2 will be punished with imprisonment or with hard labor.
3. A person who acts contrary to the provisions of sections 3 or 4 will be punished with imprisonment up to a year and with a fine or with one of these penalties. …
Collectivization in the Soviet Union: A Peasant’s Report
Ivan Trofimovivh Chuyunkov
(1930)
For a long time I have wanted to write you about what you have written on collectivization in your newspaper Nasha Derevnya.
In the first place I will give you my address so that you will not suspect that I am a kulak or one of his parasites. I am a poor peasant. I have one hut, one barn, one horse, 3 dessyatins[1] of land, and a wife and three children. Dear Comrades, as a subscriber to your newspaper … I found in No. 13/85 for February 15 a letter from a peasant who writes about the life of kolkhoz construction. I, a poor peasant, reading this letter, fully agreed with it. This peasant described life in the kolkhoz completely correctly. Isn’t it true that all the poor peasants and middle peasants do not want to go into the kolkhoz at all, but that you drive them in by force? For example, I’ll take my village soviet of Yushkovo. A brigade of soldiers came to us. This brigade went into all the occupied homes, and do you think that they organized a kolkhoz? No, they did not organize it. The hired laborers, and the poor peasants came out against it and said they did not want corvee, they did not want serfdom … I’ll write more of my village soviet. When the Red Army brigade left, they sent us a kolkhoz organizer from Bryansk okrug. And whom do you think this Comrade signed up? Not poor peasants, not hired laborers, but kulaks, who, sensing their own ruin, enter the kolkhoz. And your organizer … takes to evil deeds. At night, together with the Komsomolites, he takes everything away from the peasants, both surpluses and taxes, which you fleece from the peasants. Of course agricultural taxes are necessary, self-taxation is necessary, fire taxes are necessary, tractorization is necessary. But where can the toiling peasant get this money if not from the seeds of his products? And these Party people stay up all night and rob the peasants. If he brings a pud, if he brings 5, it’s all the same. I would propose that you let the peasant live in greater freedom than he does now, and then we won’t beg you to get rid of such a gang, for we ourselves will eliminate them.
Trouble Down on the Kolkhoz: An Official Report on Collectivization
O.G.P.U. (Soviet Secret Police)
(ca. 1932)
In the kolkohz “Stalin,” Markovsk village soviet, Krasnyi raion, which includes more than 40 households, there exists the most complete negligence. Some members of the board of the kolkhoz systematically engage in drinking and abuses … The chairman of the board … a former middle peasant, systematically gets drunk and does not guide the work of the kolkhoz at all … about 20 hectares[1] of oats lie cut down, which, as a result of the fact that they were not harvested, almost completely rotted … There remained unmowed 1 1/2 hectares of oats, which were completely spoiled. The winter wheat, which was mowed on time, remained lying in the fields, thanks to which it rotted. Almost all the pulled flax is still lying in the field and is rotting, as a result of which the flaxseed is almost completely ruined. There are about 100 hectares of as yet unmown meadows, while the socialized livestock in the kolkhoz are not supplied with fodder for the winter, and according to calculations [feed] is about 4,000 puds [72 tons] short. With the funds of the kolkhoz 4 former kulak homes were bought for the reconstruction of a cattle yard which the kolkhoz greatly needed, but these buildings are being pilfered by the kolkhozniks and burned as firewood. The equipment and harnesses of the kolkhoz are not repaired on time, as a result of which future use has been made impossible … Up to the present time no income has been earned by the kolkhoz. At present, as a result of mismanagement and abuses on the part of the board of the kolkhoz, certain kolkhozniks … talk of leaving …
[1] A hectare is about 2.5 acres
The Workers Condemn Soviet Policies in the Factories
O.G.P.U. (Soviet Secret Police)
(1929)
As soon as the meeting opened, the weavers made their way to the exit, and, as a result, of all the weavers working in the second shift, not more than 100 remained … The weavers as they were leaving, shouted: “You well-fed devils have sucked the juices out of us enough. You hypocritical wall-eyes are pulling the wool over our eyes. For twelve years already you have driveled and agitated and stuffed our heads. Before you shouted that the factory owners exploited us, but the factory owners did not force us to work in 4 shifts, and there was enough of everything in the shops. Now we work in 4 shifts. Where before 4 men worked, now only one works. You are bloodsuckers, and that’s not all, you still want to draw blood out of our veins. If you go to a shop now and want to buy something, the shops are empty; there are no shoes, no clothing; there is nothing the worker needs. But the [cost of] shares in the cooperative increase[s] every day. Before we got along without any shares, and there was enough of everything. When the administration had to transfer the factory to an uninterrupted shift, they built refreshment stands, sold rolls, did everything for the worker so that he would support the proposal, but as soon as this project was put into effect what happened? They closed the refreshment stands, stopped selling rolls, again everything was as before. After 8 hours of work at the benches you are so worn out that your eyes are dimmed, and then they come to drown your senses completely. They have found a gimmick which they can keep using–you comrades are the managers of the factory. But when you look at the managers, you will see how they throw hundreds of us out of the factory onto the labor market. Here are managers for you! Before the bourgeoisie during a strike used to fire two or three participants and then let it go at that, and now not a year goes by without their cutting down. … ”
An American Worker Behind the Uralsat the Magnitogorsk Blast Furnaces
John Scott
(1932-1935)
I spent two days stumbling around the immense iron mine which was producing upwards of five million tons of ore a year–nearly twenty-five per cent of the Soviet Union’s total output. Twenty-five imported electric locomotives were at work pulling modern fifty-ton dump cars from cutting to crusher and thence to the agglomeration plant. I watched the electric excavators shoveling ore at the rate of fifty tons per minute, or else standing with their arms extended awaiting the arrival of empty cars to fill–a sight which always reminded me of a man surprised while eating, frozen with his fork halfway to his open mouth.
The mine did not appeal to me as a place to work. I went back to the blast furnaces to survey the possibilities there.
I had seldom seen any but the seedy side of the blast furnaces. Our gang of construction workers was called in only to do repair work when something went wrong.
During the winters of 1933 and 1934 the whole blast-furnace department was periodically shut down. The cold winds played havoc with the big furnaces. Gas lines, air lines, water pipes, all froze. Tons of ice hung down all around, sometimes collapsing steel structures with their weight. One of the four furnaces was shut down for general repairs most of the time.
One job we all remembered vividly was the demolition work after the disastrous explosion on No. 2 in 1934. We were kept busy night and day for two months. Owing to incorrect handling of the tapping hole a water jacket burned through and several cubic yards of water came into contact with the molten iron. The resultant blast blew the roof off the cast house, badly damaged the side of the furnace, and seriously injured everybody who was near-by at the time. No. 2 was shut down for two months for repairs, which cost the country some fifty thousand tons of iron. The repairs themselves cost a million and a half roubles, and occupied construction workers who could have been doing other things. Several people were tried in an attempt to fix responsibility for this accident, but there was no convictions. For two weeks previous to the disaster everybody connected with the furnace had known that the tapping hole was in bad shape. The foreman told the superintendent, who told the director, who told Zavenyagin, who telephoned Ordjonokidze, the People’s Commissar of the USSR for the whole industry. Nobody realized the dangers of a bad tapping hole, and no one wanted to take the responsibility for shutting down the furnace prematurely at a time when the country needed pig iron very badly.
Inexperience and carelessness took a heavy toll in the blast-furnace transport system also. There were never enough ladles, mainly because of the fact that the railroad workers failed to put them squarely under the iron spouts or else neglected to take them away in time. In either case the ladles were inundated with hot iron, which ate through axles, wheels, and rails. …
By 1935 conditions were much improved. When I went scouting for a job I was struck by the appearance of No. 2. It was clean as a billiard table, the walls were whitewashed, tools hung neatly in their places. The gang went about its work quietly and efficiently.
The personnel was getting enough to eat. Everybody had given up trying to idolize proletarian labor on a komsomol[1] blast furnace (work on any blast furnace in any country is hot, unhealthy, dangerous, and gruelingly hard). The workers were enjoying some of the good things of life outside the mill. Their living conditions had improved, so that their attention could be focused on these things and their work regarded more realistically, as necessary labor which must be done efficiently and well in order to make possible the sunnier side of life. This point of view made possible strict labor discipline and efficient work. …
I knew a number of people working on the rolling mills, and one afternoon I set out to visit some of them. I walked down the immense blooming mill, where eight-ton ingots were tossed and shot around by mechanized cranes and power-driven rollers, and entered the operator’s cabin where a close friend of Masha’s [Scott's Russian wife] worked.
Shura was an operator. She sat in a white cabin with large double glass windows directly over the rolls of the mill, and operated a score of control buttons and a dozen foot pedals. One set in motion the rolls which brought the ingots to the mill; another regulated their speed; several more controlled the large mechanical fingers which turned the ingot over; others reversed the direction, and so on. Shura had under her control a ten-thousand-horsepower direct-current motor which reversed its direction of rotation every ten or fifteen seconds and which had received the full benefit of several decades of the best electrical engineering experience in the United States, and a score of auxiliary motors of various kinds. The place was as clean as the operating room of a good hospital, and before I was fairly inside the door an electrician came up and told me no one was supposed to come in because it might upset the operator. They were trying to make a record, he told me. According to the project they should roll an ingot in less than a minute. Actually it took 3.2 minutes on the average and the record for an eight-hour shift was only two minutes, and an average of fifteen per cent of their production was not up to specifications. The electrician made a whole speech until a shortage of ingots caused a shutdown and Shura left her levers and came and talked to me.
She was a village girl who had been very sick, which had been the cause of her taking the operators’ course instead of doing more active work. She was twenty-three, had the high cheekbones and open features of peasant stock, and the rather pale, nervous expression which had come as a result of her months in the hospital and subsequent work as blooming-mill operator. She came to work always with a red kerchief around her head, and the same serious, high-strung expression. She was never late, did not have to take off for a smoke like many of the men, and never came with a hang-over. Moreover, she had learned the technique of operating the blooming mill. She understood the electrical controls which she operated, and while her knowledge of theoretical physics was not extensive (she had gone to school only seven years), she knew enough to be a thoroughly competent operator. Beyond this it was a question of a simple mechanical and nervous dexterity, and at this she was a master. She was one of the best operators in Magnitogorsk. …
The Party Cell in Mill 500 included fifty-six members and candidates and twenty-one sympathizers. (Before one can become a full-fledged party member, it is necessary to go through the preliminary stages of sympathizer and candidate.) Weissberg, two of his assistants, three of the four shift engineers, four foremen, and the general foreman were all members of the party. Party members were privileged in that it was easier for them to get scholarships to schools, obtain new apartments, or get vacations in August instead of November.
But, on the other hand, a great deal more responsibility was put on them. If something went wrong and the brigade spoiled a job, a worker who was a party member was held as much or more responsible than the nonparty brigadier. In case of vacancies in administrative posts, a party member was usually advanced faster than a non-party member of the same capabilities.
Mitya, as party organizer, probably more than any one person was responsible for the production successes in Mill 500. He had an efficient tongue, and knew how to talk to the workers, making them ashamed of bad work; getting them to try harder by making them understand what they were working for. He was fired with such tangible ardor for the construction of Socialism and everything connected with it that it impressed and influenced everyone with whom he came in contact.
Administrative and technical questions were discussed at regular closed party meetings, and inasmuch as most of the administrators were party members, important decisions could be, and were, made.
The development of ‘vigilance’ was a major party task. All party members had to be on the watch all the time for sabotage, spying, propaganda of the class enemy, counter-revolution, and similar phenomena. This boiled down to a rather abnormal interest of party members in other people’s business and continual ‘tattletaling,’ and resultant suspicion and distrust particuarly among the administrative personnel.
[1] Communist Youth League, to which many Magnitogorsk workers belonged
One Woman’s Struggle Against Stalinist Terror
Zinaida Cherkovskaya
(1936)
To the secretary of the Western Oblast Committee of the CPSU(b), Comrade Rumyantsev
Ivan Petrovich:
The matter about which I have decided to write you concerns the CPSU(b) member Melnikov, who works with you in the Obkom. In the investigation of Party documents he received a reprimand because of me, and because of this my life has been completely shattered, and therefore I cannot remain silent. I feel that I should write you everything frankly and honestly.
I am the daughter of a railroad employee. My father worked on the railroad for 35 years, 25 years at Pochinok Station, Western Oblast. A few years ago, at the age of 17, I married a veterinarian, who, upon finishing the institute, was assigned to Pochinok. It may have been because he was twice as old as I, or for another reason, but from the first days of our life together it became obvious that we had nothing in common, we were different types of people, strangers. At first I did not have enough resoluteness to speak of divorce, and then a baby came and I lived for the greater part of a year with my parents in Pochinok. When my husband was transferred to the Brasov stud farm, I started to study at the Brasov technical school, and he at the same time found himself a more suitable woman and began to live with her, although unofficially. I did not finish the technical school, because I did not want to live where he was, and I went to Moscow for a half-year course, leaving my daughter with my mother. After finishing the course, I returned to Pochinok and remained there to take care of my sick mother, who died within a year. From the moment I left Brasov I had no correspondence with my former husband. He lived openly with another woman, but no one in Pochinok, except my parents knew that we had separated. I was ashamed to talk about it. In 1932 I learned that he had been arrested for participation in a wreckers’ organization and was exiled for 3 years. When things went badly with him he remembered me and our daughter and began to write, to beg forgiveness, etc. I never loved him, and after all this he didn’t mean anything to me at all, but for the sake of our daughter I agreed to write him once in a while about her. After the death of my mother I continued to live with my daughter and my father in Pochinok. I began to work as a proofreader in the editorial office of the Pochinok Kolkhoznik. I worked enthusiastically, felt free, independent, wanted very much to live, wanted happiness, which I had never known. After a time Melnikov was appointed editor of the P.K. We became acquainted and liked each other. We began to see each other. On the first night I told him everything about myself, so that there would be no misunderstandings afterwards. I’m not going to begin to speak about him, but I fell head over heels in love with him. After some time we became intimate. Soon he was appointed assistant secretary of the raikom of the CPSU(b), and under the pretext that he had a great deal of work, we began to see each other less often, and after a time I was dismissed from work. It was Melnikov who did this, since there was not a new editor. It is impossible to express in words how I suffered. I had put my whole soul into my work, heard only approval from those around me, and the man who knew me best of all dismissed me from work. Often I was insistently pursued by the thought of suicide. This is cowardice, I know, but I felt that it was easier to die than to live without the man in whom I saw all happiness, all joy for myself. My little daughter forced me to dispel these thoughts.
I went to Smolensk and got a job as a proofreader in the House of the Press, and although I was the youngest proofreader, they soon appointed me copy editor on the kolkhoz newspaper. Soon Melnikov began to study in the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, and we met and spent our free time together, but he lived in the dormitory and I with my sister, since it was difficult to find a room in which to live together, and furthermore, it was easier and better for him to study while living with his fellow students. We lived in the hope that after he finished his studies we would finally settle things. But in the fall of 1935 I learned that they had created a whole case against Melnikov because he was seeing me. We began to see each other less frequently, and finally parted. Later I learned that they had reprimanded him because of me. I do not know to this day of what I was accused–nobody told me. But I was completely devoted to Melnikov, lived for his interests, and the fact that he had unpleasantness on account of me was painful and incomprehensible to me. My position was desperate.
After working a year in the House of the Press, I left work in August, as Melnikov had suggested. When I learned of his reprimand, I went to pieces. It seemed to me that not only had I no right to work, but that I could not live with people. I left my sister without telling her the reason, and I did not want to live with my father. I feared that there would be unpleasantness for him on account of me, although he was in the decline of life.
In January 1936 I received a letter from my former husband, in which he wrote that they had freed him before his term was up and that he had worked for a year in the system of the NKVD in Kazakhstan. At the end he wrote: if during these four years you did not get married, during your vacation come to visit me with your daughter, to see Kazakhstan. At that time I could not reason sensibly. I decided that my life was at an end anyway, and I went to him with my daughter, but I could not live with him for one day. I told him I had loved somebody else for three years now, and that only despair could have pushed me to this rash journey. He decided that I had sacrificed myself for the sake of my daughter. He really does not know the situation, and I did not want to tell him. He hopes that sometime I will “quiet down” and will be able to live with him. In April he went to a health resort and I went to my relatives in Smolensk. I am not deceived in regard to him. I am not a young girl. I am 24 years old and have lived through many adversities of life, and things were good with me only with Melnikov. I will not be able to fall out of love with him or forget him, and I never want to build my life without him. I met him accidentally in Smolensk, told him how much I had suffered without him, and he told me that I should live only in my work, but that we should not see each other.
But I think I shall go mad. I don’t want to be reconciled to it. I cannot get it through my head that in our free country, where the children of kulaks are not responsible for the crimes of their parents, I should be tortured my whole life because my former husband was once sentenced, and I do not have the right to be the wife of the man I love. Though he is a Party member, I am not an alien. I have concealed nothing, I have deceived no one, and I do not want to be a criminal without a crime.
I have recounted my whole life and all my “crimes” to you, Ivan Petrovich, more frankly than to my own father. At the cost of my life I would be happy to prove to you the truthfulness of my words.
I trust you implicitly, and whatever your opinion will be on this problem, it will be law for me.
ZINAIDA CHERKOVSKAYA
Stalinist Interrogation Techniques Revealed
Vladimir Tchernavin
(1930)
It was my second day in prison–my second cross-examination. I was called before the tea ration was given out and had only time to eat an apple.
“How do you do?” the examining officer asked, scanning me attentively to see if I showed signs of a sleepless night.
“All right.”
“It isn’t so good in your cell. You are in 22?”
“A cell like any other.”
“Well, did you do any thinking? Are you going to tell the truth today?”
“Yesterday I told only the truth.”
He laughed. “What will it be today–not the truth?”
Then he returned to the subject of the cell.
“I tried to choose a better cell for you, but we are so crowded. I hope we will come to an understanding and that I will not be forced to change the regime I have ordered for you. The third category is the mildest: exercise in the yard, permission to receive food parcels from outside, a newspaper and books. The first two categories are much stricter. Remember, however, that it depends entirely on me; any minute you may be deprived of everything and transferred to solitary confinement. Or rather, this depends not on me but on your own behavior, your sincerity. The more frank your testimony, the better will be the conditions of your imprisonment. … ”
He spoke slowly, looking me straight in the eye, emphasizing his words with evident pleasure and relish, watching for their effect.
“Did you know Scherbakoff? He was a strong man, but I broke him and forced him to confess.”
With great difficulty I controlled myself before replying.
“I don’t doubt for a minute that you use torture, and if you believe that this assists in discovering the truth and speeding up the investigation, and since Soviet laws permit its use, I would suggest that you don’t give up mediaeval methods: a little fire is a wonderful measure. Try it! I am not afraid of you. Even with that you can’t get anything out of me.”
“Well, we will see about that later. Now let’s get down to business. Let’s talk about your acquaintances. Did you know V. K. Tolstoy, the wrecker, executed in connection with the case of the ’48′?”
“Yes, I knew him. How could I not know him when he was the director of the fishing industry in the north?” I replied in frank astonishment. “We both worked in it for more than twenty years.”
“And did you knew him well?”
“Very well.”
“How long did you know him?”
“From childhood.”
His manner changed completely; he hurriedly picked up a statement sheet and placed it in front of me. “Write down your confession.”
“What confession?”
“That you knew Tolstoy, that you were in friendly relation with him from such and such a time. I see that we will come to an understanding with you; your frankness will be appreciated. Write.”
He evidently was in a hurry, did not quite know what he was saying, afraid that I might reverse my statements.
I took the sheet and wrote down what I had said.
“Excellent. Let’s continue.”
Then followed a barrage of questions about Tolstoy, about Scherbakoff and other people that I had known. He did not find me quite so tractable and we launched into a battle of wits that kept up hour after hour. He questioned me with insistence and in great detail, trying without success to make me give dates.
“You’ll not succeed in outwitting me,” he snapped sharply. “I advise you not to try. I am going home to dinner now and you will stay here till evening. This examination will continue–not for a day or two, but for months and, if necessary, for years. Your strength is equal to mine. I will force you to tell what we need.”
After threatening me still further he handed me some sheets of paper.
“You are going to state in writing your opinion regarding the building of a fertilization factory in Murmansk, its equipment and work in the future. I’ll soon be back; when I return, your comments on these questions must be completed.”
He put on his overcoat and left. His assistant took his place, and I busied myself with my writing. It was three or four hours before he returned, already evening.
Although I had eaten almost nothing for three days. I was still in good fighting form. He questioned me about the buying of a ship from abroad, trying to make me say that here was “wrecking,” because the price had been exorbitant and the ship itself had proved unsatisfactory. It was most confusing and his questions farfetched. We talked and we argued, but I would not give the answers he wanted.
He began on another tack. …
“All right,” he said. “And what is your attitude regarding the subject of the fish supply in the Sea of Barents in connection with the construction of trawlers as provided for by the Five-Year Plan?”
Now he had broached a subject with which I could have a direct connection. The evening was already changing into night, but I was still sitting in the same chair. I was becoming unconscious of time: was it my second day in prison or my tenth? In spite of the depressing weariness, mental and physical, which was taking hold of me, I told him that I thought the fresh fish supply should be minutely and thoroughly investigated. I tried to make him see the hazards of the fishing industry in Murmansk and the enormous equipment that would be necessary to meet the proposals of the Five-Year Plan.
“And thus you confess that you doubted the practicability of the Five-Year Plan?” he said with a smile of smug satisfaction.
What could one say? I believed, as did everybody, that the plan was absurd, that it could not be fulfilled. For exactly such statements–no, for only a suspicion of having such thoughts–forty-eight men had been shot. …
A Soviet “Show Trial” and Its Usual Resolution
Andrei Vyshinsky and Karl Radek
(1937)
The President: The session is resumed. Comrade Vyshinsky, Procurator of the U.S.S.R., will speak for the Prosecution.
Vyshinsky: Comrade Judges and members of the Supreme Court of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In proceeding to perform my last duty in the present case I cannot but deal with several highly important specific features of the present trial.
In my opinion these specific features are, first of all, that the present trial, in a certain sense, sums up the criminal activities of the Trotskyite conspirators who for many years have systematically, and with the assistance of the most repulsive and despicable weapons, fought against the Soviet system, against the Soviet state, against the Soviet power and against our Party. This trial sums up the struggle waged against the Soviet state and the Party by these people, who started it long before the present time, started it during the life of our great teacher and organizer of the Soviet state, Lenin. While Lenin was alive these people fought against Lenin; and after his death they fought against his great disciple, that loyal guardian of Lenin’s behests and the continuator of his cause–Stalin.
Another specific feature of this trial is that it, like a searchlight, illuminates the most remote recesses, the secret byways, the disgusting hidden corners of the Trotskyite underground.
This trial has revealed and proved the stupid obstinacy, the reptile cold-bloodedness, the cool calculation of professional criminals with which the Trotskyite bandits have been waging their struggle against the U.S.S.R. They stuck at nothing–neither wrecking, nor diversions, nor espionage, nor terrorism, nor treason to their country.
When several months ago, in this very hall, in this very dock, the members of the so-called united Trotskyite-Zinovievite terrorist centre were sitting; when the Supreme Court, represented by the Military Collegium, was trying those criminals, all of us listened to the story of their crimes that unfolded itself like a nightmare scene before us, with horror and revulsion.
Every honest man in our country, every honest man in every country in the world could not then but say:
This is the abyss of degradation!
This is the limit, the last boundary of moral and political decay!
This is the diabolical infinitude of crime!
Every honest son of our country thought to himself: such hideous crimes cannot be repeated. There cannot be in our country any more people who have fallen so low and who have so despicably betrayed us.
But now we are again overcome with the sentiments that we felt not long ago! Once again across our anxious and wrathful vision pass frightful scenes of monstrous crime, of monstrous treachery, of monstrous treason. …
Many years ago our Party, the working class, our whole people, rejected the Trotskyite-Zinovievite platform as an anti-Soviet, anti-socialist platform. Our people banished Trotsky from our country; his accomplices were expelled from the ranks of the Party as traitors to the cause of the working class and socialism. Trotsky and Zinoviev were routed, but they did not subside; they did not lay down their arms.
The Trotskyites went underground, they donned the mask of repentance and pretended that they had disarmed. Obeying the instructions of Trotsky, Pyatakov and the other leaders of this gang of criminals, pursuing a policy of duplicity, camouflaging themselves, they again penetrated into the Party, again penetrated into Soviet offices, here and there they even managed to creep into responsible positions of state, concealing for a time, as has now been established beyond a shadow of doubt, their old Trotskyite, anti-Soviet wares in their secret apartments, together with arms, codes, passwords, connections and cadres.
Beginning with the formation of an anti-Party faction, passing to sharper and sharper methods of struggle against the Party, becoming, after their expulsion from the Party, the principal mouthpiece of all anti-Soviet groups and trends, they became transformed into the vanguard of the fascists operating on the direct instructions of foreign intelligence services. …
The President: Accused Radek.
Radek: Citizen Judges, after I have confessed to the crime of treason to the country there can be no question of a speech in defence. There are no arguments by which a grown man in full possession of his senses could defend treason to his country. Neither can I plead extenuating circumstances. A man who has spent 35 years in the labour movement cannot extenuate his crime by any circumstances when he confesses to a crime of treason to the country. I cannot even plead that I was led to err from the true path by Trotsky. I was already a grown man with fully formed views when I met Trotsky. And while in general Trotsky’s part in the development of these counter-revolutionary organizations is tremendous, at the time I entered this path of struggle against the Party, Trotsky’s authority for me was minimal.
I joined the Trotskyite organization not for the sake of Trotsky’s petty theories, the rottenness of which I realized at the time of my first exile, and not because I recognized his authority as a leader, but because there was no other group upon which I could rely in those political aims which I had set myself. I had been connected with this group in the past, and therefore I went with this group. I did not go because I was drawn into the struggle, but as a result of my own appraisal of the situation, as the result of a path I had voluntarily chosen. And for this I bear complete and sole responsibility–a responsibility which you will measure according to the letter of the law and according to your conscience as judges of the Soviet Socialist Republic.
And with this I might conclude my last plea, if I did not consider it necessary to object to the view of the trial–as regards a partial, not the main, point–which was given here and which I must reject, not from my own personal standpoint, but from a political standpoint. I have admitted my guilt and I have given full testimony concerning it, not from the simple necessity of repentance–repentance may be an internal state of mind which one need not necessarily share with or reveal to anybody–not from love of the truth is general–the truth is a very bitter one, and I have already said that I would prefer to have been shot thrice rather than to have had to admit it–but I must admit my guilt from motives of the general benefit that this truth must bring. …
… this trial has revealed two important facts. The intertwining of the counter-revolutionary organizations with all the counter-revolutionary forces in the country–that is one fact. But this fact is tremendous objective proof. Wrecking work can be established by technical experts; the terrorists’ activities were connected with so many people that the testimony of these people, apart from material evidence, presents an absolute picture. But the trial is bicentric, and it has another important significance. It has revealed the smithy of war, and has shown that the Trotskyite organization became an agency of the forces which are fomenting a new world war. …
And finally, we must say to the whole world, to all who are struggling for peace: Trotskyism is the instrument of the warmongers. We must say that with a firm voice, because we have learned it by our own bitter experience. It has been extremely hard for us to admit this, but it is a historical fact, for the truth of which we shall pay with our heads. …
Hitler Plans the Next European War
Colonel Friedrich Hossbach
(1937)
The Fuhrer began by stating that the subject of the present conference was of such importance that its discussion would, in other countries, certainly be a matter for a full Cabinet meeting, but he–the Fuhrer–had rejected the idea of making it a subject of discussion before the wider circle of the Reich Cabinet just because of the importance of the matter. His exposition to follow was the fruit of thorough deliberation and the experiences of his 4 1/2 years of power. He wished to explain to the gentlemen present his basic ideas concerning the opportunities for the development of our position in the field of foreign affairs and its requirements, and he asked, in the interests of a long-term German policy, that his exposition be regarded, in the event of his death, as his last will and testament.
The Fuhrer then continued:
The aim of German policy was to make secure and to preserve the racial community [Volksmasse] and to enlarge it. It was therefore a question of space. …
Germany’s problem could only be solved by means of force and this was never without attendant risk. The campaigns of Frederick the Great for Silesia and Bismarck’s wars against Austria and France had involved unheard-of risk, and the swiftness of the Prussian action in 1870 had kept Austria from entering the war. If one accepts as the basis of the following exposition the resort to force with its attendant risks, then there remain still to be answered the questions “when” and “how.” In this matter there were three cases [Falle] to be dealt with:
Case 1: Period 1943-1945
After this date only a change for the worse, from our point of view, could be expected.
The equipment of the army, navy, and Luftwaffe, as well as the formation of the officer corps, was nearly completed. Equipment and armament were modern; in further delay there lay the danger of their obsolescence. In particular, the secrecy of “special weapons” could not be preserved forever. The recruiting of reserves was limited to current age groups; further drafts from older untrained age groups were no longer available.
Our relative strength would decrease in relation to the rearmament which would by then have been carried out by the rest of the world. If we did not act by 1943-1945, any year could, in consequence of a lack of reserves, produce the food crisis, to cope with which the necessary foreign exchange was not available, and this must be regarded as a “waning point of the regime.” Besides, the world was expecting our attack and was increasing its counter-measures from year to year. It was while the rest of the world was still preparing its defenses [sich abriegele] that we were obliged to take the offensive.
Nobody knew today what the situation would be in the years 1943-1945. One thing only was certain, that we could not wait longer.
On the one hand there was the great Wehrmacht, and the necessity of maintaining it at its present level, the aging of the movement and of its leaders; and on the other, the prospect of a lowering of the standard of living and of a limitation of the birth rate, which left no choice but to act. If the Fuhrer was still living, it was his unalterable resolve to solve Germany’s problem of space at the latest by 1943-1945. The necessity for action before 1943-1945 would arise in cases 2 and 3.
Case 2
If internal strife in France should develop into such a domestic crisis as to absorb the French Army completely and render it incapable of use for war against Germany, then the time for action against the Czechs had come.
Case 3
If France is so embroiled by a war with another state that she cannot “proceed” against Germany.
For the improvement of our politico-military position our first objective, in the event of our being embroiled in war, must be to overthrow Czechoslovakia and Austria simultaneously in order to remove the threat to our flank in any possible operation against the West. In a conflict with France it was hardly to be regarded as likely that the Czechs would declare war on us on the very same day as France. The desire to join in the war would, however, increase among the Czechs in proportion to any weakening on our part and then her participation could clearly take the form of an attack toward Silesia, toward the north or toward the west.
If the Czechs were overthrown and a common German-Hungarian frontier achieved, a neutral attitude on the part of Poland could be the more certainly counted on in the event of a Franco-German conflict. Our agreements with Poland only retained their force as long as Germany’s strength remained unshaken. In the event of German setbacks a Polish action against East Prussia, and possibly against Pomerania and Silesia as well, had to be reckoned with.
On the assumption of a development of the situation leading to action on our part as planned, in the years 1943-1945, the attitude of France, Britain, Italy, Poland, and Russia could probably be estimated as follows:
Actually, the Fuhrer believed that almost certainly Britain, and probably France as well, had already tacitly written off the Czechs and were reconciled to the fact that this question would be cleared up in due course by Germany. Difficulties connected with the Empire, and the prospect of being once more entangled in a protracted European War, were decisive considerations for Britain against participation in a war against Germany. Britain’s attitude would certainly not be without influence on that of France. An attack by France without British support, and with the prospect of the offensive being brought to a standstill on our western fortifications, was hardly probable. … It would of course be necessary to maintain a strong defense [eine Abriegelung] on our western frontier during the prosecution of our attack on the Czechs and Austria. And in this connection it had to be remembered that the defense measures of the Czechs were growing in strength from year to year, and that the actual worth of the Austrian Army also was increasing in the course of time. Even though the populations concerned, especially of Czechoslovakia, were not sparse, the annexation of Czechoslovakia and Austria would mean an acquisition of footstuffs for 5 to 6 million people, on the assumption that the compulsory emigration of 2 million people from Czechoslovakia and 1 million people from Austria was practicable. The incorporation of these two States with Germany meant, from the politico-military point of view, a substantial advantage because it would mean shorter and better frontiers, the freeing of forces for other purposes, and the possibility of creating new units up to a level of about twelve divisions, that is, one new division per million inhabitants.
Italy was not expected to object to the elimination of the Czechs, but it was impossible at the moment to estimate what her attitude on the Austrian question would be; that depended essentially upon whether the Duce were still alive.
The degree of surprise and the swiftness of our action were decisive factors for Poland’s attitude. Poland–with Russia at her rear–will have little inclination to engage in war against a victorious Germany.
Military intervention by Russia must be countered by the swiftness of our operations; however, whether such an intervention was a practical contingency at all was, in view of Japan’s attitude, more than doubtful. …
Allied Appeasement Denounced: The Shame of Munich
Winston Churchill
(1938)
Mr. Churchill. … I will therefore, begin by saying the most unpopular and most unwelcome thing. I will begin by saying what everybody would like to ignore or forget but which must nevertheless be stated, namely, that we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat, and that France has suffered even more than we have.
Viscountess Astor. Nonsense!
Mr. Churchill. When the noble Lady cries “Nonsense,” she could not have heard the Chancellor of the Exchequer admit in his illuminating and comprehensive speech just now that Herr Hitler had gained in this particular leap forward in substance all he set out to gain. The utmost my right hon. Friend, the prime minister, has been able to secure by all his immense exertions, by all the great efforts and mobilization which took place in this country, and by all the anguish and strain through which we have passed in this country, the utmost he has been able to gain [Hon. Members: "Is Peace"]. I thought I might be allowed to make that point in its due place, and I propose to deal with it. The utmost he has been able to gain for Czechoslovakia and in the matters which were in dispute has been that the German dictator, instead of snatching his victuals from the table has been content to have them served to him course by course.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer said it was the first time Herr Hitler has been made to retract (I think that was the word) in any degree. We really must not waste time, after all this long debate, upon the difference between the positions reached at Berchtesgaden, at Godesberg and at Munich. They can be very simply epitomized, if the House will permit me to vary the metaphor. One pound was demanded at the pistol’s point. When it was given, two pounds were demanded at the pistol’s point. Finally, the dictator consented to take one pound, seventeen shillings and six pence, and the rest in promises of good will for the future.
Now I come to the point, which was mentioned to me just now from some quarters of the House, about the saving of peace. No one has been a more resolute and uncompromising struggler for peace than the prime minister. Everyone knows that. Never has there been such intense and undaunted determination to maintain and to secure peace. This is quite true. Nevertheless, I am not quite clear why there was so much danger of Great Britain or France being involved in a war with Germany at this juncture if, in fact, they were ready all along to sacrifice Czechoslovakia. …
There never can be any absolute certainty that there will be a fight if one side is determined that it will give way completely. …
I have always held the view that the maintenance of peace depends upon the accumulation of deterrents against the aggressor, coupled with a sincere effort to redress grievances. Herr Hitler’s victory, like so many of the famous struggles that have governed the fate of the world, was won upon the narrowest of margins. After the seizure of Austria in March, we faced this problem in our debates. I ventured to appeal to the government to go a little further than the prime minister went, and to give a pledge that in conjunction with France and other powers they will guarantee the security of Czechoslovakia, while the Sudeten Deutsch question was being examined either by a League of Nations commission, or some other impartial body, and I still believe that if that course had been followed events would not have fallen into this disastrous state. …
France and Great Britain together, especially if they had maintained a close contact with Russia, which certainly was not done, would have been able in those days in the summer, when they had the prestige, to influence many of the smaller states of Europe. … Such a combination, prepared at the time when the German dictator was not deeply and irrevocably committed to his new adventure, would, I believe, have given strength to all those forces in Germany which resisted this departure, this new design. …
All is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness. She has suffered in every respect by her association with the Western democracies and with the League of Nations, of which she has always been an obedient servant. … We in this country, as in other liberal and democratic countries, have a perfect right to exalt the principle of self-determination, but it comes ill out of the mouths of those in totalitarian states who deny even the smallest element of toleration to every section and creed within their bounds. But, however you put it, this particular block of land, this mass of human beings to be handed over, has never expressed the desire to go into the Nazi rule. I do not believe that even now–if their opinion could be asked, they would exercise such an option. …
I venture to think that in the future the Czechoslovak state cannot be maintained as an independent entity. You will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured only by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi regime. … It is the most grievous consequence which we have yet experienced of what we have done and of what we have left undone in the last five years: five years of futile good intention, five years of eager search for the line of least resistance, five years of uninterrupted retreat of British power, five years of neglect of our air defenses. …
News from the Berlin Homefront
Ursula von Kardorff
(1944)
Berlin, 31 May 1944 Pessimism is increasing. The Russian front is drawing closer. Where should my flight take me, I often ask myself, because I am prepared to flee. But for the time being we are still dancing on a stage that grows smaller and smaller and is surrounded by an abyss.
Spent the day before yesterday with Ulrich Dortenbach in the Rose Theater. [Saw] Lessing’sMiss Sara Simpson, starring Inge of Austria. This theater in the eastern section of the city, in the midst of the destroyed but, even in earlier times, desolate Frankfurter Allee, is one of the cheeriest showplaces in Berlin. Workers, craftsmen, housewives, and the businessmen who live in this section have had season tickets for decades. Here one is able to find a piece of the Berlin of old, no “class-conscious proletarians,” no KdF [Kraft durch Freude, Strength Through Joy] functions, no termites, only individual human beings. Hauptmann, Ibsen, Schiller, Shakespeare, and good old burlesque are on the program. Never trash and never hokum. In the refreshment room–a well-proportioned room with mirrors built in 1877–a small orchestra played during intermission. I could have caressed them all, musicians as well as audience; these people, with their tired faces and stooping posture, who in spite of difficult conditions, poor nourishment, and the constant threat of air raids, come here to find release from tension.
6 June 1944 It began tonight. The invasion. Excitement among the editorial staff. We have received instructions to write rejoicingly about this long-desired event. Hurrah, the time is finally here; now we will show them how we will chase them out again. Finally, we are moving toward the ultimate victory!
However, all ’round [there is] only skepticism and fear of air raids. Great doubt if the Atlantic fortifications will hold.
10 June 1944 As a substitute [for the editor] I was charged with composing the front page, and had to carry a photograph from the Times which showed the invasion. Incredible that it was cleared by the censors. It is a frightening sight–hundreds of little dots, paratroopers and tiny boats; it looks like a swarm of grasshoppers attacking the coast. The defense appears meager. In any case, they have gotten a foothold, and “Fortress Europe” is now besieged from two sides as well as by air. Maybe now things will move rapidly.
Berlin is in a curious mood. A mixture of apathy and inordinate pleasure-seeking. The janitor’s wife, who cleans at my place, warningly raises her index finger [and proclaims]: “So, soon it’ll be over with little Adolf, maybe it’ll go fast.” No one saves these days. … Witnessed ordinary soldiers leaving gratuities as high as half a month’s pay. The waiter at a small pub at the Gendarme Market bought himself a small farm–purely from the tips he received by procuring a bottle of Mosel [wine]. Money flows through hands like water.
16 June 1944 I arrive at the editor’s office, Willy looks at me, he seems disturbed. In front of him lies the blue page containing the secret news reports: the apocalypse has begun, we are shooting at London with long-distance weapons that are supposed to destroy the city. The new weapon is called V-I. By noon the reports are publicly aired. According to Goebbels, V-II, V-III, and V-IV are soon to follow. The whole world will blow up by the time V-V rolls around.
In all the pubs, places where usually no one speaks his mind, there is much talk of vengeance, Allied vengeance, that is. Asoldier who boasted that soon we would have the war won was contradicted. It is hard to fool Berliners. Goebbels has it nowhere so tough as here. Lately everyone speaks of gas warfare. That would really crown all of this horror.
During warm evenings when friends come over, we sit with them on the roof, which is flat. Several benches are up there, covered with dust. … All ’round one sees burned-out houses without roofs and lofts.
Underground Resistance Activities: A Communist Primer for Resistance Fighters
Anonymous
(ca. 1942)
1. You are no longer to have a good, reliable friend or acquaintance with whom you can discuss your activity.
2. Therefore, do not tell anything to someone who might know; instead tell only him who must know.
3. It is not necessary for a friend to know more about personal and internal organizational matters than is absolutely necessary in order to do one’s work
4. If when walking you slouch and shuffle along, behave conspicuously on the street, and talk a lot with your hands, you will give police an opportunity to describe you quickly and ultimately track you down.
5. The shortest way is not always the best; that is, arrange to meet your friends with whom you are working so that on the way there you will have enough time to shake possible pursuers. Allow enough time for the next rendezvous, and set an example by being punctual.
6. It is best not to talk at all about our activities in public places, public transportation, or taverns; but if you do, do it in the form of an everyday conversation.
7. At our meetings, remember to agree beforehand what you will say if the Gestapo raids the meeting.
8. Carry potential evidence on your person only if it cannot be avoided, and then only for as brief a time as possible. Keep your apartment devoid of evidence.
9. Carefully check all apartments, operative meeting places, and addresses necessary in carrying out your work.
10. No matter what, all contacts gone awry should be broken off. Make arrangements with your associates beforehand so that you will find each other again later, even without knowing names or each other’s place of residence.
11. Organize the exchange of informational materials on short notice and between only two individuals. Therefore, consider well beforehand the distribution numbers and the locations.
12. Terminate normal relationships with each other. As a private person you should also have nothing to do with other friends, even if you know that they can be trusted. This is precisely why you should not burden them needlessly. If you should happen to meet on the street, walk past each other. No one but the Gestapo is interested in whether or not you are acquainted.
13. Do not make [an] habitual haunt out of any one tavern, cinema, or park. You do not need to be known to more people than necessary.
14. Fight hard and with conviction against rumors and general feelings of panic on certain occasions. No one is to pass on unverified messages. Everyone must immediately attempt to determine the author of such things. …
15. Remember, carelessness is not synonymous with courage. Our work requires skill, so that by applying all measures of caution and paying heed to the smallest detail we can be maximally effective in our work for the masses. Through the proper distribution of energy and application of flexible tactics we can succeed. …
It is obvious that in conspiratorial matters new situations and variations will always present themselves. Therefore, you should periodically discuss the methods of the opponent and determine your own course of action accordingly. That way you will have the advantage of always being one step ahead, because in the meantime the opponent must first adjust to our tactics. Ruthlessly, but in a comradely spirit, make the guilty party accountable if the rules are broken. Through truly solid political activity you can establish the basis of such mass support that, regardless of how bloody the terror is, it will not be capable of harming you.
Let these words of Lenin guide you in your organizational activity: “Whosoever, during this period of illegality, breaches Bolshevik discipline even ever so slightly–he aids, willingly or not, our enemy, the bourgeoisie.”
“A Very Grave Matter, the Extermination of the Jews”
Heinrich Himmler
(1943)
I also want to talk to you, quite frankly, on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30th, 1934 to do the duty we were bidden, and stand comrades who had lapsed, up against the wall and shoot them, so we have never spoken about it and will never speak of it. It was that tact which is a matter of course and which I am glad to say, is inherent in us, that made us never discuss it among ourselves, never to speak of it. It appalled everyone, and yet everyone was certain that he would do it the next time if such orders are issued and if it is necessary.
I mean the clearing out of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It’s one of those things it is easy to talk about–”The Jewish race is being exterminated,” says one party member, “that’s quite clear, it’s in our program–elimination of the Jews, and we’re doing it, exterminating them.” And then they come, 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are vermin, but this one is an A-1 Jew. Not one of all those who talk this way has witnessed it, not one of them has been through it. Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500 or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time–apart from exceptions caused by human weakness–to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written, for we know how difficult we should have made it for ourselves, if–with the bombing raids, the burdens and the deprivations of war–we still had Jews today in every town as secret saboteurs, agitators and trouble-mongers. We would now probably have reached the 1916/17 stage when the Jews were still in the German national body.
We have taken from them what wealth they had. I have issued a strict order, which SS-Lieutenant General Pohl has carried out, that this wealth should, as a matter of course, be handed over to the Reich without reserve. We have taken none of it for ourselves. Individual men who have lapsed will be punished in accordance with an order I issued at the beginning, which gave this warning: Whoever takes so much as a mark of it, is a dead man. A number of SS men–there are not very many of them–have fallen short, and they will die, without mercy. We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us. But we have not the right to enrich ourselves with so much as a fur, a watch, a mark, or a cigarette or anything else. Because we have exterminated a bacterium we do not want, in the end, to be infected by the bacterium and die of it. I will not see so much as a small area of sepsis appear here or gain a hold. Wherever it may form, we will cauterize it. Altogether, however, we can say, that we have fulfilled this most difficult duty for the love of our people. And our spirit, our soul, our character has not suffered injury from it.
The Ghettoization of the Jews: Prelude to the Final Solution
Traian Popovici
(1941)
On the morning of October 11 … I looked out the window. It was snowing and–I could not believe my eyes: on the street in front of my window long columns of people were hurrying by. Old people supported by children, women with infants in their arms, invalids dragging their maimed bodies along, all with their luggage in wagons or on their backs, with hastily packed suitcases, bedding, bundles, clothes; they all made silent pilgrimage into the city’s valley of death, the ghetto. …
Great activity in the city hall. … The “abandoned” wealth of the Jews was to be inventoried and their dwellings sealed. Romanianization departments were to be formed and with police assistants to be distributed throughout the city neighborhoods.
It first dawned on me then that the procedure had been a long time in the planning. I hurried to military headquarters where General Jonescu informed me of events. He let me see the promulgated ordinances. … I paged through the instructions in haste and read the regulations for the functioning of the ghetto. The bakeries were to be under city hall control, as were the [food] markets. Then I hurried again to the city hall in order to see to the measures necessary for the uninterrupted provisioning of bread, food, and especially milk for the children. For the time being, this was the role that providence allotted to me, thanks to the military cabinet.
Only those who know the topography of the city can measure how slight was the space for the ghetto to which the Jewish population was confined and in which, under pain of death, they had to be by six o’clock.
In this part of the city, even with the greatest crowding, ten thousand people could be housed at most. Fifty thousand had to be brought in, not counting the Christian population already living there. Then, and even today, I compare the ghetto to a cattle pen.
The accommodation possibilities were minimal. Even if the available rooms were to receive thirty or more people, a great number would have to seek shelter from the snow and rain in corridors, attics, cellars, and similar sorts of places. I would rather not speak of the demands of hygiene. Pure drinking water was lacking; the available public fountains did not suffice. I noted that the city already suffered from a water shortage since two of the three pumping stations had been destroyed. The strong odors of sweat, urine, and human waste, of mold and mildew, distinguished the quarter from the rest of the city. … It was a miracle that epidemics that would endanger the whole city did not break out. With surprising speed the ghetto was nearly hermetically sealed with barbed wire. At the main exits, wooden gates were erected and military guards posted. I do not know whether it was intentional, but the effect was clear: the despised were being intimidated. …
Although … the regulation concerning the ghetto categorically stated that no one could enter without the authorization of the governor, no one observed this rule. As early as the second day after the erection of the ghetto, there began a pilgrimage consisting of ladies of all social strata and intellectual jobbers, well known to the Czernowitz public. Persons of “influence” from all strata and professions–hyenas all–caught the scent of cadaverous souls among the unfortunates. Under the pretext that they were in the good graces of the governor, the military cabinet, or the mayor, they began the high-level pillaging of all that was left to the unfortunates. Their gold coins, jewelry, precious stones, furs, and valuable foodstuffs (tea, coffee, chocolate, cocoa) were supposedly to be used to bribe others or to compensate [the interlopers] for putting in a good word to save someone from deportation. Trading in influence was in full bloom. Another category of hyena was the so-called friend who volunteered to protect all these goods from theft or to deliver them to family members and acquaintances elsewhere in the country. Individuals never previously seen in the city of Czernowitz streamed in from all corners of the country in order to draw profit from a human tragedy. If the deportation with all its premeditation was in itself monstrous, then the exploitation of despair surpassed even this. …
A Jewish Manifesto Calls for Resistance to the Holocaust
Anonymous
(1942)
Let us not be led like sheep to the slaughter!
I.Let us defend ourselves during a deportation!
For several months now, day and night, thousands and tens of thousands have been torn away from our midst. … The illusion still lives within us that they are still alive somewhere, in an undisclosed concentration camp, in a ghetto.
In the face of the next day which arrives with the horror of deportation and murder, the hour has struck to dispel the illusion: There is no way out of the ghetto, except the way of death!
No illusion greater than that our dear ones are alive.
II.On guard over national honor and dignity
We work for Germans and Lithuanians. Everyday we come face to face with our employers, the murderers of our brothers. Great the shame and pain, observing the conduct of Jews, stripped of the awareness of human dignity.
Comrades!
Don’t give the foe the chance to ridicule you! When a German ridicules a Jew–don’t help him laugh!
Don’t play up to your murderers!
Denounce the bootlickers at work!
Denounce the girls who flirt with Gestapo men!
Work slowly, don’t speed!
Show solidarity! If misfortune befalls one of you–don’t be vile egoists–all of you help him.
Jewish agents of the Gestapo and informers of all sorts walk the streets. If you get hold of one such, sentence him–to be beaten until death!
The End of the Line: Auschwitz
Olga Lengyel
(ca. 1945)
When I learned that our barrack chief, a Polish woman named Irka, had been in the camp for four years, I felt reassured.
However, when I hinted at these thoughts to Irka, she made short work of my illusions.
“You think they are going to let you live?” she jeered. “You are burying your head in the sand. All of you will be killed, except a few rare cases, who will have, perhaps, a few months. Have you a family?”
I told her the circumstances under which I had taken my parents and my children with me, and how we had been separated from one another when we arrived at camp.
She shrugged her shoulders with an air of indifference, and told me coldly:
“Well, I can assure you that neither your mother, your father, nor your children are in this world any more. They were liquidated and burned the same day you arrived.”
I listened, petrified.
“No, no, that’s impossible,” I mumbled. This timid protest made the block chief beside herself with impatience.
“Since you don’t believe me, look for yourself!” she cried, and dragged me to the door with hysterical gestures. “You see those flames? That’s the crematory oven. It would go bad with you if you let on that you knew. Call it by the name we use: the bakery. Perhaps it is your family that is being burned this moment.”
[Olga Lengyel hears that someone has seen her husband and finds him on the other side of the barbed wire fence.]
Though I had lost my sensitivity after the first experiences in the camp, I still was painfully shocked when I saw my husband again. He, too, stared at me with unbelieving eyes. In my tattered dress, in which I was half exposed, in my stripped drawers, and with my clipped head, I must have shocked him even worse than he did me.
We stood there silently, clocking our emotions.
As briefly as I could, I told him about the deaths of our two sons and of my parents. I spoke without expression in a tone that rang strangely in my own ears.
I said: “I cannot believe that human beings, even Germans, would be capable of killing little children. Can you believe it? If it is true, then there is no longer any reason for living.”
The Truth About Soviet Russia: An Impartial Report?
Sidney and Beatrice Webb
(1942)
During the three or four years from the autumn of 1917 to 1922, the Bolshevik Government had established itself in Moscow and had succeeded in repelling the German, British, French, American and Japanese invasion, of that part of the territory of Tsarist Russia which the Bolsheviks thought themselves capable of defending. For some time after they had made a formal peace with their recent enemies they were confronted not only by local rebellions but by continuous and extensive underground sabotage in the newly established plants and factories, mines and means of communication, workers’ flats and hospitals, by the remnant of the upholders of the old Tsarist regime, all of which had to be summarily suppressed. But this obviously necessary use of force was not the only task awaiting the revolutionary government. History proves that in all violent revolutions, those who combine to destroy an old social order seldom agree as to what exactly should be the political and economic pattern of the new social organization to be built up to replace it. Even our own limited revolution of 1689 in Great Britain, whereby a Protest-ant king by Parliamentary statute was substituted for a Catholic king by Divine Right, was followed, for nearly a hundred years, by generation after generation of conspirators to whom treason and rebellion, spying and deceit, with or without the connivance of a foreign power, were only part of what they deemed to be a rightful effort to overturn an even worse state of home and foreign affairs than they had joined as rebels to destroy. Thus, when we published the second edition of Soviet Communismin 1937, the outstanding scandal, so hostile critics of the Soviet Union declared, were the Treason Trials which took place in the thirties, not only of old Bolshevik comrades of Lenin and opponents of Stalin’s subsequent policy, but also of the best known commanding officers of the Red Army, many of whom had been Tsarist generals, transferring their allegiance to the Bolshevik Government in order to defend their native land from invasion by German, British, American, French and Japanese armies; but who, it was alleged and I think proved, had begun to intrigue with the German Army against the new social order of the Soviet Union. The most important of these conspiracies was the Trotsky movement against the policy of building up socialism in one country as impracticable and insisting that the Bolshevik Party should abide by what was held to be the Marx-Lenin policy of promoting proletarian revolutions throughout the world. The success of the Soviet Government in instituting not only a political but an industrial democracy, and thereby enormously increasing the health, wealth and culture of the inhabitants, and the consequent recognition of the USSR as a Great Power, discredited the Trotsky movement, which I think was finally liquidated by the murder of Trotsky in Mexico by one of his own followers.[1] Today, and for some time, there has been no sign of conspiracies or faked conspiracies within the Soviet Union. The fear of German invasion and the consequent dominance of the Nazi system of racial oppression has made clear to all the bona fide citizens of the USSR the overwhelming desirability of keeping out of world war as long as possible, meanwhile devoting their energies to increasing their means of livelihood and their defensive power; whilst the capitalist democracies and Axis powers were engaged in mutual mass murder and the destruction of property. When the German attack plunged Russian into war it was immediately apparent that the inhabitants of the USSR, whether soldiers or civilians, men, women and young people, were so convinced of the benefits yielded to the Socialist Fatherland that they resisted not only with reckless courage, but with considerable skill and ingenuity the powerful onslaught of the highly mechanized German Army hitherto victorious conquerors of one country after another. …
Far more repugnant to our western political habits is the absolute prohibition within the USSR of any propaganda advocating the return to capitalist profit-making or even to any independent thinking on the fundamental social issues about possible new ways of organizing men in society, new forms of social activity, and new development of the socially established code of conduct. It is upon this power to think new thoughts, and to formulate even the most unexpected fresh ideas, that the future progress of mankind depends. This disease of orthodoxy in a milder form is not wholly absent in the capitalist political democracies. No one suggests that Switzerland is not a political democracy, and yet, as I have already noted, members of the Society of Jesus are not only refused citizenship but are actually banished from their native land, a penalization which has been extended of late years to the members of the Third International, assuredly a strangely discordant couple to be linked together in the dock of Swiss Courts of Justice accused of the propaganda of living philosophy incompatible with the public safety. Likewise the U.S.A., in some of the constituent States, through the device of Primaries, has excluded the Communist Party, and today even the Socialist Party, from selecting the candidates for election to the legislature of those states; while in one or two states being a member of the Communist Party is punished by penal servitude. …
Whenever a country is threatened with foreign invasion or revolutionary upheaval, the suppression of sects advocating disobedience to the law, sabotage or giving information to the enemy is a necessary use of force on the part of a government, however democratically representative of the majority of the inhabitants it may be. …
[1] In reality, Trotsky was assassinated by a Stalinist agent.
“This Was Their Finest Hour”
Winston Churchill
(1940)
The military events which have happened during the past fortnight have not come to me with any sense of surprise. Indeed, I indicated a fortnight ago as clearly as I could to the House that the worst possibilities were open, and I made it perfectly clear then that whatever happened in France would make no difference to the resolve of Britain and the British Empire to fight on, “if necessary for years, if necessary alone.” During the last few days we have successfully brought off the great majority of the troops we had on the lines of communication in France–a very large number, scores of thousands–and seven-eighths of the troops we have sent to France since the beginning of the war, that is to say, about 350,000 out of 400,000 men, are safely back in this country. Others are still fighting with the French, and fighting with considerable success in their local encounters with the enemy. We have also brought back a great mass of stores, rifles and munitions of all kinds which had been accumulated in France during the last nine months.
We have, therefore, in this island to-day a very large and powerful military force. …
This brings me, naturally, to the great question of invasion from the air and of the impending struggle between the British and German air forces. It seems quite clear that no invasion on a scale beyond the capacity of our land forces to crush speedily is likely to take place from the air until our air force has been definitely overpowered. In the meantime, there may be raids by parachute troops and attempted descents of airborne soldiers. We should be able to give those gentry a warm reception both in the air and if they reach the ground in any condition to continue the dispute. But the great question is, can we break Hitler’s air weapon? Now, of course, it is a very great pity that we have not got an air force at least equal to that of the most powerful enemy within striking distance of these shores. But we have a very powerful air force which has proved itself far superior in quality, both in men and in many types of machine, to what we have met so far in the numerous fierce air battles which have been fought. In France, where we were at a considerable disadvantage and lost many machines on the ground, we were accustomed to inflict losses of as much as two to two and a half to one. In the fighting over Dunkirk, which was a sort of no man’s land, we undoubtedly beat the German air force, and this gave us the mastery locally in the air, and we inflicted losses of three or four to one. …
There remains the danger of bombing attacks, which will certainly be made very soon upon us by the bomber forces of the enemy. It is true that the German bomber force is superior in numbers to ours, but we have a very large bomber force also which we shall use to strike at military targets in Germany without intermission. I do not at all underrate the severity of the ordeal which lies before us, but I believe our countrymen will show themselves capable of standing up to it. …
What General Weygand called the “Battle of France” is over. I expect that the battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands, but if we fail then the whole world, including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more prolonged, by the lights of a perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire lasts for a thousand years men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”
A German Soldier’s Last Letter Home
Anonymous
(1942)
Dearest, I think of you all the time. Today, standing in the chow line I thought of you again. Of the wonderful food you used to cook. My socks are in shreds, too, and I can’t get rid of my cough any more. No pills are available for it. You could send me cough syrup, but don’t use any glass bottles. Have you caught cold too? Always put on something good and warm. Do you have enough coal? Just go and see A–, he got lumber from me for his furniture. Let him give you coal for it now. I hope Uncle Paul has nailed the weather stripping to your windows; otherwise it will be too late for it this year. I did not celebrate Christmas here. I was on the road with the car, and we got stuck in the snow because we went the wrong way. But we soon got out again. I have decided that next year we will celebrate a real Christmas, and I am going to give you a beautiful present.
It is not my fault that I can’t give it to you now. The Russians are all around us, and we won’t get out again until Hitler gets us out. But you must not tell that to anyone. It is supposed to be a surprise.
There Are No Civilians Anymore: The London Air Raids
Mrs. Robert Henrey
(1944)
The sharp raids of February 1944 broke a lull of nearly three years. The weather was bitterly cold, with occasional snow, but it was gone by morning, leaving a hard frost in the Green Park and a thin coating of ice on the sump.
Nobody was surprised to hear the sirens again, because the newspapers were filled with stories about the Allied raids on Germany. The unknown factor was the extent to which the enemy could go and the improvements he had made in his technique. This uncertainty, added to tiredness and war strain, made many people more nervous than during the battle of London [1940-1941], and when the bombs began to drop near the centre of town, one saw again the early evening trek towards the tube stations. As soon as it became dark a great hush fell over the city.
This mantle of silence was one of the strangest phenomena. One could hear it, yes, actually hear it. On several occasions when I was at home with the curtains drawn, this sudden blanketing fell upon my ears and made me aware that it was now officially night. It was most impressive on the evening following a big raid, when people were still under the domination of fear. One felt a shudder down the spine. There was something about it which was not of this world.
These raids were not at all like those of 1940-1. They were noisier but seldom lasted more than an hour, at any rate in their intensity, whereas in the old days, or rather, in the old nights, the sirens wailed regularly at dusk and did not sound the all clear until half an hour before dawn.
London itself had also changed. It was now crowded with American soldiers, many of whom, only a few months earlier, were pursuing peaceful occupations in city or farm. In addition to this great army from across the Atlantic, there had come into London a tremendous number of people of every sort and kind who had not been through any of the previous raids. The population had therefore to be welded together and tempered before attaining that hardness and stoicism with which it faced the much more terrifying raids of May 1941.
The bombs did not really hit the heart of the town until Sunday, 20th February. Before that we had only seen fires round the perimeter. But on this occasion there was quite a large conflagration in Pall Mall, and one saw other patches of deep red seemingly quite near but more difficult to locate.
Witness to the Birth of the Atomic Age
General Leslie Groves and General Thomas F. Farrell
(1945)
18 July 1945
TOP SECRET
MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF WAR.
SUBJECT: The Test.
1. This is not a concise, formal military report but an attempt to recite what I would have told you if you had been here on my return from New Mexico.
2. At 0530, 16 July 1945, in a remote section of the Alamogordo Air Base, New Mexico, the first full scale test was made of the implosion type atomic fission bomb. For the first time in history there was a nuclear explosion. And what an explosion! It resulted from the atomic fission of about 13-1/2 pounds of plutonium which was compressed by the detonation of a surrounding sphere of some 5000 pounds of high explosives. The bomb was not dropped from an airplane but was exploded on a platform on top of a 100-foot high steel tower.
3. The test was successful beyond the most optimistic expectations of anyone. … There were tremendous blast effects. For a brief period there was a lighting effect within a radius of 20 miles equal to several suns in midday; a huge ball of fire was formed which lasted for several seconds. This ball mushroomed and rose to a height of over ten thousand feet before it dimmed. The light from the explosion was seen clearly at Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Silver City, El Paso and other points generally to about 180 miles away. The sound was heard to the same distance in a few instances but generally to about 100 miles. Only a few windows were broken although one was some 125 miles away. A massive cloud was formed which surged and billowed upward with tremendous power, reaching the substratosphere at an elevation of 41,000 feet, 36,000 feet above the ground, in about five minutes. … Huge concentrations of highly radioactive materials resulted from the fission and were contained in this cloud.
4. A crater from which all vegetation had vanished, with a diameter of 1200 feet and a slight slope toward the center, was formed. In the center was a shallow bowl 130 feet in diameter and 6 feet in depth. The material within the crater was deeply pulverized dirt. The material within the outer circle is greenish and can be distinctly seen from as much as 5 miles away. The steel from the tower was evaporated. 1500 feet away there was a four-inch iron pipe 16 feet high set in concrete and strongly guyed. It disappeared completely. …
11. Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell was at the control shelter located 10,000 yards south of the point of explosion. His impressions are given below:
“The scene inside the shelter was dramatic beyond words. In and around the shelter were some twentyodd people concerned with last minute arrangements prior to firing the shot. Included were: Dr. Oppenheimer, the Director who had borne the great scientific burden of developing the weapon from the raw materials made in Tennessee and Washington, and a dozen of his key scientists. …
“For some hectic two hours preceding the blast, General Groves stayed with the Director, walking with him and steadying his tense excitement. Every time the Director would be about to explode because of some untoward happening, General Groves would take him off and walk with him in the rain, counselling with him and reassuring him that everything would be all right….
“Just after General Groves left, announcements began to be broadcast of the interval remaining before the blast. They were sent by radio to the other groups participating in and observing the test. As the time interval grew smaller and changed from minutes to seconds, the tension increased by leaps and bounds. Everyone in that room knew the awful potentialities of the thing that they thought was about to happen. The scientists felt that their figuring must be right and that the bomb had to go off but there was in everyone’s mind a strong measure of doubt. The feeling of many could be expressed by ‘Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief.’ We were reaching into the unknown and we did not know what might come of it. It can be safely said that most of those present–Christian, Jew and Atheist–were praying and praying harder than they had ever prayed before. If the shot were successful, it was a justification of the several years of intensive effort of tens of thousands of people–statesmen, scientists, subatomic universe. In the 1890s, Lord Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), a New Zealand-born English scientist, first realized the enormous power generated by splitting the atom. Following World War I, physicists all over the world struggled to unravel the secrets of the atom. In 1938, the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner engineers, manufacturers, soldiers, and many others in every walk of life.
“In that brief instant in the remote New Mexico desert the tremendous effort of the brains and brawn of all these people came suddenly and startlingly to the fullest fruition. Dr. Oppenheimer, on whom had rested a very heavy burden, grew tenser as the last seconds ticked off. He scarcely breathed. He held on to a post to steady himself. For the last few seconds, he stared directly ahead and then when the announcer shouted ‘Now!’ and there came this tremendous burst of light followed shortly thereafter by the deep growling roar of the explosion, his face relaxed into an expression of tremendous relief. Several of the observers standing back of the shelter to watch the lighting effects were knocked flat by the blast.
“The tension in the room let up and all started congratulating each other. Everyone sensed ‘This is it!’ No matter what might happen now all knew that the impossible scientific job had been done. Atomic fission would no longer be hidden in the cloisters of the theoretical physicists’ dreams. It was almost full grown at birth. It was a great new force to be used for good or for evil. There was a feeling in that shelter that those concerned with its nativity should dedicate their lives to the mission that it would always be used for good and never for evil. …
“The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately. Thirty seconds after the explosion came first, the air blast pressing hard against the people and things, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to The Almighty. Words are inadequate tools for the job of acquainting those not present with the physical, mental and psychological effects. It had to be witnessed to be realized. … ”
Conversations with Stalin: Glimpses into Paranoia
Milovan Djilas
(1944-1945)
[1. June 1944. Stalin:] … “Perhaps you think that just because we are the allies of the English that we have forgotten who they are and who Churchill is. They find nothing sweeter than to trick their allies. During the First World War they constantly tricked the Russians and the French. And Churchill? Churchill is the kind who, if you don’t watch him, will slip a kopeck out of your pocket. Yes, a kopeck out of your pocket! By God, a kopeck out of your pocket! And Roosevelt? Roosevelt is not like that. He dips in his hand only for bigger coins. But Churchill? Churchill–even for a kopeck.” …
[2. April 1945] Stalin presented his views on the distinctive nature of the war that was being waged: “This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.”
He also pointed out, without going into long explanations, the meaning of his Panslavic policy. “If the Slavs keep united and maintain solidarity, no one in the future will be able to move a finger. Not even a finger!” he repeated, emphasizing his thought by cleaving the air with his forefinger.
Someone expressed doubt that the Germans would be able to recuperate within fifty years. But Stalin was of a different opinion. “No, they will recover, and very quickly. That is a highly developed industrial country with an extremely qualified and numerous working class and technical intelligentsia. Give them twelve to fifteen years and they’ll be on their feet again. And this is why the unity of the Slavs is important. But even apart from this, if the unity of the Slavs exists, no one will dare move a finger.”
At one point he got up, hitched up his pants as though he was about to wrestle or to box, and cried out almost in a transport, “The war shall soon be over. We shall recover in fifteen or twenty years, and then we’ll have another go at it.”
There was something terrible in his words: a horrible war was still going on. Yet there was something impressive, too, about his cognizance of the paths he had to take, the inevitability that faced the world in which he lived and the movement that he headed.
The rest of what was said that evening was hardly worth remembering. There was much eating, even more drinking, and countless senseless toasts were raised. …
A Journalist Records the Mood in Liberated Paris
Alexander Werth
(1945)
Except for the row between de Gaulle and the Communists, nobody seems much interested in politics. Much more interested in food conditions. … Black market in full swing–sugar, wine, coffee, cigarettes. … Life in Paris not quite normal yet. Taxis very hard to get. In principle, they are only for pregnant women. Lots of silly jokes about it. … Lot of metro stations still closed. … They don’t seem to sweep even the parks. Walked through the Tuileries today over a rustling eight-inch carpet of red leaves. … Talk with Bidault at the Quai. Rhineland, Ruhr, Ruhr coal are his chief worries. … Furious with Molotov for failing to support France. … To my question about how the Communists fitted into the government, he made a face, and said: “Hm … enfin, ca va … a peu pres . …” Wretched “black market” dinner in a “workmen’s bistrot,” Batignolles way–300 francs for two: 30s at the present preposterous rate; they say there’s going to be devaluation–480 to the £–even that will be far too little. … Streets badly lit at night. Lots of robberies and burglaries. … GI’s responsible for some of them. France-Soir came out with big headline; ” CHICAGO-SUR-SEINE,” telling about misdeeds by the GI’s.
Some anti-American feeling almost everywhere; strong anti-Russian feeling among the nicepeople, but still some vestiges of previous admiration for the Red Army, Stalingrad, etc. Good deal of anti-Russian stuff in the popular press. … Half the people I meet claim to have been “in the Resistance.” But they also say: “Most unfair to have shot Laval. He did his best. We wouldn’t be here but for him … ” … Economic collabos (met one who made a fortune building bits of the Atlantic Wall) running around freely and living in luxury. They also talk in a starry-eyed way of Sartre and “existentialism”; very fashionable these days. Called on Jean-Richard Bloch at Ce Soir. Found him very pessimistic. “Everything going to hell; all the old (and new) reactionaries coming up on top again.” … Daily X chap (eyes popping out): “We must, must, MUST get the Communists thrown out of the Government … Fifth Column … ” and so on. Same attitude among the rest of the Anglo-American press, who eat beastly American-canned-food lunches (mostly bully-beef hash) at the Scribe. … Quite different attitude chez Duff Cooper [British politician], who thinks it’s very sensible of de Gaulle to keep them in the Government. Thinks Thorez [French Communist leader] a tremendous chap “with great charm” (has asked him to the Embassy to lunch), and thinks that several of the others are “very able and earnest fellows,” especially Croizat.
Spent a week in Normandy. The peasants, who made fortunes during the war and had no trouble to speak of, all claim to have been “in the Resistance.” Like hell they were. They continue to make fortunes, selling meat to the black market in Paris. Except for a privileged minority, Paris is hungry and down-at-heel; but in Normandy–in the countryside–I was served steaks that hung over the sides of the plate. … The peasants are for de Gaulle and against the Communists. Most of them seem to have voted MRP which they consider “de Gaulle’s Party.” But what interests them most is the attitude of the parties to the bouilleurs de cru [the private distiller of tax-free apple brandy]. … Railways running, but slowly, and very few trains. Took nearly ten hours, with a change at Le Mans, to get to Alencon. … The curator of the “museum” attached to one of the Norman chateaux–a dusty little old man, like something out of Courteline–treated me to a long discourse on la crise morale which, he said, was quite general in France. Even small children were crooks. …
Primary Sources – Unit Eighteen – Recovery and the Recent Past
An Indian Nationalist Condemns the British Empire
Sarojini Naidu
(1920)
I speak to you today as standing arraigned because of the blood-guiltiness of those who have committed murder in my country. I need not go into the details. But I am going to speak to you as a woman about the wrongs committed against my sisters. Englishmen, you who pride yourselves upon your chivalry, you who hold more precious than your imperial treasures the honour and chastity of your women, will you sit still and leave unavenged the dishonour, and the insult and agony inflicted upon the veiled women of the Punjab?
The minions of Lord Chelmsford, the Viceroy, and his martial authorities rent the veil from the faces of the women of the Punjab. Not only were men mown down as if they were grass that is born to wither; but they tore asunder the cherished Purdah,[1] that innermost privacy of the chaste womanhood of India. My sisters were stripped naked, they were flogged, they were outraged. These policies left your British democracy betrayed, dishonored, for no dishonor clings to the martyrs who suffered, but to the tyrants who inflicted the tyranny and pain. Should they hold their Empire by dishonoring the women of another nation or lose it out of chivalry for their honor and chastity? The Bible asked, “What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” You deserve no Empire. You have lost your soul; you have the stain of blood-guiltiness upon you; no nation that rules by tyranny is free; it is the slave of its own despotism.
[1] A practice in which Indian women screen themselves from view through special clothing such as veils and special enclosures in buildings
A Nazi Confession: The Commandant at Auschwitz Pleads His Case
Rudolf Hoess
(1946)
Tis mass extermination, with all its attendant circumstances, did not, as I know, fail to affect those who took part in it. …
Many of the men involved approached me as I went my rounds through the extermination buildings, and poured out their anxieties and impressions to me, in the hope that I could allay them.
Again and again during these confidential conversations I was asked: is it necessary that we do all this? Is it necessary that hundreds of thousands of women and children be destroyed? And I, who in my innermost being had on countless occasions asked myself exactly this question, could only fob them off and attempt to console them by repeating that it was done on Hitler’s order. I had to tell them that this extermination of Jewry had to be, so that Germany and our posterity might be freed forever from their relentless adversaries.
There was no doubt in the mind of any of us that Hitler’s order had to be obeyed regardless, and that it was the duty of the SS to carry it out. Nevertheless we were all tormented by secret doubts.
I myself dared not admit to such doubts. In order to make my subordinates carry on with their task, it was psychologically essential that I myself appear convinced of the necessity for this gruesomely harsh order. …
On one occasion two small children were so absorbed in some game that they quite refused to let their mother tear them away from it. Even the Jews of the Special Detachment were reluctant to pick the children up. The imploring look in the eyes of the mother, who certainly knew what was happening, is something I shall never forget. The people were already in the gas chamber and becoming restive, and I had to act. Everyone was looking at me. I nodded to the junior noncommissioned officer on duty and he picked up the screaming, struggling children in his arms and carried them into the gas chamber, accompanied by their mother who was weeping in the most heart-rending fashion. My pity was so great that I longed to vanish from the scene; yet I might not show the slightest trace of emotion.
I had to see everything. I had to watch hour after hour, by day and by night, the removal and burning of the bodies, the extraction of the teeth, the cutting of the hair, the whole grisly, interminable business. I had to stand for hours on end in the ghastly stench, while the mass graves were being opened and the bodies dragged out and burned.
I had to look through the peephole of the gas chambers and watch the process of death itself, because the doctors wanted me to see it.
I had to do all this because I was the one to whom everyone looked, because I had to show them all that I did not merely issue the orders and make the regulations but was also prepared myself to be present at whatever task I had assigned to my subordinates.
Even Mildner and [Adolf] Eichmann, who were certainly tough enough, had no wish to change places with me. This was one job which nobody envied me.
I had many detailed discussions with Eichmann concerning all matters connected with the “final solution of the Jewish question,” but without ever disclosing my inner anxieties. I tried in every way to discover Eichmann’s innermost and real convictions about this “solution.”
Yes, every way. Yet even when we were quite alone together and the drink had been flowing freely so that he was in his most expansive mood, he showed that he was completely obsessed with the idea of destroying every single Jew that he could lay his hands on. Without pity and in cold blood we must complete this extermination as rapidly as possible. Any compromise, even the slightest, would have to be paid for bitterly at a later date.
In the face of such grim determination I was forced to bury all my human considerations as deeply as possible. …
My family, to be sure, were well provided for in Auschwitz. Every wish that my wife or children expressed was granted them. The children could live a free and untrammeled life. My wife’s garden was a paradise of flowers. The prisoners never missed an opportunity for doing some little act of kindness to my wife or children and thus attracting their attention.
No former prisoner can ever say that he was in any way or at any time badly treated in our house. My wife’s greatest pleasure would have been to give a present to every prisoner who was in any way connected with our household. …
The children always kept animals in the garden, creatures the prisoners were forever bringing them. Tortoises, martens, cats, lizards: there was always something new and interesting to be seen there. In summer they splashed in the wading pool in the garden, or in the Sola. But their greatest joy was when Daddy bathed with them. He had, however, so little time for all these childish pleasures. Today I deeply regret that I did not devote more time to my family. I always felt that I had to be on duty the whole time. This exaggerated sense of duty has always made life more difficult for me than it actually need have been. Again and again my wife reproached me and said: “You must think not only of the service always, but of your family too.”
The Atomic Beast Harnessed: The Peaceful Use of Nuclear Power
British Parliament
(1955)
1. An important stage has been reached in the development of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. Hitherto the work in this country has consisted of a military programme, a broadly based research and development programme, and the production and use of radioisotopes. The military programme continues to be of great importance but the peaceful applications of nuclear energy now demand attention. Nuclear energy is the energy of the future. Although we are still only at the edge of knowledge of its peaceful uses, we know enough to assess some of its possibilities.
2. Our future as an industrial country depends both on the ability of our scientists to discover the secrets of nature and on our speed in applying the new techniques that science places within our grasp. The exact lines of future development in nuclear energy are uncertain, but this must not deter us from pressing on with its practical application wherever it appears promising. It is only by coming to grips with the problems of the design and building of nuclear plant that British industry will acquire the experience necessary for the full exploitation of this new technology.
3. The application that now appears practicable on a commercial scale is the use of nuclear fission as a source of heat to drive electric generating plant. This comes moreover at a time when the country’s great and growing demand for energy, and especially electric power, is placing an increasing strain on our supplies of coal and makes the search for supplementary sources of energy a matter of urgency. Technical developments in nuclear energy are taking place so fast that no firm long-term programme can yet be drawn up. But if progress is to be made some indication must be given of the probable lines of development so that the necessary preparations can be made in good time. A large power station may take five or more years to complete, including finding the site, designing the station and building it. …
15. It is expected that it will be possible to extract as much as 3,000 megawatt-days of heat from every ton of fuel. This is the equivalent of the heat from 10,000 tons of coal. There is as yet no practical experience of this level of irradiation at high temperatures and the metallurgical behaviour of the fuel elements is uncertain. But there are many lines of development which should overcome such metallurgical defects as may appear. …
19. … Taking what appears to be a reasonable value for the plutonium, the cost of electricity from the first commercial nuclear station comes to about 0-6d a unit. This is about the same as the probable future cost of electricity generated by new coal-fired power stations. … If no credit were allowed for the plutonium the cost of nuclear power would be substantially more than 0-6d a unit. Later stations should show a great improvement in efficiency, but the value of plutonium would probably fall considerably during their lifetime. Even so their higher efficiency should enable them to remain competitive with other power stations.
20. These estimates assume that all the plutonium is used for civil purposes, as would be most desirable. No allowance has been made for any military credits. …
A Philosopher Explains His Anti-Nuclear Position
Bertrand Russell
(1959)
Opponents of my recent activities in the campaign against H-bomb warfare have brought up what they consider to be an inconsistency on my part and have used statements that I made ten years ago to impair the force of the statements that I have made more recently. I should like to clear up this matter once for all.
At a time when America alone possessed the atom bomb and when the American Government was advocating what was known as the Baruch Proposal, the aim of which was to internationalize all the uses of atomic energy, I thought the American proposal both wise and generous. It seemed to me that the Baruch scheme, if adopted, would prevent an atomic arms race, the appalling dangers of which were evident to all informed opinion in the Western World. For a time it seemed possible that the USSR would agree to this scheme, since Russia had everything to gain by agreeing and nothing to lose. Unfortunately, Stalin’s suspicious nature made him think that there was some trap, and Russia decided to produce her own atomic weapons. I thought, at that time, that it would be worth while to bring pressure to bear upon Russia and even, if necessary, to go so far as to threaten war on the sole issue of the internationalizing of atomic weapons. My aim, then as now, was to prevent a war in which both sides possessed the power of producing worldwide disaster. Western statesmen, however, confident of the supposed technical superiority of the West, believed that there was no danger of Russia achieving equality with the non-Communist world in the field of nuclear warfare. Their confidence in this respect has turned out to have been mistaken. It follows that, if nuclear war is now to be prevented, it must be by new methods and not by those which could have been employed ten years ago.
My critics seem to think that, if you have once advocated a certain policy, you should continue to advocate it after all the circumstances have changed. This is quite absurd. If a man gets into a train with a view to reaching a certain destination and on the way the train breaks down, you will not consider the man guilty of an inconsistency if he gets out of the train and employs other means of reaching his destination. In like manner, a person who advocates a certain policy in certain circumstances will advocate a quite different policy in different circumstances.
I have never been a complete pacifist and have at no time maintained that all who wage war are to be condemned. I have held the view, which I should have thought was that of common sense, that some wars have been justified and others not. What makes the peculiarity of the present situation is that, if a great war should break out, the belligerents on either side and the neutrals would be all, equally, defeated. This is a new situation and means that war cannot still be used as an instrument of policy. It is true that the threat of war can still be used, but only by a lunatic. Unfortunately, some people are lunatics, and, not long ago, there were such lunatics in command of a powerful State. We cannot be sure this will not happen again and, if it does, it will produce a disaster compared with which the horrors achieved by Hitler were a flea-bite. The world at present is balanced in unstable equilibrium upon a sharp edge. To achieve stability, new methods are required, and it is these new methods that those who think as I do are attempting to urge upon the East and upon the West.
I do not deny that the policy that I have advocated has changed from time to time. It has changed as circumstances have changed. To achieve a single purpose, sane men adapt their policies to the circumstances. Those who do not are insane.
Though I do not admit inconsistency, I should not be wholly sincere if I did not admit that my mood and feelings have undergone a change somewhat deeper than that resulting from strategic considerations alone. The awful prospect of the extermination of the human race, if not in the next war, then in the next but one or the next but two, is so sobering to any imagination which has seriously contemplated it as to demand very fundamental fresh thought on the whole subject not only of international relations but of human life and its capabilities. If you were quarrelling with a man about some issue that both you and he had thought important just at the moment when a sudden hurricane threatened to destroy you both and the whole neighbourhood, you would probably forget the quarrel. I think what is important at present is to make mankind aware of the hurricane and forgetful of the issue which had been producing strife. I know it is difficult after spending many years and much eloquence on the evils of Communism or Capitalism, as the case may be, to see this issue as one of relative unimportance. But, although this is difficult, it is what both the Communist Rulers and the men who shape the policy of the West will have to achieve if mankind is to survive. To make sure a realization is possible is the purpose of the policy which I now advocate.
A “Long Telegram” Recommends a Western Policy of Containment
George F. Kennan
(1946)
It was perhaps inevitable that the Grand Alliance of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, which had so successfully waged war together against Nazi Germany, would collapse as the post-war settlement was considered. The ideological differences alone were enough to cause such a rupture. Almost immediately, the Grand Alliance unity turned into a long and bitter Cold War between East and West. Some historians maintain that the origins of the Cold War lay in the West’s inability to understand the legitimate security concerns that prompted Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) to impose a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. Others argue that the Soviet Union’s attempt to expand its worldwide influence and foster revolution could have evoked no other response than Western resistance. Some have argued that both sides share blame for approaching the post-war issues with ideological blinders, making rational compromise impossible. Despite this divergenc At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted rather Russian rulers than Russian people; for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form, fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries. For this reason they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between Western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth about world without or if foreigners learned truth about world within. And they had learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.
It was no coincidence that Marxism, which had smouldered ineffectively for half a century in Western Europe, caught hold and blazed for first time in Russia. Only in this land which had never known a friendly neighbor or indeed any tolerant equilibrium of separate powers, either internal or international, could a doctrine thrive which viewed economic conflicts of society as insoluble by peaceful means. After establishment of Bolshevist regime, Marxist dogma, rendered even more truculent and intolerant by Lenin’s interpretation, became a perfect vehicle for sense of insecurity with which Bolsheviks, even more than previous Russian rulers, were afflicted. In this dogma, with its basic altruism of purpose, they found justification for their instinctive fear of outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifices they felt bound to demand. In the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value in their methods and tactics. Today they cannot dispense with it. It is fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability. Without it they would stand before history, at best, as only the last of that long succession of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee external security of their internally weak regimes. This is why Soviet purposes must always be solemnly clothed in trappings of Marxism, and why no one should underrate importance of dogma in Soviet affairs. Thus Soviet leaders are driven [by?] necessities of their own past and present position to put forward a dogma which [apparent omission] outside world as evil, hostile and menacing, but as bearing within itself germs of creeping disease and destined to be wracked with growing internal convulsions until it is given final coup de grace by rising power of socialism and yields to new and better world. This thesis provides justification for the increase of military and police power of Russian state, for that isolation of Russian population from outside world, and for that fluid and constant pressure to extend limits of Russian police power which are together the natural and instinctive urges of Russian rulers. Basically this is only the steady advance of uneasy Russian nationalism, a centuries old movement in which conceptions of offense and defense are inextricably confused. But in new guise of international Marxism, with its honeyed promises to a desperate and war torn outside world, it is more dangerous and insidious than ever before. …
In summary, we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure. This political force has complete power of disposition over energies of one of world’s greatest peoples and resources of world’s richest national territory, and is borne along by deep and powerful currents of Russian nationalism. In addition, it has an elaborate and far flung apparatus for exertion of its influence in other countries, an apparatus of amazing flexibility and versatility, managed by people whose experience and skill in underground methods are presumably without parallel in history. Finally, it is seemingly inaccessible to considerations of reality in its basic reactions. For it, the vast fund of objective fact about human society is not, as with us, the measure against which outlook is constantly being tested and re-formed, but a grab bag from which individual items are selected arbitrarily and tendenciously to bolster an outlook already preconceived. This is admittedly not a pleasant picture. … But I would like to record my conviction that problem is within our power to solve–and that without recourse to any general military conflict. And in support of this conviction there are certain observations of a more encouraging nature I should like to make:
1. Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventuristic. It does not work by fixed plans. It does not take unnecessary risks. Impervious to logic of reason, and it is highly sensitive to logic of force. For this reason it can easily withdraw–and usually does–when strong resistance is encountered at any point. Thus, if the adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to use it, he rarely has to do so. If situations are properly handled there need be no prestige-engaging showdowns.
2. Gauged against Western World as a whole, Soviets are still by far the weaker force. Thus, their success will really depend on degree of cohesion, firmness and vigor which Western World can muster. And this is factor which it is within our power to influence.
3. Success of Soviet system, as form of internal power, is not yet finally proven. It has yet to be demonstrated that it can survive supreme test of successive transfer of power from one individual or group to another. Lenin’s death was first such transfer, and its effects wracked Soviet state for 15 years. After Stalin’s death or retirement will be second. But even this will not be final test. Soviet internal system will now be subjected, by virtue of recent territorial expansions, to series of additional strains which once proved severe tax on Tsardom. We here are convinced that never since termination of civil war have mass of Russian people been emotionally farther removed from doctrines of Communist Party than they are today. In Russia, party has now become a great and–for the moment–highly successful apparatus of dictatorial administration, but it has ceased to be a source of emotional inspiration. Thus, internal soundness and permanence of movement need not yet be regarded as assured.
4. All Soviet propaganda beyond Soviet security sphere is basically negative and destructive. It should therefore be relatively easy to combat it by any intelligent and really constructive program.
“An Iron Curtain Has Descended Across the Continent”
Winston Churchill
(1946)
The United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power. It is a solemn moment for the American democracy. With primacy in power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future. As you look around you, you feel not only the sense of duty done but also feel anxiety lest you fall below the level of achievement. Opportunity is here now, clear and shining, for both our countries. To reject it or ignore it or fritter it away will bring upon us all the long reproaches of the after-time. It is necessary that constancy of mind, persistency of purpose, and the grand simplicity of decision shall guide and rule the conduct of the English speaking peoples in peace as they did in war. …
A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory. Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organization intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytizing tendencies. I have a strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin. There is sympathy and good will in Britain–and I doubt not here also–toward the peoples of all the Russias and a resolve to persevere through many differences and rebuffs in establishing lasting friendships.
We understand the Russian need to be secure on her western frontiers from all renewal of German aggression. We welcome her to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world. Above all, we welcome constant, frequent, and growing contacts between Russian people and our own people on both sides of the Atlantic. It is my duty, however, to place before you certain facts about the present position in Europe.
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in the Soviet sphere and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone, with its immortal glories, is free to decide its future at an election under British, American, and French observation. …
If now the Soviet government tries, by separate action, to build up a pro-Communist Germany in their areas, this will cause new serious difficulties in the British and American zones, and will give the defeated Germans the power of putting themselves up to auction between the Soviets and the Western democracies. Whatever conclusions may be drawn from these facts–and facts they are–this is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build up. Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace.
In front of the iron curtain which lies across Europe are other causes for anxiety. In Italy the Communist party is seriously hampered by having to support the Communist-trained Marshall Tito’s claims to former Italian territory at the head of the Adriatic. Nevertheless, the future of Italy hangs in the balance. Again, one cannot imagine a regenerated Europe without a strong France. …
However, in a great number of countries, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout the world, Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist center. Except in the British Commonwealth, and in the United States, where communism is in its infancy, the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization. These are somber facts for anyone to have to recite on the morrow of a victory gained by so much splendid comradeship in arms and in the cause of freedom and democracy, and we should be most unwise not to face them squarely while time remains. …
Our difficulties and dangers will not be removed by closing our eyes to them; they will not be removed by mere waiting to see what happens; nor will they be relieved by a policy of appeasement. What is needed is a settlement, and the longer this is delayed, the more difficult it will be and the greater our dangers will become. From what I have seen of our Russian friends and allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for military weakness. For that reason the old doctrine of a balance of power is unsound. We cannot afford, if we can help it, to work on narrow margins, offering temptations to a trial of strength. If the Western democracies stand together in strict adherence to the principles of the United Nations Charter, their influence for furthering these principles will be immense and no one is likely to molest them. If, however, they become divided or falter in their duty, and if these all-important years are allowed to slip away, then indeed catastrophe may overwhelm us all.
A Soviet Assessment of American Post-war Intentions
Nikolai Novikov
(1946)
The foreign policy of the United States, which reflects the imperialist tendencies of American monopolistic capital, is characterized in the postwar period by a striving for world supremacy. This is the real meaning of the many statements by President Truman and other representatives of American ruling circles: that the United States has the right to lead the world. All the forces of American diplomacy–the army, the air force, the navy, industry and science–are enlisted in the service of this foreign policy. For this purpose broad plans for expansion have been developed and are being implemented through diplomacy and the establishment of a system of naval and air bases stretching far beyond the boundaries of the United States, through the arms race, and through the creation of ever newer types of weapons. …
Europe has come out of the war with a completely dislocated economy, and the economic devastation that occurred in the course of the war cannot be overcome in a short time. All of the countries of Europe and Asia are experiencing a colossal need for consumer goods, industrial and transportation equipment, etc. Such a situation provides American monopolistic capital with prospects for enormous shipments of goods and the importation of capital into these countries–a circumstance that would permit it to infiltrate their national economies.
Such a development would mean serious strengthening of the economic position of the United States in the whole world and would be a stage on the road to world domination by the United States.
On the other hand, we have seen a failure of calculations on the part of U.S. circles which assumed that the Soviet Union would be destroyed in the war or would come out of it so weakened that it would be forced to go begging to the United States for economic assistance. Had that happened, they would have been able to dictate conditions permitting the United States to carry out its expansion in Europe and Asia without hindrance from the USSR. …
President Truman’s Plan to Contain the Soviet Union
Harry S Truman (1947)
The United States has received from the Greek Government an urgent appeal for financial and economic assistance. Preliminary reports from the American Economic Mission now in Greece and reports from the American Ambassador in Greece corroborate the statement of the Greek Government that assistance is imperative if Greece is to survive as a free nation. …
The British Government has informed us that, owing to its own difficulties, it can no longer extend financial or economic aid to Turkey.
As in the case of Greece, if Turkey is to have the assistance it needs, the United States must supply it. We are the only country able to provide that help.
I am fully aware of the broad implications involved if the United States extends assistance to Greece and Turkey, and I shall discuss these implications with you at this time.
One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion. This was a fundamental issue in the war with Germany and Japan. Our victory was won over countries which sought to impose their will, and their way of life, upon other nations.
To ensure the peaceful development of nations, free from coercion, the United States has taken a leading part in establishing the United Nations. The United Nations is designed to make possible lasting freedom and independence for all its members. We shall not realize our objectives, however, unless we are willing to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes. This is no more than a frank recognition that totalitarian regimes imposed upon free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States.
The peoples of a number of countries of the world have recently had totalitarian regimes forced upon them against their will. The Government of the United States has made frequent protests against coercion and intimidation, in violation of the Yalta agreement, in Poland, Rumania, and Bulgaria. I must also state that in a number of other countries there have been similar developments.
At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.
One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.
The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.
I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.
I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.
I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.
The world is not static, and the status quo is not sacred. But we cannot allow changes in thestatus quo in violation of the Charter of the United Nations by such methods as coercion, or by such subterfuges as political infiltration. In helping free and independent nations to maintain their freedom, the United States will be giving effect to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
It is necessary only to glance at a map to realize that the survival and integrity of the Greek nation are of grave importance in a much wider situation. If Greece should fall under the control of an armed minority, the effect upon its neighbor, Turkey, would be immediate and serious. Confusion and disorder might well spread throughout the entire Middle East.
Moreover, the disappearance of Greece as an independent state would have a profound effect upon those countries in Europe whose peoples are struggling against great difficulties to maintain their freedoms and their independence while they repair the damages of war. …
Should we fail to aid Greece and Turkey in this fateful hour, the effect will be far reaching to the West as well as to the East.
We must take immediate and resolute action.
I therefore ask the Congress to provide authority for assistance to Greece and Turkey is the amount of $400,000,000 for the period ending June 30, 1948. In requesting these funds, I have taken into consideration the maximum amount of relief assistance which would be furnished to Greece out of the $350,000,000 which I recently requested that the Congress authorize for the prevention of starvation and suffering in countries devastated by the war.
In addition to funds, I ask the Congress to authorize the detail of American civilian and military personnel to Greece and Turkey, at the request of those countries, to assist in the tasks of reconstruction, and for the purpose of supervising the use of such financial and material assistance as may be furnished. I recommend that authority also be provided for the instruction and training of selected Greek and Turkish personnel. …
This is a serious course upon which we embark.
I would not recommend it except that the alternative is much more serious. The United States contributed $341,000,000,000 toward winning World War II. This is an investment in world freedom and world peace.
The assistance that I am recommending for Greece and Turkey amounts to little more than 1/10 of 1 percent of this investment. It is only common sense that we should safeguard this investment and make sure that it was not in vain.
The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died.
We must keep that hope alive.
The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms.
If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world–and we shall surely endanger the welfare of this Nation.
Great responsibilities have been placed upon us by the swift movement of events.
I am confident that the Congress will face these responsibilities squarely.
Presidential Defiance: “Ich bin ein Berliner”
John F. Kennedy
(1961)
There are some people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world.
Let them come to Berlin!
There are some who say that Communism is the wave of the future.
Let them come to Berlin!
And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists.
Let them come to Berlin!
And there are even a few who say that it is true that Communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress.
Lass sie nach Berlin kommen! Let them come to Berlin!
I know of no town, no city, that has been besieged for eighteen years, that still lives with the vitality and the force and the determination of the city of West Berlin.
When all are free the people of West Berlin can take sober satisfaction in the fact that they were in the front lines for almost two decades.
All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin. And, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words: “Ich bin ein Berliner.”
Post-war Soviet Literature Is Brought to Heel by Stalin’s Cultural Hatchetman
Andrei Zhdanov
(1947)
It is clear from the Central Committee’s decision that Zvezda’s worst mistake has been that of allowing the writings of [Nikolai] Zoshchenko and [Anna] Akhmatova to appear in its pages. It is, I think, hardly necessary for me to instance Zoshchenko’s “work” The Adventures of a Monkey. You have certainly all read it and know it better than I do. The point of this “work” of Zoshchenko’s is that in it he portrays Soviet people as lazy, unattractive, stupid and crude. He is in no way concerned with their labour, their efforts, their heroism, their high social and moral qualities. He never so much as mentions these. He chooses, like the cheap philistine he is, to scratch about in life’s basenesses and pettinesses. This is no accident. It is intrinsic in all cheap philistine writers, of whom Zoshchenko is one. …
Is it possible to fall morally and politically lower than this? How can the people of Leningrad tolerate such rubbish and vulgarity in the pages of their journals?
The Leningraders in charge of Zvezda must indeed be lacking in vigilance if a “work” of this sort is offered to the journal’s Soviet readers, if it is found possible to publish works steeped in the venom of bestial enmity towards the Soviet order. Only the scum of the literary world could write such “works,” and only the blind, the apolitical could allow them to appear….
Zoshchenko’s thoroughly rotten and corrupt social, political and literary attitude does not result from any recent transformation. There is nothing accidental about his latest “works.” They are simply the continuation of his literary “legacy” dating from the twenties. …
What is the cause of these errors and failings [by the Leningrad literary journals]?
It is that the editors of the said journals, our Soviet men of letters, and the leaders of our ideological front in Leningrad, have forgotten some of the principal tenets of Leninism as regards literature. Many writers, and many of those working as responsible editors, or holding important posts in the Writers’ Union, consider politics to be the business of the Government or of the Central Committee. When it comes to men of letters, engaging in politics is no business of theirs. If a man has done a good, artistic, fine piece of writing, his work should be published even though it contains vicious elements liable to confuse and poison the minds of our young people.
We demand that our comrades, both practising writers and those in positions of literary leadership, should be guided by that without which the Soviet order cannot live, that is to say, by politics, so that our young people may be brought up not in the spirit of do-nothing and don’t care, but in an optimistic revolutionary spirit. …
Lenin was the first to state clearly what attitude towards art and literature advanced social thought should take. Let me remind you of the well-known article, Party Organisation and Party Literature, which he wrote at the end of 1905, and in which he demonstrated with characteristic forcefulness that literature cannot but have a partisan adherence and that it must form an important part of the general proletarian cause. All the principles on which the development of our Soviet literature is based are to be found in this article. …
The lack of ideological principles shown by leading workers on Zvezda and Leningrad has led to a second serious mistake. Certain of our leading workers have, in their relations with various authors, set personal interests, the interests of friendship, above those of the political education of the Soviet people or these authors’ political tendencies. It is said that many ideologically harmful and from a literary point of view weak productions are allowed to be published because the editor does not like to hurt the author’s feelings. In the eyes of such workers it is better to sacrifice the interests of the people and of the state than to hurt some author’s feelings. This is an entirely wrong and politically dangerous principle. It is like swapping a million roubles for a kopeck. …
However fine may be the external appearance of the work of the fashionable modern bourgeois writers in America and Western Europe, and of their film directors and theatrical producers, they can neither save nor better their bourgeois culture, for its moral basis is rotten and decaying. It has been placed at the service of capitalist private ownership, of the selfish and egocentric interests of the top layer of bourgeois society. A swarm of bourgeois writers, film directors and theatrical producers are trying to draw the attention of the progressive strata of society away from the acute problems of social and political struggle and to divert it into a groove of cheap meaningless art and literature, treating of gangsters and show-girls and glorifying the adulterer and the adventures of crooks and gamblers.
Is it fitting for us Soviet patriots, the representatives of advanced Soviet culture, to play the part of admirers or disciples of bourgeois culture? Our literature, reflecting an order on a higher level than any bourgeois-democratic order and a culture manifoldly superior to bourgeois culture, has, it goes without saying, the right to teach the new universal morals to others. …
The New Class: The Marxist Dialectic at Work in the Soviet Union
Milovan Djilas (1954)
The greatest illusion [of Communism] was that industrialization and collectivization in the U.S.S.R., and destruction of capitalist ownership, would result in a classless society. In 1936, when the new Constitution was promulgated, Stalin announced that the “exploiting class” had ceased to exist. The capitalist and other classes of ancient origin had in fact been destroyed, but a new class, previously unknown to history, had been formed.
It is understandable that this class, like those before it, should believe that the establishment of its power would result in happiness and freedom for all men. The only difference between this and other classes was that it treated the delay in the realization of its illusions more crudely. It thus affirmed that its power was more complete than the power of any other class before in history, and its class illusions and prejudices were proportionally greater.
This new class, the bureaucracy, or more accurately the political bureaucracy, has all the characteristics of earlier ones as well as some new characteristics of its own.
The “Secret Speech” Launches De-Stalinization
Nikita Khrushchev
(1956)
At the present we are concerned with a question which has immense importance for the party now and for the future–[we are concerned] with how the cult of the person of Stalin has been gradually growing, the cult which became at a certain specific stage the source of a whole series of exceedingly serious and grave perversions of party principles, of party democracy, of revolutionary legality. …
When we analyze the practice of Stalin in regard to the direction of the party and of the country, when we pause to consider everything which Stalin perpetrated, we must be convinced that Lenin’s fears were justified. The negative characteristics of Stalin, which, in Lenin’s time, were only incipient, transformed themselves during the last years into a grave abuse of power by Stalin, which caused untold harm to our Party. …
Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation, and patient co-operation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed this concept or tried to prove his viewpoint, and the correctness of his position, was doomed to removal from the leading collective and to subsequent moral and physical annihilation. This was especially true during the period following the XVIIth Party Congress [1934], when many prominent party leaders and rank-and-file party workers, honest and dedicated to the cause of Communism, fell victim to Stalin’s despotism.
We must affirm that the party had fought a serious fight against the Trotskyites, rightists and bourgeois nationalists, and that it disarmed ideologically all the enemies of Leninism. This ideological fight was carried on successfully, as a result of which the Party became strengthened and tempered. Here Stalin played a positive role. …
It was precisely during this period (1935-1937-1938) that the practice of mass repression through the government apparatus was born, first against the enemies of Leninism–Trotskyites, Zinovievites, Bukharinites, long since politically defeated by the party–and subsequently also against many honest Communists, against those party cadres who had borne the heavy load of the Civil War and the first and most difficult years of industrialization and collectivization, who actively fought against the Trotskyites and the rightists for the Leninist Party line. …
This led to glaring violations of revolutionary legality, and to the fact that many entirely innocent persons, who in the past had defended the party line, became victims.
We must assert that in regard to those persons who in their time had opposed the party line, there were often no sufficiently serious reasons for their physical annihilation. The formula, “enemy of the people,” was specifically introduced for the purpose of physically annihilating such individuals. …
… Many party, soviet and economic activists who were branded in 1937-1938 as “enemies” were actually never enemies, spies, wreckers, etc., but were always honest Communists; they were only so stigmatized, and often, no longer able to bear barbaric tortures, they charged themselves (at the order of the investigative judges–falsifiers) with all kinds of grave and unlikely crimes. The commission [for investigation of the purge] has presented to the Central Committee Presidium lengthy and documented materials pertaining to mass repressions against the delegates to the XVIIth Party Congress and against members of the Central Committee elected at that Congress. These materials have been studied by the Presidium of the Central Committee.
It was determined that of the 139 members and candidates of the Party’s Central Committee who were elected at the XVIIth Congress, 98 persons, i.e., 70 percent, were arrested and shot (mostly in 1937-1938). (Indignation in the hall) …
Facts prove that many abuses were made on Stalin’s orders without reckoning with any norms of party and Soviet legality. Stalin was a very distrustful man, sickly suspicious; we knew this from our work with him. He could look at a man and say: “Why are your eyes so shifty today?” or “Why are you turning so much today and avoiding to look me directly in the eyes?” The sickly suspicion created in him a general distrust even toward eminent party workers whom he had known for years. Everywhere and in everything he saw “enemies,” “two-facers” and “spies.”
Possessing unlimited power he indulged in great willfulness and choked a person morally and physically. A situation was created where one could not express one’s own will.
When Stalin said that one or another should be arrested, it was necessary to accept on faith that he was an “enemy of the people.” Meanwhile, Beria’s gang, which ran the organs of state security, outdid itself in proving the guilt of the arrested and the truth of materials which it falsified. And what proofs were offered? The confessions of the arrested, and the investigative judges accepted these “confessions.” And how is it possible that a person confesses to crimes which he has not committed? Only in one way–because of application of physical methods of pressuring him, tortures, bringing him to a state of unconsciousness, deprivation of his judgment, taking away of his human dignity. In this manner were “confessions” acquired. …
I recall the first days when the conflict between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia began artificially to be blown up. Once, when I came from Kiev to Moscow, I was invited to visit Stalin who, pointing to the copy of a letter lately sent to Tito, asked me, “Have you read this?” Not waiting for my reply he answered, “I will shake my little finger–and there will be no more Tito. He will fall.” …
But this did not happen to Tito. No matter how much or how little Stalin shook, not only his little finger but everything else that he could shake, Tito did not fall. Why? The reason was that, in this case of disagreement with the Yugoslav comrades, Tito had behind him a state and a people who had gone through a severe school of fighting for liberty and independence, a people which gave support to its leaders.
You see to what Stalin’s mania for greatness led. He had completely lost consciousness of reality; he demonstrated his suspicion and haughtiness not only in relation to individuals in the USSR, but in relation to whole parties and nations. …
Some comrades may ask us: Where were the members of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee? Why did they not assert themselves against the cult of the individual in time? And why is this being done only now?
First of all we have to consider the fact that the members of the Political Bureau viewed these matters in a different way at different times. Initially, many of them backed Stalin actively because Stalin was one of the strongest Marxists and his logic, his strength and his will greatly influenced the cadres and party work. …
Later, however, Stalin, abusing his power more and more, began to fight eminent party and government leaders and to use terroristic methods against honest Soviet people. …
In the situation which then prevailed I have talked often with Nikolai Alexandrovich Bulganin; once when we two were traveling in a car, he said, “It has happened sometimes that a man goes to Stalin on his invitation as a friend. And when he sits with Stalin, he does not know where he will be sent next, home or to jail.”
It is clear that such conditions put every member of the Political Bureau in a very difficult situation. And when we also consider the fact that in the last years the Central Committee plenary sessions were not convened and that the sessions of the Political Bureau occurred only occasionally, from time to time, then we will understand how difficult it was for any member of the Political Bureau to take a stand against one or another injust or improper procedure, against serious errors and shortcomings in the practices of leadership. …
Comrades: We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all; we must draw the proper conclusions concerning both ideological-theoretical and practical work.
It is necessary for this purpose: … to return to and actually practice in all our ideological work the most important theses of Marxist-Leninist science about the people as the creator of history and as the creator of all material and spiritual good of humanity, about the decisive role of the Marxist Party in the revolutionary fight for the transformation of society, about the victory of Communism. …
We are absolutely certain that our party, armed with the historical resolutions of the XXth Congress, will lead the Soviet people along the Leninist path to new successes, to new victories. (Tumultuous, prolonged applause)
Long live the victorious banner of our party–Leninism! (Tumultuous, prolonged applause ending in ovation. All rise.)
A British Journalist Witnesses the Hungarian Revolution
Anthony Rhodes (1956)
In the Stalin square the next morning [late October, 1956], the people of Budapest had not only pulled down the dictator’s statue, they were feverishly chopping it up into little bits, so that not a trace should remain. Outside the Communist Party headquarters was a mountain of cinders, consisting of burnt communist books and pamphlets. A ceaseless hail of these came hurtling out of the windows, together with paintings and photographs of Stalin, Lenin and Rakosi [the Hungarian Communist leader], to keep the fires alight. Even gramophone records of the leaders’ speeches added to the blaze.
When these busy people realized who we were, they clustered around, beseeching us to let our countrymen know the truth, suggesting that we should take photographs of a big oil painting of Stalin which had just been hideously defaced. They slapped us on the back and shook our hands a dozen times, until we felt that we, not they, had liberated their city. An old woman in tears kissed my hand as if I were a Monsignore; and one of the Austrians suddenly found himself clasping two babies.
Meanwhile inside the building, a grim AVO [Allamvedelmi Osztaly, State Security Department] hunt was in progress. A number of AVO men had just been caught in the sewers and hanged, I was told. Would I care to step inside and take some photographs of them, for the benefit of the West? But the sight of the hanged men the night before had been enough, and I refused this invitation. The AVO men had evidently imagined that their Russian masters would quickly dominate the situation, and they had been waiting underground (literally) for this to happen. But when the lull came and they appeared in public again, they found to their dismay not the Russians, but the population of Budapest, in control. Their cruelties of the past were now expiated. After execution, their bodies were left hanging for an hour or so, for all to see; then the dustcarts came and took them away, and more were displayed. The Hungarians never seemed to tire of looking at the corpses of their late masters. To see the hate combined with glee on the faces of some of these people as they gazed on them was to realize what communism had done in ten years to the Hungarian mind. …
[On November 2] I was standing near the Chain bridge watching [the Soviets'] families leave, when an English journalist I had met the day before ran up to me and said, “If you want the story of your life, come to the Parliament buildings now! Nagy is about to make an important declaration about the Warsaw Pact.”
I followed him to this building where, by showing his journalist’s pass, he was able to take me upstairs, through salons and corridors full of the Biedermeyer furnishings, marble-mounted and ormolu mirrors from the last century, to the door of the cabinet room. Here, he said, the government had been in session for two hours, arguing about the weighty decision they are about to take.
On the first landing we were told to wait in a reception room, in which other journalists were walking up and down with notebooks. Suddenly the big doors opposite opened and we saw, for a moment, Kadar the new first secretary of the Communist Party, seated at a table, and at his shoulder the Prime Minister, Imre Nagy. Near the wall was the President, Tildy, whose voice seemed raised in argument. On the other side of the table, out of view, sat (we did not know it at the time), the Russian ambassador [Yuri] Andropov.[1]
A quarter of an hour later, an official from the Hungarian Foreign Office, whom my friend evidently knew, came out of the cabinet room quickly. Taking him by the arm he said in English, “Have you a motorcar? Well, leave Budapest immediately! Don’t waste time here asking for more news. When it comes, you won’t be able to leave.”
He said that the government had decided to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact, and had appealed for help to the United Nations. Whatever Nagy might feel personally about the wisdom of this step, he felt it was the will of the Hungarian people. Some of the cabinet, and of course the Soviet ambassador, were trying to dissuade him; “And the pro-Russian forces in the cabinet will finally win,” he said. “Nagy is now going to the radio building to make the announcement. But you see what will happen afterwards.”
Five minutes later we saw the Russian ambassador leave hurriedly; and a half an hour later, Nagy went to make the courageous statement about withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact, which meant that Hungary was no longer a satellite–which was responsible virtually, too, for the second Russian intervention. But in the streets that evening the Hungarians were elated. “Nagy has cleaned his slate,” they said. “We can support him, he’s our man now.” …
[The British Legation soon ordered all British journalists and non-essential personnel to leave the country, sensing what was about to happen. Rhodes and others in his party drove westward, toward the Austrian frontier.]
A wintry gale from the south-east was now blowing, stripping off the leaves and sweeping them along in slanting squalls of snow and sleet. Not far from Gyor, we ran into a heavy snow-storm and then, through the falling flakes, we saw ahead a large tank going in our direction. “A 50-ton Stalin,” said one of the British officials in our party learnedly. “What splendid tanks the Russians have left the insurgents!”
It was difficult to pass this tank because it was moving west too: I blew the horn impatiently, to get it to withdraw to the side of the road. At length we managed to squeeze past, only to find ahead of it another Stalin tank of the same size. Again I blew the horn in irritation–and again at last we managed to pass. But there was yet another tank in front of this and then, as we rounded a corner, a whole line of them running out ahead, about fifteen, trundling along, wagging their guns and antennae.
“Really! These insurgent tanks ought to get off the roads to let us pass,” said the British official again. But then as we passed one of them, a face appeared at the turret and looked down–a Mongolian face. ” … they are Russians!” he finished lamely.
Our car was in fact sandwiched in a long column of Russian tanks. More Mongoloid faces peered down at us as we passed, blank, expressionless, slit-eyed, beneath bell-shaped helmets. The Russians were bringing up their eastern troops. With these not particularly reassuring road companions we remained for nearly threequarters of an hour, trying to pass. It is understandable that to men in such machines the ordinary, standard motor-horn means little or nothing.
After Gyor, we saw more Russians in a maize field at the side of the road–armoured cars with tents around them, soldiers eating their midday meal out of messtins in the snow. Young for the most part, the term “simple soldier” applied to these men admirably. Of the thirty or so I saw, twenty at least were Mongoloid, almost Chinese, in appearance; several had taken off their helmets and were scratching their shaven heads. These were the troops who were gathering around Budapest for the assault due to take place in two days’ time. Although dirty and slovenly in appearance, there was a businesslike air about their equipment and vehicles. They could clearly move, fire and communicate with one another by wireless. And what more can you ask of the modern soldier?
We later learned that we were one of the last Western convoys these Russian troops allowed through. A few hours later, their tanks fanned out along the Austrian frontier, closing it completely, in preparation for the assault. To travellers from Budapest, Red Cross personnel, or journalists wishing to “file” their cables in Vienna, they repeated the two words,” Niet Wien!”stubbornly, and forced them to return to Gyor, Magyarovar, or Budapest itself. In this way we came to Nickelsdorf again, and left the people, who, by liberating themselves, were soon to liberate Eastern Europe from the excesses of communism.
[1] In 1982-1983 Andropov would serve as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Describes the Stalinist Gulag
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
(1962)
At that very moment the door bolt rattled to break the calm that now reigned in the barracks. From the corridor ran two of the prisoners …
“Second count,” they shouted.
On their heels came a guard.
“All out to the other half.” …
“Damn them,” said Shukhov. Mildly, because he hadn’t gone to sleep yet.
Tsezar raised a hand and gave him two biscuits, two lumps of sugar, and a slice of sausage.
“Thank you, Tsezar Markovich,” said Shukhov, leaning over the edge of his bunk. …
Then he waited a little till more men had been sent out–he wouldn’t have to stand barefoot so long in the corridor. But the guard scowled at him and shouted: “Come on, you there in the corner.” …
“Do you want to be carried out, you shits?” the barracks commander shouted.
They shoved them all into the other half of the barracks … Shukhov stood against the wall near the bucket. The floor was moist underfoot. An icy draft crept in from the porch.
They had them all out now, and once again the guard and the orderly did their round, looking for any who might be dozing in dark corners. There’d be trouble if they counted short. …
Shukhov managed to squeeze in eighteenth. He ran back to his bunk …
All right. Feet back into the sleeve of his jacket. Blanket on top. Then the coat. …
Now for that slice of sausage. Into the mouth. Getting your teeth into it. Your teeth. The meaty taste. And the meaty juice, the real stuff. Down it goes, into your belly.
Gone. …
Shukhov went to sleep fully content. He’d had many strokes of luck that day: they hadn’t put him in the cells; they hadn’t sent his squad to the settlement; he’d swiped a bowl of kasha at dinner. …
Maternal and Infant Health Care Statistics for the New Socialist Society
Czechoslovakian Government
(1948-1978)
1948 1957 1967 1976 1978
Resources
Prenatal clinics 434 1,625 1,812 1,840 1,840
Obstetrical/gynecological beds 6,531 12,624 14,856 15,932 15,935
Specialized obstetricians 326 1,030 1,865 2,341 2,407
Midwives 2,643 4,648 5,570 6,387 6,510
Activities
Deliveries in maternity homes (%) 41 86 99.2 99.8 99.8
Average number of visits to
prenatal clinics per woman 0.6 3.9 7.1 9.2 9.4
Outcome
Maternal mortality rate per
100,000 deliveries 137 63 28 15 13
Cases of eclampsia per
100,000 deliveries 122 68 35 34
Perinatal mortality rate per
1,000 live births 51 26.3 20.9 20.3 18.5
Stillbirth rate per 1,000 live
births 19 11.6 7.1 6.8 6.0
Early neonatal mortality rate
per 1,000 live births 32 14.7 13.8 13.5 12.5
An American Plan to Rebuild a Shattered Europe
George C. Marshall
(1947)
I need not tell you, gentlemen, that the world situation is very serious. That must be apparent to all intelligent people. I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. Furthermore, the people of this country are distant from the troubled areas of the earth and it is hard for them to comprehend the plight and consequent reactions of the long-suffering peoples, and the effect of those reactions on their governments in connection with our efforts to promote peace in the world.
In considering the requirements for the rehabilitation of Europe the physical loss of life, the visible destruction of cities, factories, mines and railroads was correctly estimated, but it has become obvious during recent months that this visible destruction was probably less serious than the dislocation of the entire fabric of European economy. For the past ten years conditions have been highly abnormal.
The feverish preparation for war and the more feverish maintenance of the war effort engulfed all aspects of national economies. Machinery has fallen into disrepair or is entirely obsolete. Under the arbitrary and destructive Nazi rule, virtually every possible enterprise was geared into the German war machine. Long-standing commercial ties, private institutions, banks, insurance companies and shipping companies disappeared, through loss of capital, absorption through nationalization or by simple destruction.
In many countries, confidence in the local currency has been severely shaken. The breakdown of the business structure of Europe during the war was complete. Recovery has been seriously retarded by the fact that two years after the close of hostilities a peace settlement with Germany and Austria has not been agreed upon. But even given a more prompt solution of these difficult problems, the rehabilitation of the economic structure of Europe quite evidently will require a much longer time and greater effort than had been foreseen.
There is a phase of this matter which is both interesting and serious. The farmer has always produced the foodstuffs to exchange with the city dweller for the other necessities of life. This division of labor is the basis of modern civilization. At the present time it is threatened with breakdown. The town and city industries are not producing adequate goods to exchange with the food-producing farmer. Raw materials and fuel are in short supply. Machinery is lacking or worn out.
The farmer or the peasant cannot find the goods for sale which he desires to purchase. So the sale of his farm produce for money which he cannot use seems to him an unprofitable transaction. He, therefore, has withdrawn many fields from crop cultivation and is using them for grazing. He feeds more grain to stock and finds for himself and his family an ample supply of food, however short he may be on clothing and the other ordinary gadgets of civilization. Meanwhile, people in the cities are short of food and fuel. So the governments are forced to use their foreign money and credits to procure these necessities abroad. This process exhausts funds which are urgently needed for reconstruction. Thus a very serious situation is rapidly developing which bodes no good for the world. The modern system of the division of labor upon which the exchange of products is based is in danger of breaking down.
The truth of the matter is that Europe’s requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products–principally from America–are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help, or face economic, social and political deterioration of a very grave character.
The remedy lies in breaking the vicious circle and restoring the confidence of the European people in the economic future of their own countries and of Europe as a whole. The manufacturer and the farmer throughout wide areas must be able and willing to exchange their products for currencies, the continuing value of which is not open to question.
Aside from the demoralizing effect on the world at large and the possibilities of disturbances arising as a result of the desperation of the people concerned, the consequences to the economy of the United States should be apparent to all. It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.
Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist. Such assistance, I am convinced, must not be on a piecemeal basis as various crises develop. Any assistance that this Government may render in the future should provide a cure rather than a mere palliative.
Any government that is willing to assist in the task of recovery will find full cooperation, I am sure, on the part of the United States Government. Any government which maneuvers to block the recovery of other countries cannot expect help from us. Furthermore, governments, political parties or groups which seek to perpetuate human misery in order to profit therefrom politically or otherwise will encounter the opposition of the United States.
It is already evident that, before the United States Government can proceed much further in its efforts to alleviate the situation and help start the European world on its way to recovery, there must be some agreement among the countries of Europe as to the requirements of the situation and the part those countries themselves will take in order to give proper effect to whatever action might be undertaken by this Government. It would be neither fitting nor efficacious for this Government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a program designed to place Europe on its feet economically. This is the business of the Europeans. The initiative, I think, must come from Europe. The role of this country should consist of friendly aid in the drafting of a European program and of later support of such a program so far as it may be practical for us to do so. The program should be a joint one, agreed to by a number of, if not all, European nations.
An essential part of any successful action on the part of the United States is an understanding on the part of the people of America of the character of the problem and the remedies to be applied. Political passion and prejudice should have no part. With foresight, and a willingness on the part of our people to face up to the vast responsibility which history has clearly placed upon our country, the difficulties I have outlined can and will be overcome.
Post-war Germany: Conditions in the British Zone of Occupation
British Army
(1947)
The situation in Germany has been affected by certain outstanding events. First, there was the Agreement, signed in New York in December, 1946, for the fusion of the British and American Zones. The principal objects of the Agreement were the improved administration of the economy of the two Zones and the provision of money for their economic rehabilitation. This entailed the setting up of a bipartite administration and the hastening of the transfer of power to the Germans in the British Zone, which was not so advanced in this matter as the American Zone. The second event was the transfer of considerable powers of local government to the German Governments at Land [state] level and below. Among the powers transferred were responsibility for education, public health and the police. Thirdly, in chronological order, was the severity of last winter. Its effects are still being felt. Great hardships were suffered, industry almost came to a standstill and the fusion agreement had a bad start. Fourthly, there was the failure of the Foreign Ministers’ Conference in Moscow, which had serious effects for Germany, and made quadripartite agreement even more difficult. A direct result of this failure was the fifth major event, the strengthening of the fusion agreement and the setting up of a central bizonal economic organization at Frankfurt. Lastly, there was the breakdown in the food supply in the spring, which led to a severe shortage from the latter part of March until well into June. The basic ration which was nominally fixed at 1,550 calories fell to below 1,000. As a result, coal production, on which the prosperity of the Zone depends, dropped disastrously at a time when it had just reached a new high level of 233,000 tons a day. In addition, this shortage had a great effect on the morale of the Germans, whose feelings hardened towards those whom they were bound to hold responsible for their conditions.
7. The situation at present may be summarised briefly as follows:–
(1) Disarmament is virtually complete, but demilitarisation by the removal of industrial plant as reparations has hardly begun. …
(2) Denazification has almost finished. At the beginning of October responsibility for it was handed over to the Germans, with instruction that it was to be completed by the end of the year.
(3) In the political sphere, some progress has been made in the democratisation of the German system, such as the introduction of an electoral system by which an elector votes for a candidate and not a party list; but the German Civil Service is still far from being nonpolitical.
(4) The labour problem is acute. Out of a total population in the Zone of about 22 1/4 million, only some 9 million are in employment. To put it in another way, before the war over 47 per cent. of the population was employed. In order to reach this percentage to-day, it would be necessary to increase the labour force by 2 million. The explanation is largely to be found in the present lack of balance in the age groups. Apart from the absence of prisoners of war, the additions to the population of refugees from eastern Germany have aggravated the position. At least 75 per cent of the 1 1/2 million refugees accepted into the Zone have been old and infirm or children. One result is that there is practically no unemployment of fit men, although there is undoubtedly some under-employment.
(5) The food situation remains extremely serious. The basic ration for the normal consumer is now 1,550 calories, but it is not by any means always honoured. The stocks of bread-grains and meat are better than they were at this time last year, but the drought during the summer has reduced the supply of fats and has caused a poor potato harvest. The immediate aim is to increase the ration to at least 1,800 calories, but the prospects for such an increase during the next year are not promising.
(6) The level of coal production, vital to German recovery, follows the level of the food ration. By last March production had risen to 233,000 tons a day, but the shortage of food in the spring caused it to fall to little over 210,000. By September, the figure had reached 240,000 tons.
(7) The volume of industrial production in the British Zone has only increased from 33 per cent. to 34 per cent. of the 1936 figure.[1] The factors which are preventing industrial recovery are lack of food, lack of coal, and lack of incentive, especially the lack of any real purchasing power in the Reichsmark.
(8) Transport is in a very bad state, owing to the lack of steel and timber for the repair of locomotives, rolling stock. … Road transport and the inland waterways are in little better condition. In fact it is difficult to see how it is going to be possible to move any extra coal which the miners may produce. The position is aggravated by the fact that repairs scarcely keep pace with wastage and no new construction is being carried out; and by the delay in the return of a large number of wagons which have travelled outside the Zone, carrying exported coal.
(9) The export trade reflects the general low level of the economy of the combined Zone….
[1] The figure for the combined Zones is 37 per cent.
In Darkest Germany: The Nihilistic Younger Generation
Victor Gollancz
(1947)
The worst thing in Germany–worse than the malnutrition, the overcrowding, the gaping footwear in the schools–is the spiritual condition of the youth. I thought I had touched bottom in Julich, where in cellar after cellar I found 5, 6, 9 people–fathers, mothers, children, adult daughters and sons–all jumbled together without light or air, and lacking even the pretence of any decent privacy. But a conference with young people at Dusseldorf a day later, and then another, were still more horrible; and what I learned then confirmed similar experiences with university students at Kiel and Hamburg.
The attitude of the youth varies from one of a puzzled bewilderment, still friendly to the British–these are in a minority–to bitterness, cynicism and a growing hostility to us and all our works. The mood is not (yet) pro-Nazi: it shows rather a nihilistic contempt for government and governments of every kind. They contrast our promises with our deeds: the B.B.C. told us, they say, that you were coming to liberate us, but what has it all amounted to? I mention democracy; and they ask whether democracy means starvation rations and lack of the barest necessities, or turning people out of their homes and seizing their furniture, or blowing up shipyards, closing down factories, and throwing tens of thousands of men out of employment. I risk a question about Nuremberg; and they say–at the very best–yes, they were guilty, but so are the Allies: look at the expellees, sick, starving and robbed, not thousands of them but millions. Many jeer openly at Nuremberg. I met no single young person who denied the Nazi guilt; but I met very few who thought it in any way special, or different in kind from that of all politicians everywhere. They talk a good deal about justice; and they want to know whether it is just to hale a man off to internment without trial and release him as innocent a year later. They talk, too, about their ostracism by the British on the one hand, and the behaviour of our troops to German girls on the other.
At the root is despair about the future. Time after time I was told “We don’t mind how hard life is if only we can have something to hope for”. But they see their factories being dismantled; they know that hundreds of other factories are on the list; and the majority are convinced that we are determined to ruin them, partly by way of punishment but mainly as commercial rivals. The minority wonders.
And yet–I am convinced of it after contact with them–they had, and perhaps still have, the makings in them of good democrats. After Belsen, the worst of all my experiences was when a university student at Hamburg said in an agonized voice “For God’s sake don’t make us Nazis.” If we are to save them we must (1) stop doing the things they justly criticise, and give instead a living example of the liberal tradition; (2) put a little psychological understanding into our propaganda, which, on such subjects as war guilt or the world food situation, has been contemptible when it has not been non-existent; (3) increase the establishment of the education and youth section of the C.C.G., which is doing devoted work, but is as grotesquely understaffed as Trade and Industry is overstaffed, and is frustrated at every turn into the bargain; (4) remove the nightmare of uncertainty from the German future–which is to say, abandon Potsdam.
Existentialism Defined
Jean Paul Sarte
(1946)
[Existentialism] has been reproached as an invitation to people to dwell in quietism of despair. For if every way to a solution is barred, one would have to regard any action in this world as entirely ineffective, and one would arrive finally at a contemplative philosophy. Moreover, since contemplation is a luxury, this would be only another bourgeois philosophy. This is, especially, the reproach made by the Communists.
From another quarter we are reproached for having underlined all that is ignominious in the human situation …
From the Christian side, we are reproached as people who deny the reality and seriousness of human affairs. For since we ignore the commandments of God and all values prescribed as eternal, nothing remains but what is strictly voluntary. Everyone can do what he likes, and will be incapable, from such a point of view, of condemning either the point of view or the action of anyone else.
It is to these various reproaches that I shall endeavor to reply … [W]e can begin by saying that existentialism, in our sense of the word, is a doctrine that does render human life possible; a doctrine, also, which affirms that every truth and every action imply both an environment and a human subjectivity. …
Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man … What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world–and defines himself afterwards … [T]here is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. …
The Second Sex: Existential Feminism
Simone de Beauvoir
(1949)
According to French law, obedience is no longer included among the duties of a wife, and each woman citizen has the right to vote; but these civil liberties remain theoretical as long as they are unaccompanied by economic freedom. A woman supported by a man–wife or courtesan–is not emancipated from the male because she has a ballot in her hand; if custom imposes less constraint upon her than formerly, the negative freedom implied has not profoundly modified her situation; she remains bound in her condition of vassalage. It is through gainful employment that woman has traversed most of the distance that separated her from the male; and nothing else can guarantee her liberty in practice. Once she ceases to be a parasite, the system based on her dependence crumbles; between her and the universe there is no longer any need for a masculine mediator.
The curse that is upon woman as vassal consists, as we have seen, in the fact that she is not permitted to do anything; so she persists in the vain pursuit of her true being through narcissism, love, or religion. …
It is quite understandable, also, that the milliner’s apprentice, the shopgirl, the secretary, will not care to renounce the advantages of masculine support. I have already pointed out that the existence of a privileged caste, which she can join by merely surrendering her body, is an almost irresistible temptation to the young woman; she is fated for gallantry by the fact that her wages are minimal while the standard of living expected of her by society is very high. If she is content to get along on her wages, she is only a pariah: ill lodged, ill dressed, she will be denied all amusement and even love. Virtuous people preach asceticism to her, and, indeed, her dietary regime is often as austere as that of a Carmelite [nun]. Unfortunately, not everyone can take God as a lover; she has to please men if she is to succeed in her life as a woman. She will therefore accept assistance, and this is what her employer cynically counts on in giving her starvation wages. This aid will sometimes allow her to improve her situation and achieve a real independence; in other cases, however, she will give up her work and become a kept woman. She often retains both sources of income and each serves more or less as an escape from the other; but she is really in double servitude: to job and to protector. For the married woman her wages represent only pin money as a rule; for the girl who “makes something on the side” it is the masculine contribution that seems extra; but neither of them gains complete independence through her own efforts.
There are, however, a fairly large number of privileged women who find in their professions a means of economic and social autonomy. These come to mind when one considers woman’s possibilities and her future. This is the reason why it is especially interesting to make a close study of their situation, even though they constitute as yet only a minority; they continue to be a subject of debate between feminists and antifeminists. The latter assert that the emancipated women of today succeed in doing nothing of importance in the world and that furthermore they have difficulty in achieving their own inner equilibrium. The former exaggerate the results obtained by professional women and are blind to their inner confusion. …
There is one feminine function that is actually almost impossible to perform in complete liberty. It is maternity. In England and America and some other countries a woman can at least decline maternity at will, thanks to contraceptive techniques. We have seen that in France she is often driven to painful and costly abortion or she frequently finds herself responsible for an unwanted child that can ruin her professional life. If this is a heavy charge, it is because inversely, custom does not allow a woman to procreate when she pleases. The unwed mother is a scandal to the community, and [an] illegitimate birth is a stain on the child; only rarely is it possible to become a mother without accepting the chains of marriage or losing caste. If the idea of artificial insemination interests many women, it is not because they wish to avoid intercourse with a male, it is because they hope that freedom of maternity is going to be accepted by society at last. It must be said in addition that in spite of convenient day nurseries and kindergartens, having a child is enough to paralyze a woman’s activity entirely; she can go on working only if she abandons it to relatives, friends, or servants. She is forced to choose between sterility, which is often felt as a painful frustration, and burdens hardly compatible with a career.
Thus the independent woman of today is torn between her professional interests and the problems of her sexual life; it is difficult for her to strike a balance between the two; if she does, it is at the price of concessions, sacrifices, acrobatics, which require her to be in a constant state of tension. …
The free woman is just being born; when she has won possession of herself perhaps Rimbaud’s prophecy will be fulfilled: “There shall be poets! When women’s unmeasured bondage shall be broken, when she shall live for and through herself, man–hitherto detestable–having let her go, she, too, will be poet! Woman will find the unknown! Will her ideational worlds be different from ours? She will come upon strange, unfathomable, repellent, delightful things; we shall take them, we shall comprehend them.” It is not sure that her “ideational worlds” will be different from those of men, since it will be through attaining the same situation as theirs that she will find emancipation; to say in what degree she will remain different, in what degree these differences will retain their importance–this would be to hazard bold predictions indeed. What is certain is that hitherto woman’s possibilities have been suppressed and lost to humanity, and that it is high time she be permitted to take her chances in her own interest and in the interest of all.
Third World Advocate Decries Colonized Peoples’ Loss of Identity
Frantz Fanon
(1952)
I propose nothing short of the liberation of the man of color from himself….
The black schoolboy in the Antilles, who in his lessons is forever talking about “our ancestors, the [French],” identifies himself with the explorer, the bringer of civilization, the white man who carries truth to savages–an all-white truth. There is identification–that is, the young Negro subjectively adopts a white man’s attitude….
Little by little, one can observe in the young Antillean the formation and crystallization of an attitude and a way of thinking and seeing that are essentially white. When in school he has to read stories of savages told by white men, he always thinks of the [African]. … The Negro lives in Africa. Subjectively, intellectually, the Antillean conducts himself like a white man. But he is a Negro. That he will learn once he goes to Europe; and when he hears Negroes mentioned he will recognize that the word includes himself.
The Troubles in Ireland: An IRA Leader Reveals Its Ultimate Aims
Gerry Adams
(1979)
The task that we, as republicans, have set ourselves, and the ills affecting our people and our country are too complex to be satisfied merely by a British withdrawal or by the establishment of a 32 county neo-colonial Free State.[1] We are not, and never have been, merely a ‘Brits Out’ movement. … We stand opposed to all forms and all manifestations of imperialism and capitalism. We stand for an Ireland free, united, socialist and Gaelic. … Our movement needs constructive and thoughtful self-criticism. We also require links with those oppressed by economic and social pressures. Today’s circumstances and our objectives dictate the need for building an agitational struggle in the 26 Counties, an economic resistance movement, linking up republicans with other sections of the working class. It needs to be done now because to date our most glaring weakness lies in our failure to develop revolutionary politics and to build an alternative to so-called constitutional politics.
[1] Historically, Ireland is divided into thirty-two counties; of these, twenty-six today constitute the Republic of Ireland and six remain part of the United Kingdom.
Vatican II: The Catholic Church Engages the Modern World
Pope John XXIII
(1961)
Painful Considerations
Today the Church is witnessing a crisis under way within society. While humanity is on the edge of a new era, tasks of immense gravity and amplitude await the Church, as in the most tragic periods of its history. It is a question in fact of bringing the modern world into contact with the vivifying and perennial energies of the gospel, a world which exalts itself with its conquests in the technical and scientific fields, but which brings also the consequences of a temporal order which some have wished to reorganize excluding God. This is why modern society is earmarked by a great material progress to which there is not a corresponding advance in the moral field.
Hence there is a weakening in the aspiration toward the values of the spirit. Hence an urge for the almost exclusive search for earthly pleasures, which progressive technology places with such ease within the reach of all. And hence there is a completely new and disconcerting fact: the existence of a militant atheism which is active on a world level.
Reasons for Confidence
These painful considerations are a reminder of the duty to be vigilant and to keep the sense of responsibility awake. Distrustful souls see only darkness burdening the face of the earth. We, instead, like to reaffirm all our confidence in our Savior, who has not left the world which He redeemed.
Indeed, we make ours the recommendation of Jesus that one should know how to distinguish the “signs of the times” (Mt. 16:4), and we seem to see now, in the midst of so much darkness, a few indications which auger well for the fate of the Church and of humanity.
The bloody wars that have followed one on the other in our times, the spiritual ruins caused by many ideologies, and the fruits of so many bitter experiences have not been without useful teachings. Scientific progress itself, which gave man the possibility of creating catastrophic instruments for his destruction, has raised questions. It has obliged human beings to become thoughtful, more conscious of their own limitations, desirous of peace, and attentive to the importance of spiritual values. And it has accelerated that progress of closer collaboration and of mutual integration toward which, even though in the midst of a thousand uncertainties, the human family seems to be moving. And this facilitates, no doubt, the apostolate of the Church, since many people who did not realize the importance of its mission in the past are, taught by experience, today more disposed to welcome its warnings.
Present Vitality of the Church
Then, if we turn our attention to the Church, we see that it has not remained a lifeless spectator in the face of these events, but has followed step by step the evolution of peoples, scientific progress, and social revolution. It has opposed decisively the materialistic ideologies which deny faith. Lastly, it has witnessed the rise and growth of the immense energies of the apostolate of prayer, of action in all fields. It has seen the emergence of a clergy constantly better equipped in learning and virtue for its mission; and of a laity which has become ever more conscious of its responsibilities within the bosom of the Church, and, in a special way, of its duty to collaborate with the Church hierarchy.
To this should be added the immense suffering of entire Christian communities, through which a multitude of admirable bishops, priests, and laymen seal their adherence to the faith, bearing persecutions of all kinds and revealing forms of heroism which certainly equal those of the most glorious periods of the Church. …
… [W]elcoming as from above the intimate voice of our spirit, we considered that the times now were right to offer to the Catholic Church and to the world the gift of a new Ecumenical Council, as an addition to, and continuation of, the series of the twenty great councils, which have been through the centuries a truly heavenly providence for the increase of grace and Christian progress. …
The forthcoming Council will meet therefore and at a moment in which the Church finds very alive the desire to fortify its faith, and to contemplate itself in its own awe-inspiring unity. In the same way, it feels more urgent the duty to give greater efficiency to its sound vitality and to promote the sanctification of its members, the diffusion of revealed truth, the consolidation of its agencies. …
And, finally, to a world, which is lost, confused, and anxious under the constant threat of new frightful conflicts, the forthcoming Council must offer a possibility for all men of good will to turn their thoughts and their intentions toward peace, a peace which can and must, above all, come from spiritual and supernatural realities, from human intelligence and conscience, enlightened and guided by God the Creator and Redeemer of humanity.
Working Program of the Council
These fruits that we expect so much from the Council, and on which we like so often to dwell, entail a vast program of work which is now being prepared. This concerns the doctrinal and practical problems which correspond more to the requirements of perfect conformity with Christian teaching, for the edification and in the service of the Mystical Body and of its supernatural mission, and, therefore, the sacred books, venerable tradition, the sacraments, prayer, ecclesiastical discipline, charitable and relief activities, the lay apostolate, and mission horizons.
This supernatural order must, however, reflect its efficiency in the other order, the temporal one, which on so many occasions is unfortunately ultimately the only one that occupies and worries man. In this field, the Church also has shown that it wishes to be Mater et Magistra –Mother and Teacher–according to the words of our distant and glorious predecessor, Innocent III, spoken on the occasion of the Fourth Lateran Council [in 1215]. …
The Helsinki Final Act: Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms Enunciated
Helsinki Conference on European Security
(1975)
VII. Respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief
The participating States will respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.
They will promote and encourage the effective exercise of civil, political, economic, social, cultural and other rights and freedoms all of which derive from the inherent dignity of the human person and are essential for his free and full development.
Within this framework the participating States will recognize and respect the freedom of the individual to profess and practice, alone or in community with others, religion or belief acting in accordance with the dictates of his own conscience.
The participating States on whose territory national minorities exist will respect the right of persons belonging to such minorities to equality before the law, will afford them the full opportunity for the actual enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms and will, in this manner, protect their legitimate interests in this sphere.
The participating States recognize the universal significance of human rights and fundamental freedoms, respect for which is an essential factor for the peace, justice and well-being necessary to ensure the development of friendly relations and co-operation among themselves as among all States.
They will constantly respect these rights and freedoms in their mutual relations and will endeavour jointly and separately, including in cooperation with the United Nations, to promote universal and effective respect for them.
They confirm the right of the individual to know and act upon his rights and duties in this field.
In the field of human rights and fundamental freedoms, the participating States will act in conformity with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They will also fulfill their obligations as set forth in the international declarations and agreements in this field, including, inter alia, the International Covenants on Human Rights, by which they may be bound.
VIII. Equal rights and self-determination of peoples
The participating States will respect the equal rights of peoples and their right to self-determination, acting at all times in conformity with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and with the relevant norms of international law, including those relating to territorial integrity of States.
By virtue of the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, all peoples always have the right, in full freedom, to determine, when and as they wish, their internal and external political status, without external interference, and to pursue as they wish their political, economic, social and cultural development.
The participating States reaffirm the universal significance of respect for and effective exercise of equal rights and self-determination of peoples for the development of friendly relations among themselves as among all States; they also recall the importance of the elimination of any form of violation of this principle.
Ostpolitik Begins to Breach the Divide Between East and West
Willy Brandt
(1969)
I was not happy about the concept of Ostpolitik as it was first ascribed to me and then identified with me. But how can you capture a term which has acquired a life of its own and been swiftly adopted into foreign languages? Why did I dislike the label? Because I was afraid it suggested that I regarded foreign policy as a chest from which you might pull out now one drawer, now another. Together with my colleagues, and not least my Foreign Minister and Deputy Chancellor, I assumed that we needed two things at the same time, and co-ordinated with each other: reliable partnership with the West, and the understanding with the East that was laboriously taking shape and must then be extended. I was aware that our national interests simply would not allow us to oscillate between West and East.
Reduced to basics, this meant that our efforts in Ostpolitik must be attuned to our Western partners and rooted in the political structure of the Atlantic Alliance. Even more simply: ourOstpolitik had to begin in the West. But developments since the Western treaties of 1955 meant that relations as normal and productive as possible were also called for with the Soviet Union and the other Warsaw Pact countries. Normalizing those relations was necessary for the Federal Republic to be able to protect its own interests in European cooperation on anything like an equal footing. We were therefore determined to do what we could to encourage peace on a basis of the utmost possible security–’in awareness of our special responsibility in Europe and to the best of our ability, which we do not, however, overestimate.’
At the time, in the autumn of 1969, a West European summit conference of the six Common Market countries was imminent. It took place in The Hague at the beginning of December. We said that this conference could and perhaps would decide whether Western Europe took a brave step forward or plunged into a dangerous crisis. My government assumed that the European Economic Community would have to be made deeper and broader, and needed both the United Kingdom and the other countries that were willing to join. It must also find appropriate forms of co-operation with those European states which could not or would not join. We determined that German and French unanimity could be the deciding factor in this process. We would try to give our close contractual ties with France a steadiness which would be a model for the nature of relations between European partners. We declared our readiness to encourage closer co-operation in foreign policy, with the aim of helping the Western European states, step by step, to adopt a common stance on international political questions.
Another important point of departure was our assumption that the North Atlantic Alliance would continue to guarantee our security. Its firm coherence was the prerequisite for the kind of solidarity of conduct which could lead to detente in Europe. Safeguarding peace was the first essential, whether we were concerned with a serious and tenacious effort to bring about proportional arms limitation, or with the guaranteeing of our own security policy. As part of the Western Alliance, we wanted to help bring equilibrium between West and East. We saw our contribution as defensive, which was how the Western Alliance soon came to see itself. The Bundeswehr, we said, was not suitable for offensive strategy, by virtue either of its training and structure or of its arms and equipment. At no price would I be moved from the defensive principle that lay at the heart of our defence policy.
It has sometimes been suggested, not always kindly, that my policies may have been motivated by doubts about the intentions of the United States. They were not. However, it is true that I took an evaluation of the interests and special problems of the United States into consideration, and assumed that American commitment to Europe would be reduced rather than increased over the years. But I stated with the utmost clarity that our close ties with the United States excluded any doubt about the binding nature of the duties they had undertaken towards Europe, the Federal Republic and West Berlin. Our common interest required neither additional assurances nor repeated declarations. They supported a more independent German policy in a more active partnership. …
And what about keeping the Western powers informed? What about consulting them, in so far as their rights in connection with ‘Germany as a whole’ were affected? It is true that we wanted to represent ourselves–that goes for the East as well–and to that extent we wanted to be ‘more equal’ than before. We did observe the principle of regularly furnishing accurate information. However, Henry Kissinger was correct in saying that Brandt had not asked for permission, but for American co-operation in a political course whose direction was already determined.
You do not need to have read Kissinger’s memoirs to know that there was ill-concealed suspicion in the Western capitals–as far as I could see, it was least felt in London; in Paris, there were marked swings between friendly understanding and wild speculation; the Washington attitude was quite simple–Nixon’s security adviser told my eminent colleague Paul Frank in 1970 that any detente with the Soviet Union would be America’s doing.
Before our meeting in April 1970 Nixon invited me to spend a few days of relaxation at Camp David. … Henry Kissinger turned up at the President’s retreat, and did not trouble to hide his suspicions. In later years, however, he set the record straight by several times ‘congratulating’ me on the achievements of German Ostpolitik. He was once heard to say that all we got in return for accepting the division of Germany was ‘improvements in the political atmosphere.’ Kissinger, powerful as a security adviser, and later Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford, thought in terms of the Concert of Powers and the classic secret diplomacy of the nineteenth century. He saw Europeans as pawns in the great game of the superpowers.
A Real Politiker Dissects the Bismarckian Balance of Power
Henry Kissinger
(ca. 1980)
[Walter] Laqueur: There are interesting lessons to be learned about the relationship between legitimacy, equilibrium, and peace. But I am sure you will agree that the modern period in the history of diplomacy starts with Bismarck.
Kissinger: Of course. Without going into the specifics of his diplomacy, Bismarck essentially believed that an international system can be based entirely on the balance of power. The restraints that had been imposed by the common adherence to legitimate principles, along with the convictions that had developed since the eighteenth century, were so much baggage for him. Every state should be free to conduct its own policy based on its own conception of national interest. If it calculated correctly it would understand that there are inherent limits to its strength, and it would produce a rather moderate foreign policy. But at the same time it placed all its energies on the balance of power. Through extraordinarily skillful and extremely moderate foreign policy, Bismarck managed to create a united Germany and maintain the peace for about forty years, even after upsetting the previous system.
Contrary to popular belief, a policy based on pure balance of power is the most difficult foreign policy to conduct. It requires, first of all, a constantly correct assessment of the elements of power. Secondly, it demands a total ruthlessness and means that statesmen must be able to ignore friendship, loyalty, and anything other than the national interest. Third, it requires a domestic structure that will tolerate if not support this strategy. Fourth, it requires the absence of both permanent friends and permanent enemies, because as soon as a permanent enemy exists, freedom of maneuver is immediately reduced.
After Germany defeated France in 1871, the German generals insisted on the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, which caused Bismarck to say, “I have achieved much more than I thought desirable in this war.” He was correct: France became a permanent German enemy, and Germany’s freedom of maneuver was greatly reduced. Indeed, the paradox of the German victory was that it, along with the German unification which followed, produced the very structural dangers that Bismarck sought to avoid. A united Germany was a threat to each of its neighbors; its very existence forced them into an alliance. Subsequent German leaders tried to be “reliable” and consistent in foreign affairs, but this only compounded their problems, for the more rigid their policy, the more united their neighbors became.
All of this is crucial in understanding the great tragedy in Western history: the outbreak of the First World War. …
The Dangers of Unregulated Growth and Technological Innovations
The Club of Rome
(1977)
The population of the developed world makes up about 30 percent of the world population, and may shrink to no more than 10 percent in the next century, unless war, famine, and disease slow down the growth of human numbers in developing countries. Less than one-third of the world population controls more than two-thirds of its wealth, possesses 95 percent of existing scientific and technological research and development facilities, consumes some 40 percent of the world’s nonrenewable resources, and contributes the lion’s share of its pollution.
These conditions impose special responsibilities on the people of the developed world. They must take the initiative in specifying and pursuing global security, food, energy, and resource goals. They must work together with the poor nations to create a more just and sustainable international order. And they must also take care that their own lives are not locked into pathways of alienation, meaninglessness, and stress. There is, we believe, a set of feasible policy alternatives available to developed countries which responds to all these needs. They can improve the national quality of life and at the same time bring about more equity and justice in the world.
The already discussed goals related to security, food, energy, and resources need to be vigorously pursued in the developed world. Combined with them are goals to overcome the worst side effects of technological civilization without demanding unrealistic sacrifices from individuals and leaders.
Present conditions in the developed world arose from historical processes that resulted in significant achievements in the spheres of industry, agriculture, and social organization. These achievements are closely associated with efficient applications of science and technology and the creation of great national and corporate wealth. Discoveries in science led to rapid advances in technology, and these permitted the creation of large-scale production systems with decreasing unit costs. Higher productivity gave rise to increases in real income which, in turn, created a demand for more and more production in an ongoing spiral. The resultant economic process was self-reinforcing, product-proliferating, and energy- and materials-hungry. This pattern continued almost without interruption from the end of World War II to the early 1970s, despite fluctuations of the business cycle. …
During the 1970s many governmental and business leaders began to wonder whether the exponential growth of industries had begun to deplete stocks of nonrenewable natural resources. Since industry depends for continued growth on large stocks of reasonably priced natural resources as well as on cheap and abundant energies, more and more people began to question whether the industrial system would undermine itself by depleting its essential stocks.
The growth-no growth debates, triggered by Limits to Growth, the famous first report to the Club of Rome, are now history. Without rehashing well-worn arguments, it is enough to say that the issue for the economy is not whether to grow or not to grow; it is how to grow, and for what purpose. Growth for its own sake often proves to be contrary to human interests–it can depress, rather than enhance, the quality of life. Economic growth should serve human ends–and should occur only when it can fulfill this function. Further growth in pollution, traffic jams, urban conglomerations, mindless automation, and impersonal bureaucracy is contrary to human interests, although it might register as a contribution to economic growth when measured by such overall quantitative indicators as gross national product, national income, and international trade. But growth can occur in many areas where human needs are truly served–where the quality of life within developed countries is enhanced, and where world development and justice are promoted. Such growth is not undifferentiated but selective, and responds to social and cultural needs. The fact is that notwithstanding pockets of poverty, the basic material needs of people in affluent countries can already be fully met; the problem is better distribution, not more material growth. Further material growth would merely create increasing gaps between rich and poor. Hence rather than emphasizing overall growth, problems of distribution and injustice need to be addressed, and ways and means found to reduce, and eventually eliminate, the alienation, isolation, and impersonal tenor of life in affluent urban environments. …
To improve the quality of life in developed countries, policies must be geared to reducing the undesirable side effects of economic growth–such as unemployment and inflation–and promoting the satisfaction of material, social, and cultural needs. Major goals must be to place less emphasis on material- and energy-wasteful modes of production and more on conservation and recycling; less emphasis on automated machines and more on human services. Industrialized societies can progress by improving education, health and social services, cultural activities, and recreational opportunities.
There is a great need to improve educational systems. …
Communication in the political sphere needs to be expanded. …
In most of the free market economies, health and social services are insufficiently funded. …
While there is much room for progress in such services areas, a linear increase in materials- and energy-wasteful production systems would worsen rather than improve the overall quality of life. The artificial inculcation of demand for certain types of products is a disservice to the public, as illustrated by advertising designed to sell gas-guzzling private automobiles. Continued increase in the number of such automobiles would produce serious health hazards, create transportation breakdowns, and increase energy and raw material costs.
A trend toward the standard concept of a “post-industrial” society, however, is not without its grave dangers. Technologies should not be put in use simply because they are available–not even automated production systems or electronic communication technologies. Employment could be much reduced, and there could be a decline in face-to-face communication. Privacy could be invaded, and extensive data files used to control behavior. People could be exposed to information overload. Indeed, wide use of electronic communication systems could be a bane as well as a blessing. On the one hand people could be freed from many manual chores, could have much leisure time, and could have the cultural and environmental facilities to fill such time with enjoyment; on the other hand such societies could become impersonal technocracies, subject to a high degree of surveillance, saturated with services, and plagued by unsolved problems of unemployment and alienation. …
The “Fundamental Codes of a Culture” Deconstruct the Order of Things
Michel Foucault
(1961)
The fundamental codes of a culture–those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices–establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home. At the other extremity of thought, there are the scientific theories or the philosophical interpretations which explain why order exists in general, what universal law it obeys, what principle can account for it, and why this particular order has been established and not some other. But between these two regions, so distant from one another, lies a domain which, even though its role is mainly an intermediary one, is nonetheless fundamental: it is more confused, more obscure, and probably less easy to analyse. It is here that a culture, imperceptibly deviating from the empirical orders prescribed for it by its primary codes, instituting an initial separation from them, causes them to lose their original transparency, relinquishes its immediate and invisible powers, frees itself sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not the only possible ones or the best ones; this culture then finds itself faced with the stark fact that there exist, below the level of its spontaneous orders, things that are in themselves capable of being ordered, that belong to a certain unspoken order; the fact, in short, that order exists. As though emancipating itself to some extent from its linguistic, perceptual, and practical grids, the culture superimposed on them another kind of grid which neutralized them, which by this superimposition both revealed and excluded them at the same time, so that the culture, by this very process, came face to face with order in its primary state. It is on the basis of this newly perceived order that the codes of language, perception, and practice are criticized and rendered partially invalid. It is on the basis of this order, taken as a firm foundation, that general theories as to the ordering of things, and the interpretation that such an ordering involves, will be constructed. Thus, between the already “encoded” eye and reflexive knowledge there is a middle region which liberates order itself: it is here that it appears, according to the culture and the age in question, continuous and graduated or discontinuous and piecemeal, linked to space or constituted anew at each instant by the driving force of time, related to a series of variables or defined by separate systems of coherences, composed of resemblances which are either successive or corresponding, organized around increasing differences, etc. This middle region, then, in so far as it makes manifest the modes of being of order, can be posited as the most fundamental of all: anterior to words, perceptions, and gestures, which are then taken to be more or less exact, more or less happy, expressions of it (which is why this experience of order in its pure primary state always plays a critical role); more solid, more archaic, less dubious, always more “true” than the theories that attempt to give those expressions explicit form, exhaustive application, or philosophical foundation. Thus, in every culture, between the use of what one might call the ordering codes and reflections upon order itself, there is the pure experience of order and its modes of being.
French Students “Come to Everything Too Late”
Anonymous Pamphlet
(1966-1967)
In their ideological existence French students come to everything too late. All the values and illusions that are the pride of their cloistered world are already doomed as untenable illusions which history has long ago made ridiculous.
Because they share a little of the University’s crumbling prestige, students are still pleased to be students. Too late. The mechanical, specialized teaching they receive has fallen as abysmally low (in comparison with the former level of bourgeois general culture)[1] as their own intellectual level at the time they enter it, due to the single fact that the reality that dominates it all, the economic system, calls for mass production of untutored students incapable of thinking. Being unaware that the University has become institutionalized organization of ignorance, that “higher education” itself is disintegrating at the same tempo that mass production of professors progresses, and that all of these professors are morons, most of whom would set any high school student body into an uproar, students continue, therefore, to listen respectfully to their teachers, with the conscious determination to rid themselves of all spirit of criticism, the better to commune in the mystic illusion of having become “students,” i.e., persons who are seriously occupied with acquiring serious knowledge in the hope that they will be entrusted with ultimate truths. This is a menopause of the mind. Everything that is taking place today in school and faculty amphitheatres will be condemned in the future revolutionary society as just so much socially harmful noise. From now on, students make people laugh.
Students don’t even realize that history is also changing their absurd, “cloistered” world. The famous “crisis of the University,” which is a detail of the more general crisis of modern capitalism, remains the subject of a deaf men’s dialogue between different specialists. It expresses quite simply the difficulties of belated adjustment by this special production sector to overall transformation of the production apparatus. The leftovers of the old ideology of the liberal bourgeois University become commonplaces as its social basis disappears. The University could consider that it was an autonomous power at the time of free-trade capitalism and liberal government, which left it a certain marginal freedom.
It was in fact closely dependent on the needs of this type of society which were: to give a privileged minority who were pursuing studies an adequate general culture before they joined the ranks of the ruling class, which they had hardly left. Hence the ridiculous position of certain nostalgic[2] professors, embittered at having lost their former function of watchdogs of future leaders for the much less honorable one of sheep dogs leading flocks of “white collar” workers, according to the planified needs of the economic system, along the path to their respective factories and offices. They are the ones who oppose their archaic ideas to technocratization of the University and continue imperturbedly to impact scraps of the culture called “general” to future specialists who won’t know what to do with it.
More serious, and therefore more dangerous, are the modernists on the left and those in the UNEF led by the “ultras” of the FGEL, who demand “structural reform of the University,” “re-introduction of the University into social and economic life,” that is to say, its adaptation to the needs of modern capitalism. From having been the dispensers of “general culture” for the use of the ruling classes, the various facultes and schools, still draped in anachronistic prestige, have been turned into quick-breeding factories for lower and medium cadres. So far from protesting against this historical process that directly subordinates one of the last relatively autonomous sectors of social life to the demands of the mercantile system, our progressives protest against the delays and lapses that beset its realization. They are the champions of the future cybernetically run University, which is already apparent here and there. The mercantile system and its modern hirelings are the real enemy.
[1] We do not mean the culture of the Ecole normale superieureor of the “Sorboniqueurs,” but that of the Encyclopaedists, or of Hegel.
[2] Not daring to claim kinship with philistine liberalism, they invent references for themselves to the academic freedoms of the Middle Ages, which was the time of “non-freedom democracy.”
Jean-Paul Sartre Interviews Daniel Cohn-Bendit
Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Jean-Paul Sartre
(1968)
J.-P.S.: You have said that the student movement is now on the crest of a wave. But the vacation is coming, and with it a deceleration, probably a retreat. The government will take the opportunity to put through reforms. It will invite students to participate and many will accept, saying either ‘Reformism is all we want,’ or ‘It is only reformism, but it is better than nothing, and we have obtained it by force.’ So you will have a transformed university, but the changes may be merely superficial ones, dealing particularly with the development of material facilities, lodgings, university restaurants. These things would make no basic changes in the system. They are demands that the authorities could satisfy without bringing the regime into question. Do you think that you could obtain any ‘adjustments’ that would really introduce revolutionary elements into the bourgeois university–for example, that would make the education given at the university contradictory to the basic function of the university in the present regime: the training of cadres who are well integrated into the system?
D.C.-B.: First, purely material demands may have a revolutionary content. On university restaurants we have a demand which is basic. We demand their abolition as university restaurants. They must become youth restaurants in which all young people, whether students or not, can eat for one franc forty. No one can reject this demand: if young workers are working during the day, there seems no reason why they should not dine for one franc forty in the evening. Similarly with the Cites Universitaires [campuses]. There are many young workers and apprentices who would rather live away from their parents but who cannot take a room because that would cost them 30,000 francs per month; let us welcome them to the Cites,where the rent is from 9,000 to 10,000 francs per month. And let the well-to-do students in law and sciences-po [political science] go elsewhere.
Basically, I don’t think that any reforms the government might make would be enough to demobilize the students. There obviously will be a retreat during the vacation, but they will not ‘break’ the movement. Some will say, ‘We have lost our chance’, without any attempt to explain what has happened. Others will say, ‘The situation is not yet ripe.’ But many militants will realize that we must capitalize on what has just taken place, analyse it theoretically and prepare to resume our action next term. For there will be an explosion then, whatever the government’s reforms. And the experience of disorderly, unintentional, authority-provoked action we have just been through will enable us to make any action launched in the autumn more effective. The vacation will enable students to come to terms with the disarray they showed during the fortnight’s crisis, and to think about what they want to do and can do.
As to the possibility of making the education given at the university a ‘counter-education’ manufacturing not well-integrated cadres but revolutionaries, I am afraid that that seems to me a somewhat idealistic hope. Even a reformed bourgeois education will still manufacture bourgeois cadres. People will be caught in the wheels of the system. At best they will become members of a bien-pensant ["right-thinking"] left, but objectively they will remain cogs ensuring the functioning of society.
Our aim is to pursue successfully a ‘parallel education’ which will be technical and ideological. We must launch a university ourselves, on a completely new basis, even if it only lasts a few weeks. We shall call on left-wing and extreme left-wing teachers who are prepared to work with us in seminars and assist us with their knowledge–renouncing their ‘professional’ status–in the investigations which we shall undertake.
In all faculties we shall open seminars–not lectures courses, obviously–on the problems of the workers’ movement, on the use of technology in the interests of man, on the possibilities opened up by automation. And all this not from a theoretical viewpoint (every sociological study today opens with the words ‘Technology must be made to serve man’s interests’), but by posing concrete problems. Obviously this education will go in the opposite direction to the education provided by the system and the experiment could not last long; the system would quickly react and the movement give way. But what matters is not working out a reform of capitalist society, but launching an experiment that completely breaks with that society, an experiment that will not last, but which allows a glimpse of a possibility: something which is revealed for a moment and then vanishes. But that is enough to prove that the something could exist.
We do not hope to make some kind of socialist university in our society, for we know that the function of the university will stay the same so long as the system is unchanged as a whole. But we believe that there can be moments of rupture in the system’s cohesion and that it is possible to profit by them to open breaches in it.
A Breath of Springtime in Prague: Intellectuals Issue the “2000 Words” Manifesto
Czechoslovak Intellectuals
(1968)
First, the life of our nation was threatened by the war. Then came blacker days, which threatened our spiritual and national character. Most of the nation accepted and had faith in the new program of socialism, which was taken over by the wrong people. It would not have mattered so much that they lacked the experience of statesmen, the knowledge of scholars or the training of philosophers, if they had allowed themselves to be replaced by more capable persons.
The communist party betrayed the great trust the people put in it after the war. It preferred the glories of office, until it had those and nothing more. The disappointment was great among communists as well as noncommunists. The leadership of the party changed it from a political and ideological group into a power-hungry organization, attracting egotists, cowards, and crooks.
They influenced the party’s operations to such an extent that honest people could not gain a foothold without debasement, much less make it a modern political instrument. There were many communists who fought this deterioration but they could not prevent what happened.
The situation in the party led to a similar situation in the state, resulting in the linkage of party and state. There was no criticism of the state and economic organizations. Parliament forgot how to deliberate, the government forgot how to rule and managers how to manage. Elections had no significance and the laws lost their value. We could not trust any of our representatives, and when we could it was impossible to ask them for anything because they were powerless. What made things even worse was that we could not trust each other.
The Decline of Honesty
Personal and collective honor deteriorated. Honesty led nowhere, and it was useless to speak of rewards according to ability. As a result, most citizens lost interest in public affairs. They were concerned only with themselves and with accumulating money. The situation got so bad that now one cannot even rely on money. Relations among people were undermined and joy in work was lost. To sum up, the nation was in a morass that threatened its spiritual health and character. …
In all justice, we can say that some of them did realize what was happening. We know that now because they are redressing wrongs, correcting mistakes, bringing decisions to the membership and the citizens, and limiting the authority and the size of the official apparatus. They no longer support the conservative viewpoint in the party. But there are still many officials opposed to change who exercise the instruments of power, particularly in the districts and in the communities.
Since the beginning of the year we have been in the process of reviving democratization. It began in the communist party. We must say this. And those noncommunists among us who, until recently, expected no good to come from the communists also know it. We must add, however, that this process could not have begun elsewhere. After twenty years, only the communists had an actual political life; only communist criticism was in a position to assess things as they were; only the opposition in the communist party had the privilege of being in contact with the enemy.
The Basis of Democratization
The present effort of the democratic communists is only an installment in the repayment of the debt the entire party owes the people outside the party, who had no political rights. No gratitude is due to the communist party, although it should probably be acknowledged that it is honestly striving to use this last opportunity to save its own honor and the nation’s. …
Therefore, let us not overestimate the significance of the criticism from the ranks of writers and students. The source of social change is in the economy. The right word is significant only if it is spoken under conditions which have been duly prepared. “Duly prepared conditions in our country”–unfortunately, this cliche means our general level of poverty and the complete disintegration of the old system of rule, under which certain types of politicians calmly and peacefully compromised themselves at our expense.
Truth does not prevail. It only remains when everything else fails. …
Yet, we have not spoken up. All we have to do is complete what we started out to do–humanize this regime. Otherwise the revenge of the old forces will be cruel. We turn to those who have been waiting. The days immediately ahead of us will determine our future course for many years to come. …
The Ultimate Sacrifice: A Czech Student Immolates Himself
Jan Palach
(1969)
Seeing that our nations [Czechs and Slovaks] are on the brink of despair we have decided to make our protest and arouse the people of this country in the following way.
Our group consists of volunteers who have resolved to let themselves be burned alive for our cause.
I have the honor to draw the first lot and thus obtain the right to draft this first letter and become the first torch.
Our demands are: (1) The immediate abolition of censorship. (2) Aban on the distribution ofZpravy.[1]
Unless our demands are met within five days, i.e. by 21 January, and unless the public demonstrates adequate support (i.e. by an indefinite strike), further torches will burst into flames.
Signed: Torch Number 1
P.S. Remember August! Czechoslovakia has obtained room for manoeuvre in international affairs: let us exploit the fact.
[1] Zpravy was a Soviet-controlled occupation newspaper with scurrilous attacks on reformers.
The “Twenty-One Demands”: A Call for Workers’Rights and Freedom in a Socialist State
Solidarity Union
(1980)
1. Acceptance of Free Trade Unions independent of both the Party and employers, in accordance with the International Labor Organization’s Convention number 87 on the freedom to form unions, which was ratified by the Polish government.
2. A guarantee of the right to strike and guarantees of security for strikers and their supporters.
3. Compliance with the freedoms of press and publishing guaranteed in the Polish constitution. A halt to repression of independent publications and access to the mass media for representatives of all faiths.
4. (a) Reinstatement to their former positions for: people fired for defending workers’ rights, in particular those participating in the strikes of 1970 and 1976; students dismissed from school for their convictions. (b)The release of all political prisoners … (c) A halt to repression for one’s convictions.
5. The broadcasting on the mass media of information about the establishment of the Interfactory Strike Committee (MKS) and publication of the list of demands.
6. The undertaking of real measures to get the country out of its present crisis by:
(a) providing comprehensive, public information about the socio-economic situation;
(b) making it possible for people from every social class and stratum of society to participate in open discussions concerning the reform program.
7. Compensation of all workers taking part in the strike for its duration with holiday pay from the Central Council of Trade Unions.
8. Raise the base pay of every worker 2,000 zlotys per month to compensate for price rises to date.
9. Guaranteed automatic pay raises indexed to price inflation and to decline in real income.
10. Meeting the requirements of the domestic market for food products: only surplus goods to be exported.
11. The rationing of meat and meat products through food coupons (until the market is stabilized).
12. Abolition of “commercial prices” and hard currency sales in so-called “internal export” shops.
13. A system of merit selection for management positions on the basis of qualifications rather than Party membership. Abolition of the privileged status of MO [police], SB [Internal Security Police], and the party apparatus through: equalizing all family subsidies; eliminating special stores, etc.
14. Reduction of retirement age for women to 50 and for men to 55. Anyone who has worked in the PRL [Polish People's Republic] for 30 years, for women, or 35 years for men, without regard to age, should be entitled to retirement benefits.
15. Bringing pensions and retirement benefits of the “old portfolio” to the level of those paid currently.
16. Improvement in the working conditions of the Health Service, which would assure full medical care to working people.
17. Provision for sufficient openings in daycare nurseries and preschools for the children of working people.
18. Establishment of three-year paid maternity leaves for the raising of children.
19. Reduce the waiting time for apartments.
20. Raise per diem [for work-related travel] from 40 zlotys to 100 zlotys and provide cost-of-living increases.
21. Saturdays to be days off from work. Those who work on round-the-clock jobs or three-shift systems should have the lack of free Saturdays compensated by increased holiday leaves or through other paid holidays off from work.
“Sweated Labor:” A Poor Woman’s Fate
Henry Mayhew
(1849)
I do the “looping.” The looping consists in putting on the lace work down the front of the coats. I puts it on. That’s my living; I wish it was not. I get 5d. for the looping of each coat; that’s the regular price. It’s three hours’ work to do one coat, and work fast to do it as it’s done now. I’m a particular quick hand. I have to find my own thread. It cost 1 1/2d. for a reel of cotton; that will do five coats. If I sit down between eight and nine in the morning, and work till twelve at night–I never enters my bed afore–and then rise between eight and nine again (that’s the time I sit down to work on account of doing my own affairs first), and then work on till eleven, I get my four coats done by that time, and some wouldn’t get done till two. It’s an hour’s work going and coming, and waiting to be served at the piece-master’s, so that at them long hours it takes me a day and a half hard work to get four coats looped. When I first touched this work I could do eight in the same time, and be paid better; I had 7d. then instead of 5d.; now the work in each is nearly double in quantity, that it is.
I’ve got two boys both at work, one about fifteen, earning 3s. per week, and I have got him to keep and clothe. The week before last I bought him a top coat–it cost me 6s.–for fear he should be laid up, for he’s such bad health. The other boy is eighteen years, and earns 9s. a week. He’s been in work about four months, and was out six weeks. At the same time I had no work. Oh, it was awful then! I have been paying 1s. 6d. a week off a debt for bread and things I was obliged to get on credit then.
My last boy is only nine years of age, and him I have entirely to keep [support]. He goes to the charity school. It lets him have one coat and trousers and shoes and stockings every year. He wears a pinafore now to save his coat. My eldest boy is like a hearty man to every meal. If he hadn’t got me to manage for him, may be he’d spend all his earnings in mere food. I get my second bread, and I go as far as Nassau-street to save two or three halfpence. Butter we neverhave. A roast of meat none of us ever sees. A cup of tea, a piece of bread, and an onion, is generally all I have for my dinner, and sometimes I haven’t even an onion.
The Theory of Natural Selection and the Evolution of Species
Charles Darwin
(1859)
I have now recapitulated the facts and considerations which have thoroughly convinced me that species have been modified, during a long course of descent. This has been effected chiefly through the natural selections of numerous successive, slight, favourable variations; aided in an important manner by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts; and in an unimportant manner, that is in relation to adaptive structures, whether past or present, by the direct action of external conditions, and by variations which seem to us in our ignorance to arise spontaneously. … But as my conclusions have lately been much misrepresented, and it has been stated that I attribute the modification of species exclusively to natural selection, I may be permitted to remark that in the first edition of this work, and subsequently, I placed in a most conspicuous position–namely, at the close of the Introduction–the following words: “I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification.” This has been of no avail. Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.
It can hardly be supposed that a false theory would explain, in so satisfactory a manner as does the theory of natural selection, the several large classes of facts above specified. It has recently been objected that this is an unsafe method of arguing; but it is a method used in judging of the common events of life, and has often been used by the greatest natural philosophers. The undulatory theory of light has thus been arrived at; and the belief in the revolution of the earth on its own axis was until lately supported by hardly any direct evidence. It is no valid objection that science as yet throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life. Who can explain what is the essence of the attraction of gravity? No one now objects to following out the results consequent on this unknown element of attraction; notwithstanding that Leibnitz formerly accused Newton of introducing “occult qualities and miracles into philosophy.”
I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz, “as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion.” A celebrated author and divine has written to me that “he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.” …
… The chief cause of our natural unwillingness to admit that one species has given birth to clear and distinct species, is that we are always slow in admitting great changes of which we do not see the steps. The difficulty is the same as that felt by so many geologists, when Lyell first insisted that long lines of inland cliffs had been formed, and great valleys excavated, by the agencies which we see still at work. The mind cannot possibly grasp the full meaning of the term of even a million years; it cannot add up and perceive the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost infinite number of generations. …
Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for the manner in which all organic beings are grouped, shows that the greater number of species in each genus, and all the species in many genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct. We can so far take a prophetic glance into futurity as to foretell that it will be the common and widely-spread species, belonging to the larger and dominant groups within each class, which will ultimately prevail and procreate new and dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Cambrian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. … Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.
A Clergyman’s Response to Darwin
Bishop Samuel Wilberforce
(1860)
The conclusion, then, to which Mr. Darwin would bring us is, that all the various forms of vegetable and animal life with which the globe is now peopled, or of which we find the remains preserved in a fossil state in the great earth-museum around us, which the science of geology unlocks for our instruction, … “have descended from some one primordial form into which life was first breathed by the Creator.” This is the theory which really pervades the whole volume. Man, beast, creeping thing, and plant of the earth, are all the lineal and direct descendants of some one individual ens, whose various progeny have been simply modified by the action of natural and ascertainable conditions into the multiform aspect of life which we see around us. This is undoubtedly at first sight a somewhat startling conclusion to arrive at. To find that mosses, grasses, turnips, oaks, worms, and flies, mites and elephants, infusoria and whales, tadpoles of to-day and venerable saurians, truffles and men, are all equally the lineal descendants of the same aboriginal common ancestor. … –This, to say the least of it, is no common discovery–no very expected conclusion. …
We come then to these conclusions. All the facts presented to us in the natural world tend to show that none of the variations produced in the fixed forms of animal life, when seen in its most plastic condition under domestication, give any promise of a true transmutation of species; first, from the difficulty of accumulating and fixing variations within the same species; secondly, from the fact that these variations, though most serviceable for man, have no tendency to improve the individual beyond the standard of his own specific type, and so to afford matter, even if they were infinitely produced, for the supposed power of natural selection on which to work; whilst all variations from the mixture of species are barred by the inexorable law of hybrid sterility. Further, the embalmed records of 3,000 years show that there has been no beginning of transmutation in the species of our most familiar domesticated animals; and beyond this, that in the countless tribes of animal life around us, down to its lowest and most variable species, no one have ever discovered a single instance of such transmutation being now in prospect; no new organ has ever been known to be developed–no new natural instinct to be formed–whilst, finally, in the vast museum of departed animal life which the strata of the earth imbed for our examination, whilst they contain far too complete a representation of the past to be set aside as a mere imperfect record, yet afford no one instance of any such change as having ever been in progress, or give us anywhere the missing links of the assumed chain, or the remains which would enable now existing variations, by gradual approximations to shade off into unity. …
Few things have more deeply injured the cause of religion than the busy fussy energy with which men, narrow and feeble alike in faith and in science, have bustled forth to reconcile all new discoveries in physics with the word of inspiration. For it continually happens that some larger collection of facts, or some wider view of the phenomena of nature, alter the whole philosophic scheme; whilst revelation has been committed to declare an absolute agreement with what turns out after all to have been a misconception or an error. We cannot, therefore, consent to test the truth of natural science by the word of revelation. But this does not make it the less important to point out on scientific grounds scientific errors, when those errors tend to limit God’s glory in creation, or to gainsay the revealed relations of that creation to Himself. To both these classes of error, though, we doubt not, quite unintentionally on his part, we think that Mr. Darwin’s speculations directly tend.
The Regulation of Prostitution in Vienna
Viennese Police Code
(1852)
Instructions for Police Treatment of Prostitutes, 1852
1. Under the designation prostitute is understood to be every woman who seeks business by exposing her body for sale in lewdness.
2. Under what circumstances the prostitute is officially conducted to the criminal court and what penalties in all other cases remain under police jurisdiction is determined by penal law.
3. The prostitute falls into the realm of police correction when she:
a. walks the streets, that is, she walks in such a way as to enlist business from men;
b. loiters for the same end on doorsteps in allies or in open spaces;
c. has her residence in a house or part of the city in which are gathered such women of a conduct similar to those of a bordello or in a region known for its lewd manners;
d. lures people in a shameless way from a window or from an open air part of the house, or otherwise offends public decency, and not only in a criminal way.
4. Every one who is defined under these as a streetwalker and who is held in detention is subject to the following proceedings:
a. a medical examination;
b. an inquiry into her present situation, and
c. her past, in order to
d. conduct an investigation into her methods of earning a living and her personal relationships.
5. Should such a female qualify as a prostitute and be found ill, she must first of all go to the hospital or according to the circumstances to an investigatory hospital and after a successful cure further investigation will be undertaken.
Survival of the Fittest Applied to Human Kind
Herbert Spencer
(1851)
In common with its other assumptions of secondary offices, the assumption by a government of the office of Reliever-general to the poor, is necessarily forbidden by the principle that a government cannot rightly do anything more than protect. In demanding from a citizen contributions for the mitigation of distress–contributions not needed for the due administration of men’s rights–the state is, as we have seen, reversing its function, and diminishing that liberty to exercise the faculties which it was instituted to maintain. Possibly, … some will assert that by satisfying the wants of the pauper, a government is in reality extending his liberty to exercise his faculties. … But this statement of the case implies a confounding of two widely different things. To enforce the fundamental law–to take care that every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man–this is the special purpose for which the civil power exists. Now insuring to each the right to pursue within the specified limits the objects of his desires without let or hindrance, is quite a separate thing from insuring him satisfaction. …
Pervading all nature we may see at work a stern discipline, which is a little cruel that it may be very kind. That state of universal warfare maintained throughout the lower creation, to the great perplexity of many worthy people, is at bottom the most merciful provision which the circumstances admit of. … The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many “in shallows and in miseries,” are the decrees of a large, farseeing benevolence. It seems hard that an unskilfulness which with all its efforts he cannot overcome, should entail hunger upon the artisan. It seems hard that a labourer incapacitated by sickness from competing with his stronger fellows, should have to bear the resulting privations. It seems hard that widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life or death. Nevertheless, when regarded not separately, but in connection with the interests of universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to be full of the highest beneficence–the same beneficence which brings to early graves the children of diseased parents, and singles out the low-spirited, the intemperate, and the debilitated as the victims of an epidemic. …
Political Reform Taken to Its Logical Conclusion: Rights for Women
John Stuart Mill
(1869)
It will be said, the rule of men over women differs from all these others in not being a rule of force: it is accepted voluntarily; women make no complaint, and are consenting parties to it. In the first place, a great number of women do not accept it. Ever since there have been women able to make their sentiments known by their writings (the only mode of publicity which society permits to them), an increasing number of them have recorded protests against their present social condition: and recently many thousands of them, headed by the most eminent women known to the public, have petitioned Parliament for their admission to the parliamentary suffrage. The claim of women to be educated as solidly, and in the same branches of knowledge, as men, is urged with growing intensity, and with a great prospect of success; while the demand for their admission into professions and occupations hitherto closed against them, becomes every year more urgent. …
But if the principle is true, we ought to act as if we believed it, and not to ordain that to be born a girl instead of a boy, any more than to be born black instead of white, or a commoner instead of a nobleman, shall decide the person’s position through all life–shall interdict people from all the more elevated social positions, and from all, except a few, respectable occupations. …
At present, in the more improved countries, the disabilities of women are the only case, save one, in which laws and institutions take persons at their birth, and ordain that they shall never in all their lives be allowed to compete for certain things. The one exception is that of royalty. … All other dignities and social advantages are open to the whole male sex: many indeed are only attainable by wealth, but wealth may be striven for by any one, and is actually obtained by many men of the very humblest origin. The difficulties, to the majority, are indeed insuperable without the aid of fortunate accidents; but no male human being is under any legal ban: neither law nor opinion superadd artificial obstacles to the natural ones. …
Neither does it avail anything to say that the nature of the two sexes adapts them to their present functions and position, and renders these appropriate to them. Standing on the ground of common sense and the constitution of the human mind, I deny that any one knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another. … What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing–the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others. …
One thing we may be certain of–that what is contrary to women’s nature to do, they never will be made to do by simply giving their nature free play. The anxiety of mankind to interfere in behalf of nature, for fear lest nature should not succeed in effecting its purpose, is an altogether unnecessary solicitude. What women by nature cannot do, it is quite superfluous to forbid them from doing. What they can do, but not so well as the men who are their competitors, competition suffices to exclude them from; since nobody asks for protective duties and bounties in favor of women; it is only asked that the present bounties and protective duties in favor of men should be recalled. If women have a greater natural inclination for some things than for others, there is no need of laws or social inculcation to make the majority of them do the former in preference to the latter. Whatever women’s services are most wanted for, the free play of competition will hold out the strongest inducements to them to undertake. …
Those who attempt to force women into marriage by closing all other doors against them … are afraid, not lest women should be unwilling to marry, for I do not think that any one in reality has that apprehension; but lest they should insist that marriage should be on equal conditions; lest all women of spirit and capacity should prefer doing almost anything else, not in their own eyes degrading, rather than marry, when marrying is giving themselves a master, and a master too of all their earthly possessions. … looking to the laws alone, society would be a hell upon earth. Happily there are both feelings and interests which in many men exclude, and in most, greatly temper, the impulses and propensities which lead to tyranny: and of those feelings, the tie which connects a man and his wife affords, in a normal state of things, incomparably the strongest example. The only tie which at all approaches to it, that between him and his children, tends, in all save exceptional cases, to strengthen, instead of conflicting with, the first. Because this is true; because men in general do not inflict, nor women suffer, all the misery which could be inflicted and suffered if the full power of tyranny with which the man is legally invested were acted on; the defenders of the existing form of the institution think that all its iniquity is justified, and that any complaint is merely quarrelling with the evil which is the price paid for every great good. …
Marriage Patterns in Eastern and Western Europe: A Statistical Comparison
Various Governments
(ca. 1900s)
Eastern and Western Europe Diverge in the Incidence of Unmarried People, c. 1900
Unmarried Population as Percentage of Total Population in Each Age Group
Europe (except Eastern Europe)
Men Women
Country 20 – 2 4 2 5 – 29 45 – 4 9 2 0 – 24 25 – 2 9 4 5 – 49
Austria 93 51 1 1 66 38 13
Belgium 85 50 16 71 41 17
Denmark 88 50 9 7 5 4 2 1 3
Finland 84 51 14 68 40 15
France 90 48 1 1 58 30 12
Germany 91 48 9 7 1 3 4 1 0
Great Britain 83 47 12 73 42 15
Holland 89 53 13 79 44 14
Iceland 92 66 19 81 56 29
Ireland 96 78 20 86 59 17
Italy 86 46 1 1 60 30 1 1
Norway 86 54 1 1 77 48 18
Portugal 84 48 13 69 41 20
Sweden 92 61 13 80 52 19
Switzerland 91 58 16 78 45 17
Eastern Europe
Men Women
Country 20 – 2 4 2 5 – 29 45 – 4 9 2 0 – 24 25 – 2 9 4 5 – 49
Greece 82 47 9 1 4 1 3 4
Hungary 81 31 5 3 6 1 5 4
Romania 67 21 5 2 0 8 3
Bulgaria 58 23 3 2 4 3 1
U.S.S.R. 51 18 3 2 8 9 4
Serbia 50 18 3 1 6 2 1
Live Births in Europe on the Eve of the Great War
Various Governments
(1908-1913)
Live Births per 1,000 Inhabitants, 1908 – 1913
European Russia 45.6 Australia (1911-13) 28.1
Romania 43.1 Denmark 27.1
Serbia 38.2 Norway 26.0
Portugal 34.6 England 24.9
Italy 32.4 Sweden 24.4
Austria 31.9 USA 24.3
Germany 29.5 Ireland 23.3
Netherlands 29.1 France 19.5
Women’s Suffrage: An Englishwoman Says “No”
Mrs. Humphrey Ward (1889)
We, the undersigned, wish to appeal to the common sense and the educated thought of men and women of England against the proposed extension of the Parliamentary suffrage to women.
While desiring the fullest possible development of the powers, energies, and education of women, we believe that their work for the State, and their responsibilities towards it, must always differ essentially from those of men, and that therefore their share in the working of the State machinery should be different from that assigned to men. Certain large departments of the national life are of necessity worked exclusively by men. To men belong the struggle of debate and legislation in Parliament; the working of the army and navy; all the heavy, laborious, fundamental industries of the State, such as those of mines, metals, and railways; the lead and supervision of English commerce, the service of that merchant fleet on which our food supply depends.
At the same time we are heartily in sympathy with all the recent efforts which have been made to give women a more important part in those affairs of the community where their interests and those of men are equally concerned; where it is possible for them not only to decide but to help in carrying out, and where, therefore, judgment is weighted by a true responsibility, and can be guided by experience and the practical information which comes from it. As voters for or members of School Boards, Boards of Guardians, and other important public bodies, women have now opportunities for public usefulness which must promote the growth of character, and at the same time strengthen among them the social sense and habit. But we believe that the emancipating process has now reached the limits fixed by the physical constitution of women, and by the fundamental difference which must always exist beween their main occupations and those of men. The care of the sick and the insane; the treatment of the poor; the education of children: in all these matters, and others besides, they have made good their claim to larger and more extended powers. We rejoice in it. But when it comes to questions of foreign or colonial policy, or of grave constitutional change, then we maintain that the necessary and normal experience of women does not and can never provide them with such materials for sound judgment as are open to men.
In conclusion: nothing can be further from our minds than to seek to depreciate the position or the importance of women. It is because we are keenly alive to the enormous value of their special contribution to the community, that we oppose what seems to us likely to endanger that contribution. We are convinced that the pursuit of a mere outward equality with men is for women not only vain but demoralizing. It leads to a total misconception of women’s true dignity and special mission. It tends to personal struggle and rivalry, where the only effort of both the great divisions of the human family should be to contribute the characteristic labour and the best gifts of each to the common stock.
The Suffrage Movement Radicalized
Emmeline Pankhurst
(ca. 1906-7)
The contention of the old-fashioned suffragists, and of the politicians as well, has always been that an educated public opinion will ultimately give votes to women without any great force being exerted in behalf of the reform. … In the year 1906 there was an immensely large public opinion in favor of woman suffrage. But what good did that do the cause?
From the very first … we made the public aware of the woman suffrage movement as it had never been before. … We threw away all our conventional notions of what was “ladylike” and “good form,” and we applied to our methods the one test question, Will it help? Just as the [Salvation Army] took religion to the street crowds in such fashion that the church people were horrified, so we took suffrage to the general public in a manner that amazed and scandalised the other suffragists. …
Women have concealed themselves for thirty-six hours in dangerous positions, under the platforms, in the organs, wherever they could get a vantage point. They waited starving in the cold, sometimes on the roof exposed to a winter’s night, just to get a chance of saying in the course of a Cabinet Minister’s speech, “When is the Liberal Government going to put its promises into practice?”
A Socialist Solution to the Question of Women’s Rights
Clara Zetkin
(1887)
It is not just the women workers who suffer because of the miserable payment of their labor. The male workers, too, suffer because of it. As a consequence of their low wages, the women are transformed from mere competitors into unfair competitors who push down the wages of men. Cheap women’s labor eliminates the work of men and if the men want to continue to earn their daily bread, they must put up with low wages. Thus women’s work is not only a cheap form of labor, it also cheapens the work of men and for that reason it is doubly appreciated by the capitalist, who craves profits. The economic advantages of the industrial activity of proletarian women only aid the tiny minority of the sacrosanct guild of coupon clippers and extortionists of profit.
Given the fact that many thousands of female workers are active in industry, it is vital for the trade unions to incorporate them into their movement. In individual industries where female labor plays an important role, any movement advocating better wages, shorter working hours, etc., would be doomed from the start because of the attitude of those women workers who are not organized. Battles which begin propitiously enough, ended up in failure because the employers were able to play off non-union female workers against those that are organized in unions. These non-union workers continued to work (or took up work) under any conditions, which transformed them from competitors in dirtywork to scabs.
Certainly one of the reasons for these poor wages for women is the circumstances that female workers are practically unorganized. They lack the strength which comes with unity. They lack the courage, the feeling of power, the spirit of resistance, and the ability to resist which is produced by the strength of an organization in which the individual fights for everybody and everybody fights for the individual. Furthermore, they lack the enlightenment and the training which an organization provides.
A French Response to the Demographic Crisis: Bonuses for Babies
French National Assembly
(1913)
Article 1–For large families allowances are a compulsory service for all departements, with the participation of the communes and the State.
Article 2–Every head of a family of French nationality, who is responsible for more than three legitimate or acknowledged children and whose resources are insufficient for their upbringing, receives an annual allowance for each child under thirteen years of age, after the third child under thirteen years of age.
Article 3– The rate of allowance is determined for each commune by the municipal council, subject to the approval of the General Council and the Minister of the Interior.
It may not be less than 60 francs per year per child, and not more than 90 francs; if the allowance exceeds 90 francs, the difference is the exclusive responsibility of the commune.
Primary Sources – Unit Thirteen – The Age of Nationalism, 1850-1914The Liberal Dilemma: Extension of the Franchise–A No Vote
Robert Lowe
(1867)
If the working classes, in addition to being a majority in the boroughs, get a redistribution of the seats in their favor, it will follow that their influence will be enormously increased. They will then urge the House of Commons to pass another Franchise Bill, and another Redistribution Bill to follow it. … No one can tell where it will stop, and it will not be likely to stop until we get equal electoral districts and a qualification so low that it will keep out nobody. There is another matter with which my honorable friend has not dealt. I mean the point of combination among the working classes. To many persons there appears great danger that the machinery which at present exists for strikes and trade unions may be used for political purposes.
I come now to the question of the representatives of the working classes. It is an old observation that every democracy is in some respect similar to a despotism. As courtiers and flatterers are worse than despots themselves, so those who flatter and fawn upon the people are generally very inferior to the people, the objects of their flattery and adulation. We see in America, where the people have undisputed power, that they do not send honest, hard-working men to represent them in Congress, but traffickers in office, bankrupts, men who have lost their character and been driven from every respectable way of life, and who take up politics as a last resource.
Now, Sir, democracy has yet another tendency, which it is worth while to study at the present moment. It is singularly prone to the concentration of power. Under it individual men are small and the government is great. That must be the character of a government which represents the majority, and which absolutely tramples down and equalizes everything except itself. And democracy has another strong peculiarity. It looks with the utmost hostility on all institutions not of immediate popular origin, which intervene between the people and the sovereign power which the people have set up.
Now, look what was done in France. Democracy has left nothing in that country between the people and the emperor except a bureaucracy which the emperor himself has created. In America it has done almost the same thing. You have there nothing to break the shock between the two great powers of the State. The wise men who framed the constitution tried to provide a remedy by dividing functions as much as possible. They assigned one function to the President, another to the Senate, a third to the Congress, and a fourth to the different States. But all their efforts have been in vain, and you see how two hostile camps have arisen, and the terrible duel which is now taking place between them. …
I have now, Sir, traced as well as I can what I believe will be the natural results of a measure which, it seems to my poor imagination, is calculated, if it should pass into law, to destroy one after another those institutions which have secured for England an amount of happiness and prosperity which no country has ever reached or is ever likely to attain. Surely the heroic work of so many centuries, the matchless achievements of so many wise heads and strong hands, deserve a nobler consummation than to be sacrificed at the shrine of revolutionary passion or the maudlin enthusiasm of humanity. But if we do fall, we shall fall deservedly. Uncoerced by any external force, not borne down by any internal calamity, but in the full plethora of our wealth and the surfeit of our too exuberant prosperity, with our own rash and inconsiderate hands, we are about to pluck down on our own heads the venerable temple of our liberty and our glory. History may tell of other acts as signally disastrous, but of none more wanton, none more disgraceful.
A Russian Zionist Makes the Case for a Jewish Homeland
Leo Pinsker
(1882)
That hoary problem, subsumed under the Jewish question, today, as ever in the past, provokes discussion. Like the squaring of the circle it remains unsolved, but unlike it, continues to be the everburning question of the day. That is because the problem is not one of mere theoretical interest: it renews and revives in everyday life and presses ever more urgently for solution.
This is the kernel of the problem, as we see it: the Jews comprise a distinctive element among the nations under which they dwell, and as such can neither assimilate nor be readily digested by any nation.
Hence the solution lies in finding a means of so readjusting this exclusive element to the family of nations, that the basis of the Jewish question will be permanently removed. …
A fear of the Jewish ghost has passed down the generations and the centuries. First a breeder of prejudice, later in the conjunction with other forces we are about to discuss, it culminated in Judeophobia.
Judeophobia, together with other symbols, superstitions, and idiosyncrasies, has acquired legitimacy among all the peoples of the earth with whom the Jews had intercourse. Judeophobia is a variety of demonopathy with the distinction that it is not peculiar to particular races but is common to the whole of mankind, and that this ghost is not disembodied like other ghosts but partakes of flesh and blood, must endure pain inflicted by the fearful mob who imagines itself endangered.
Judeophobia is a psychic aberration. As a psychic aberration it is hereditary, and as a disease transmitted for two thousand years it is incurable. …
The Jews are aliens who can have no representatives, because they have no country. Because they have none, because their home has no boundaries within which they can be entrenched, their misery too is boundless. The general law does not apply to the Jews as true aliens, but there are everywhere laws for the Jews, and if the general law is to apply to them, a special and explicit bylaw is required to confirm it. Like the Negroes, like women, and unlike all free peoples, they must be emancipated. If, unlike the Negroes, they belong to an advanced race, and if, unlike women, they can produce not only women of distinction, but also distinguished men, even men of greatness, then it is very much the worse for them.
Since the Jew is nowhere at home, nowhere regarded as a native, he remains an alien everywhere. That he himself and his ancestors as well are born in the country does [not] alter this fact in the least.
When we are ill-used, robbed, plundered, and dishonored, we dare not defend ourselves, and, worse still, we take it almost as a matter of course. When our face is slapped, we soothe our burning cheek with cold water; and when a bloody wound has been inflicted, we apply a bandage. When we are turned out of the house which we ourselves built, we beg humbly for mercy, and when we fail to reach the heart of our oppressor we move on in search of another exile.
When an idle spectator on the road calls out to us: “You poor Jewish devils are certainly to be pitied,” we are most deeply touched; and when a Jew is said to be an honor to his people, we are foolish enough to be proud of it. We have sunk so low that we become almost jubilant when, as in the West, a small fraction of our people is put on an equal footing with non-Jews. But he who must be put on a footing stands but weakly. If no notice is taken of our descent and we are treated like others born in the country, we express our gratitude by actually turning renegades. For the sake of the comfortable position we are granted, for the fleshpots which we may enjoy in peace, we persuade ourselves, and others, that we are no longer Jews, but full-blooded citizens. Idle delusion! Though you prove yourselves patriots a thousand times, you will still be reminded at every opportunity of your Semitic descent. This fateful memento mori will not prevent you, however, from accepting the extended hospitality, until some fine morning you find yourself crossing the border and you are reminded by the mob that you are, after all, nothing but vagrants and parasites, without the protection of the law.
But even humane treatment does not prove that we are welcome. … Moreover, the belief in a Messiah, in the intervention of a higher power to bring about our political resurrection, and the religious assumption that we must bear patiently divine punishment, caused us to abandon every thought of our national liberation, unity, and independence. Consequently, we have renounced the idea of a nationhood and did so the more readily since we were preoccupied with our immediate needs. Thus we sank lower and lower. The people without a country forgot their country. Is it not high time to perceive the disgrace of it all?
Happily, matters stand somewhat differently now. The events of the last few years in enlightened Germany, in Romania, in Hungary, and especially in Russia, have effected what the far bloodiest persecutions of the Middle Ages could not. The national consciousness which until then had lain dormant in sterile martyrdom awoke the masses of the Russian and Romanian Jews and took form in an irresistible movement toward Palestine. Mistaken as this movement has proved to be by its results, it was, nevertheless, a right instinct to strike out for home. The severe trials which they have endured have now provoked a reaction quite different from the fatalistic submission to a divine condign punishment. Even the unenlightened masses of the Russian Jews have not entirely escaped the influences of the principles of modern culture. Without renouncing Judaism and their faith, they revolted against undeserved ill-treatment which could be inflicted with impunity only because the Russian Government regards the Jews as aliens. And the other European governments–why should they concern themselves with the citizens of a state in whose internal affairs they have no right to interfere?. …
If we would have a secure home, give up our endless life of wandering and rise to the dignity of a nation in our own eyes and in the eyes of the world, we must, above all, not dream of restoring ancient Judaea. We must not attach ourselves to the place where our political life was once violently interrupted and destroyed. The goal of our present endeavors must be not the “Holy Land,” but a land of our own. We need nothing but a large tract of land for our poor brothers, which shall remain our property and from which no foreign power can expel us. There we shall take with us the most sacred possessions which we have saved from the shipwreck of our former country, the God-idea and the Bible. It is these alone which have made our old fatherland the Holy Land, and not Jerusalem or the Jordan. Perhaps the Holy Land will again become ours. If so, all the better, but first of all, we must determine–and this is the crucial point–what country is accessible to us, and at the same time adapted to offer the Jews of all lands who must leave their homes a secure and indisputed refuge, capable of productivization. …
Czech Nationalism Finds a Literary Outlet
Bozena Nemcova
(1855)
“The Sibyl foretold that great misery would come on the Czech lands, that there would be wars and famine and plague. But the worst of all would be when father wouldn’t understand son, or son father, or brother brother, and when neither word nor bond would be worth anything. That would be the worst of all, she said, and then the Czech earth would be scattered under the hooves of horses.”
“You remembered it well. But God forbid it should ever come true,” said Granny with a sigh.
“Oh, Granny, sometimes I’m so afraid I can’t tell you! You wouldn’t like the Czech earth to be scattered under the hooves of horses, either, would you?”
“Silly girl, or course I wouldn’t! Don’t we pray every day for the well-being of the Czech earth? Isn’t this land our mother? Well, then, if I should see my mother falling into distress, do you think I could be indifferent? What would you do, if somebody was trying to kill your mother?”
“We should scream and cry,” said the boys and Adelka.
“Ah, you’re children,” said Granny with a smile.
“We should have to go to her help, shouldn’t we, Granny?” said Babbie, and her eyes were burning.
“That’s it, child, that’s it, that’s the right of it! Screaming and crying don’t help,” said the old woman, and laid her hand upon her granddaughter’s head.
“But, Granny, we’re only little, how could we help?” asked John, who was annoyed that he should be dismissed as a mere child.
“Don’t you remember what I told you about little David, who killed great Goliath? You see, even a little person can do much, if he has faith in God, you remember that. When you grow up and go out into the world you’ll get to know evil and good, you’ll be led astray and brought into temptation. Then remember your Granny, and the things she told you when she was out walking with you. You know that I left the good living the Prussian king offered me, and chose to work till I dropped rather than let my children be turned into foreigners and estranged from me. You must love your country like a mother, too, love her above all things, and work for her like good sons and daughters, and then the prophecy that frightens you will never be fulfilled. I shan’t see you grow to be men, but I hope you’ll remember your Granny’s words,” she concluded in a trembling voice.
“I’ll never, never forget them,” whispered Babbie, hiding her face in the old woman’s lap.
Economic Nationalism: A System of Political Economy
Friedrich List
(1841)
The State is not merely justified in imposing, but bound to impose, certain regulations and restrictions on commerce (which is in itself harmless) for the best interests of the nation. By prohibitions and protective duties it does not give directions to individuals how to employ their productive powers and capital (as the popular school[1] sophistically alleges); it does not tell the one, ‘You must invest your money in the building of a ship, or in the creation of a manufactory;’ or the other, ‘You must be a naval captain or a civil engineer:’ it leaves it to the judgment of every individual how and where to invest his capital, or to what vocation he will devote himself. It merely says, ‘It is to the advantage of our nation that we manufacture these or the other goods ourselves; but as by free competition with foreign countries we can never obtain possession of this advantage, we have imposed restrictions on that competition, so far as in our opinion is necessary, to give those among us who invest their capital in these new branches of industry, and those who devote their bodily and mental powers to them, the requisite guarantees that they shall not lose their capital and shall not miss their vocation in life; and further to stimulate foreigners to come over to our side with their productive powers. In this manner, it does not in the least degree restrain private industry; on the contrary, it secures to the personal, natural, and moneyed powers of the nation a greater and wider field of activity. It does not thereby do something which its individual citizens could understand better and do better than it; on the contrary, it does something which the individuals, even if they understood it, would not be able to do for themselves.
The allegation of the school, that the system of protection occasions unjust and anti-economical encroachments by the power of the State against the employment of the capital and industry of private individuals, appears in the least favourable light if we consider that it is the foreign commercial regulations which allow such encroachments on our private industry to take place, and that only by the aid of the system of protection are we enabled to counteract those injurious operations of the foreign commercial policy. If the English shut out our corn [grain] from their markets, what else are they doing than compelling our agriculturists to grow so much less corn than they would have sent out to England under systems of free importation? If they put such heavy duties on our wool, our wines, or our timber, that our export trade to England wholly or in great measure ceases, what else is thereby effected than that the power of the English nation restricts proportionately our branches of production? In these cases a direction is evidently given by foreign legislation to our capital and our personal productive powers, which but for the regulations made by it they would scarcely have followed. It follows from this, that were we to disown giving, by means of our own legislation, a direction to our own national industry in accordance with our own national interests, we could not prevent foreign nations from regulating our national industry after a fashion which corresponds with their own real or presumed advantage, and which in any case operates disadvantageously to the development of our own productive powers. …
The system of the school suffers, as we have already shown in the preceding chapters … , from three main defects: firstly, from boundless cosmopolitanism, which neither recognises the principle of nationality, nor takes into consideration the satisfaction of its interests; secondly, from a dead materialism, which everywhere regards chiefly the mere exchangeable value of things without taking into consideration the mental and political, the present and the future interests, and the productive powers of the nation; thirdly, from a disorganising particularism and individualism, which, ignoring the nature and character of social labour and the operation of the union of powers in their higher consequences, considers private industry only as it would develop itself under a state of free interchange with society (i.e. with the whole human race) were that race not divided into separate national societies.
Between each individual and entire humanity, however, stands THE NATION, with its special language and literature, with its peculiar origin and history, with its special manners and customs, laws and institutions, with the claims of all these for existence, independence, perfection, and continuance for the future, and with its separate territory; a society which, united by a thousand ties of mind and of interests, combines itself into one independent whole, which recognises the law of right for and within itself, and in its united character is still opposed to other societies of a similar kind in their national liberty, and consequently can only under the existing conditions of the world maintain self-existence and independence by its own power and resources. As the individual chiefly obtains by means of the nation and in the nation mental culture, power of production, security, and prosperity, so is the civilisation of the human race only conceivable and possible by means of the civilisation and development of the individual nations.
Meanwhile, however, an infinite difference exists in the condition and circumstances of the various nations: we observe among them giants and dwarfs, well-formed bodies and cripples, civilised, half-civilised, and barbarous nations; but in all of them, as in the individual human being, exists the impulse of self-preservation, the striving for improvement which is implanted by nature. It is the task of politics to civilise the barbarous nationalities, to make the small and weak ones great and strong, but, above all, to secure to them existence and continuance. It is the task of national economy to accomplish the economical development of the nation, and to prepare it for admission into the universal society of the future. …
By its Zollverein, the German nation first obtained one of the most important attributes of its nationality. But this measure cannot be considered complete so long as it does not extend over the whole coast, from the mouth of the Rhine to the frontier of Poland, including Holland and Denmark. A natural consequence of this union must be the admission of both these countries into the German Bund, and consequently into the German nationality, whereby the latter will at once obtain what it is now in need of, namely, fisheries and naval power, maritime commerce and colonies. Besides, both these nations belong, as respects their descent and whole character, to the German nationality. The burden of debt with which they are oppressed is merely a consequence of their unnatural endeavours to maintain themselves as independent nationalities, and it is in the nature of things that this evil should rise to a point when it will become intolerable to those two nations themselves, and when incorporation with a larger nationality must seem desirable and necessary to them.
Belgium can only remedy by means of confederation with a neighbouring larger nation her needs which are inseparable from her restricted territory and population. …
________________________________________
[1] The laissez-faire economists
A Poetic Tribute to the Zollverein
Hoffmann von Fallersleben
(1840)
The Zollverein
Leather, salmon, eels and matches,
Cows and madder, paper, shears,
Ham and cheese and boots and vetches,
Wool and soap and yarns and beers;
Gingerbread and rags and fennels,
Nuts, tobacco, glasses, flax,
Leather, salt, lard, dolls and funnels,
Radish, rape, rep, whisky, wax;
Articles of home consumption,
All our thanks are due to you!
You have wrought without presumption
What no intellect could do;
You have made the German Nation
Stand united, hand in hand,
More than the Confederation
Ever did for Fatherland.
A Frenchman Receives a Lesson in the Realities of Peasant Life in Russia
Alexander Herzen
(ca. 1850s)
“The Russian,” you say, “is a liar and a thief; he is lying and always stealing, and quite innocently, for it is his nature.”
I shall not stop to call attention to the sweeping nature of this observation, but should like to be allowed to put to you this simple question: who, now, is the deceived, the robbed, the dupe? Heavens above, it is the landowner, the government official, the steward, the judge, the police officer: in other words, the sworn foes of the peasant, whom he looks upon as apostates, as traitors, as half-Germans. Deprived of every possible means of defense the peasant resorts to cunning in dealing with his oppressors; he deceives them, and [he] is perfectly right in doing so. Cunning, Monsieur, is, in the words of a great thinker [Hegel], the irony of brute force.
Through his horror of private property in land, as you have so well observed, through his listless, careless temperament, the Russian peasant, I say, has seen himself gradually and silently caught in the toils of the German bureaucracy and of the landowners’ power. He has submitted to this humiliating yoke with the resignation of despair, I agree, but he has never believed in either the rights of the landowner, or the justice of the law-courts, or the fair-dealing of the administration. For nearly two hundred years the peasant’s whole life has been nothing but a dumb, passive opposition to the existing order of things. He submits to oppression, he endures it, but he dips his hand in nothing that goes on outside the village communes.
The idea of the Tsar still enjoys prestige among the peasants; it is not the Tsar Nicholas that the people venerates; it is an abstract idea, a myth, a providence, an avenger, a representative of justice in the people’s imagination.
After the Tsar, only the clergy could possibly have a moral influence on Orthodox Russia. The higher clergy alone represent old Russia in governing spheres; the clergy have never shaved their beards, and by that fact have remained on the side of the people. The people listen with confidence to a monk. But the monks and the higher clergy, occupied exclusively, as they say, with life beyond the grave, care little for the people. The Pop [priest] has lost all influence through his cupidity, his drunkenness, and his intimate relations with the police. Here, too, the peasants respect the idea but not the person.
As for the sectaries [Old Believers] they hate both person and idea, both Pop and Tsar.
Apart from the Tsar and the clergy every element of government and society is utterly alien, essentially antagonistic to the people. The peasant finds himself in the literal sense of the word an outlaw. The law-court takes good care not to protect him, and his share in the existing order of things is entirely confined to the twofold tribute that lies heavily upon him and is paid in his sweat and his blood. Poor disinherited man, he instinctively understands that the whole system is ordered not for his benefit but to his detriment, and that the whole problem of the government and the landowners is to wring out of him as much labor and as much money as possible. Since he understands this and is gifted with a supple and resourceful intelligence, he deceives them all and in everything. It could not be otherwise; if he spoke the truth it would already be an assent on his side, an acceptance of their power over him; if he did not rob them (observe that to conceal part of the produce of his own labor is considered theft in a peasant) he would thereby be fatally recognizing the lawfulness of their exactions, the rights of the landowners and the justice of the law-courts. …
The life of the Russian peasantry has hitherto been confined to the commune. It is only in relation to the commune and its members that the peasant recognizes that he has rights and duties. Outside the commune he recognizes no duties and everything seems to him to be based upon violence. The baneful side of his nature is his submitting to that violence, and not his refusing in his own way to recognize it and his trying to protect himself by guile. There is much more uprightness in lying before a judge set over him by unlawful authority than in a hypocritical show of respect for the verdict of a jury packed by a prefect, whose revolting iniquity is as clear as daylight. The people respect only those institutions which reflect their innate conception of law and right. …
The Russian autocracy is entering upon a new phase. Having grown out of [the] anti-national revolution [of Peter the Great], it has accomplished its mission. It has created a colossal empire, a numerous army, a centralized government. Without principles, without tradition, it has no more to do; it is true that it undertook another task–to bring Western civilization into Russia; and it was to some extent successful in doing that while it still persisted in its fine role of civilizing government.
That role it has now abdicated.
The government, which had broken with the people in the name of civilization, has lost no time a hundred years later in breaking with civilization in the name of absolutism.
It did so as soon as the tri-colored specter of liberalism began to be visible through its civilizing tendencies: it tried then to return to nationalism, to the people. That was impossible–the people and the government had nothing in common any longer; the former had grown away from the latter, while the government thought it could discern rising from deep within the masses the still more terrible specter of the Red Cock. All things considered liberalism was still less dangerous than another Pugachev, but the panic and distaste of liberal ideas had become such that the government was no longer capable of making its peace with civilization.
War Reportage: News from the Front Lines in the Crimea
William Howard Russell
(1855)
On the 9th September Sebastopol was in flames! The fleet, the object of so much diplomatic controversy, and of so many bloody struggles, had disappeared in the deep! One more great act of carnage was added to the tremendous but glorious tragedy, of which the whole world, from the most civilized nations down to the most barbarous hordes of the East, was the anxious and excited audience.
Amid shouts of victory and cries of despair–in frantic rejoicing and passionate sorrow–a pall of black smoke, streaked by the fiery flashings of exploding fortresses, descended upon the stage, …
In the middle of the day there was a council of the allied generals, and at two o’clock it became generally known that the allies would assault the place at noon on the 8th, after a vigorous cannonade and bombardment. The hour was well selected, as it had been ascertained that the Russians were accustomed to indulge in a siesta about that time.
The weather changed suddenly on the 7th September, and on the morning of the 8th it became bitterly cold. A biting wind right from the north side of Sebastopol blew intolerable clouds of harsh dust into our faces. The sun was obscured, and the sky became of a leaden, wintry gray.
The French were reenforced by five thousand Sardinians, who marched up from the Tchernaya. It was arranged that the French should attack the Malakoff at noon, and, as soon as their attack succeeded, we were to assault the Redan. At five minutes before twelve o’clock, the French, like a swarm of bees, issued forth from their trenches close to the Malakoff, scrambled up its face, and were through the embrasures in the twinkling of an eye. They crossed the seven meters of ground which separated them from the enemy at a few bounds; they drifted as lightly and quickly as autumn leaves before the wind, battalion after battalion, into the embrasures, and in a minute or two after the head of their column issued from the ditch the tricolor was floating over the Korniloff Bastion. The musketry was very feeble at first,–indeed, our allies took the Russians by surprise, and very few of the latter were in the Malakoff; but they soon recovered themselves, and from twelve o’clock till past seven in the evening the French had to meet and repulse the repeated attempts of the enemy to regain the work, when, weary of the fearful slaughter of his men, who lay in thousands over the exterior of the works, and despairing of success, the Muscovite general withdrew his exhausted legions, and prepared, with admirable skill, to evacuate the place.
As the alarm of the English assault on the Redan circulated, the enemy came rushing up from the barracks in the rear of the Redan, increasing the force and intensity of their fire, while our soldiers dropped fast. The Russians were encouraged to maintain their ground by the immobility of our soldiers and the weakness of a fusillade, from the effects of which the enemy were well protected. In vain the officers, by voice and act, by example and daring valor, tried to urge our soldiers on to clear the works. The men, most of whom belonged to regiments which had suffered in the trenches and were acquainted with the traditions of June 18, had an impression that the Redan was extensively mined, and that if they advanced they would all be blown up; yet, to their honor be it recorded, many of them acted as became the men of Alma and Inkermann, and, rushing confusedly to the front, were swept down by the enemy’s fire.
Every moment our men were diminishing in numbers, while the Russians were arriving in swarms from the town, and rushing down from the Malakoff, which had been occupied by the French. The struggle that ensued was short, desperate, and bloody. Our soldiers, taken at every disadvantage, met the enemy with the bayonet too, and isolated combats occurred, in which the brave fellows who stood their ground had to defend themselves against three or four adversaries at once. In this melee the officers, armed only with their swords, had but little chance; nor had those who carried pistols much opportunity of using them in such a close and sudden contest. They fell like heroes, and many a gallant soldier with them. The bodies of English and Russians inside the Redan, locked in an embrace which death could not relax, but had rather cemented all the closer, were found next day as evidences of the terrible animosity of the struggle.
The scene in the ditch was appalling, although some of the officers have assured me that they and the men were laughing at the precipitation with which many brave and gallant fellows did not hesitate to plunge headlong upon the mass of bayonets, muskets, and sprawling soldiers,–the ladders were all knocked down or broken, so that it was difficult for the men to scale the other side, and the dead, the dying, the wounded, and the uninjured were all lying in piles together. …
“The Lady with the Lamp” Lights the Way for Future Nurses
Florence Nightingale
(1858)
There is no doubt that the admission of women to ward service is beset with difficulties. Nurses are careful, efficient, often decorous, and always kind, sometimes drunken, sometimes unchaste.
The nurses should be strong, active women, of unblemished character, and should be irreversibly dismissed for the first offence of unchastity, drunkenness, or dishonesty, or proved impropriety of any kind.
Their rules should be simple, very definite, should leave them at the absolute disposal of the surgeon. Their dress should be uniform.
Give them plenty to do, and great responsibility–two effectual means of steadying women.
“In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.” Quietness has been from the beginning of its publicity the one thing wanted in this work. I know the fuss, which from its beginning surrounded it, was abhorrent to us: but the work, which is all we care for, has throughout suffered from it. One hospital, naval, military, or civil, nursed well, and gradually training a few nurses, would do more good to the cause than an endless amount of meetings, testimonials, pounds, and speeches. This never will, never can be a popular work. Few good ones are, without the stern fructifying element of moral restraint and influence; and though the streams of this are many, its source is one. Hearts are not touched without Religion. Religion was not given us from above in impressions and generalities, but in habits of thought and action, in love of God and of mankind, carried into action.
A Marxist Analysis of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s Coup
Karl Marx
(1851)
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, worldhistorical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Mountain of 1848 to 1851 for the Mountain of 1793 to 1795, the Nephew for the Uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances in which the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire is taking place.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this timehonoured disguise and this borrowed language. Thus Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, in turn, 1789 and the revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1795. In like manner the beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can produce freely in it only when he moves in it without remembering the old and forgets in it his ancestral tongue. …
The February Revolution was a sudden attack, a taking of the old society by surprise, and the people proclaimed this unhoped for stroke as a world-historical deed, opening the new epoch. On December 2 the February Revolution is conjured away by a cardsharper’s trick, and what seems overthrown is no longer the monarchy; it is the liberal concessions that were wrung from it by century-long struggles. Instead of society having conquered a new content for itself, the state only appears to have returned to its oldest form, to the shamelessly simple domination of the sabre and the cowl. …
Let us recapitulate in their general outlines the phases that the French Revolution has gone through from February 24, 1848, to December 1851. …
It could not be otherwise. The February days originally intended an electoral reform, by which the circle of the politically privileged among the possessing class itself was to be widened and the exclusive domination of the aristocracy of finance overthrown. When it came to the actual conflict, however, when the people mounted the barricades, the National Guard maintained a passive attitude, the army offered no serious resistance and the monarchy ran away, the republic appeared to be a matter of course. Every party construed it in its own sense. Having been won by the proletariat by force of arms, the proletariat impressed its stamp on it and proclaimed it to be a social republic. …
During the June days all classes and parties had united in the party of order against the proletarian class as the party of anarchy, of socialism, of communism. They had “saved” society from ” the enemies of society.” They had given out the watchwords of the old society, “property, family, religion, order,” to their army as pass words and proclaimed to the counter-revolutionary crusaders: “In this sign you will conquer!” From that moment, as soon as one of the numerous parties which ad gathered under this sign against the June insurgents seeks to hold the revolutionary battle field in its own interests, it goes down before the cry: “Property, family, religion, order.” …
The history of the Constituent National Assembly since the June days is the history of the domination and the liquidation of the republican section of the bourgeoisie, of that section which is known by the names of tricolour republicans, pure republicans, political republicans, formalist republicans, etc. …
The republican bourgeois section, which had long regarded itself as the legitimate heir of the July monarchy, thus found itself successful beyond its hopes; it attained power, however, not as it had dreamed under Louis Philippe, through a liberal revolt of the bourgeoisie against the throne, but through a rising of the proletariat against capital, a rising laid low with grapeshot. What it had pictured to itself as the most revolutionary happening, turned out in reality to be the most counter-revolutionary. The fruit fell into its lap, but it fell from the tree of knowledge, not from the tree of life.
The exclusive rule of the bourgeois republicans lasted only from June 24 to December 10, 1848. It is summed up [by] the drafting of a republican Constitutionand in the state of siege of Paris. … I have worked out elsewhere the significance of the election of December 10. I will not revert to it here. It is sufficient to remark here that it was a reaction of the peasants, who had had to pay the costs of the February Revolution, against the remaining classes of the nation, a reaction of the countryside against the town. It met with great approval in the army, for which the republicans of the National had provided neither glory nor additional pay; among the big bourgeoisie, which hailed Bonaparte as a bridge to monarchy; among the proletarians and petty bourgeois, who hailed him as a scourge for Cavaignac [the general who had crushed the workers' uprising in June 1848]. I shall have an opportunity later of going more closely into the relationship of the peasants to the French Revolution.
The period from December 20, 1848, until the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in May, 1849, comprises the history of the downfall of the bourgeois republicans. After having founded a republic for the bourgeoisie, driven the revolutionary proletariat out of the field and reduced the democratic petty bourgeoisie to silence for the time being, they are themselves thrust aside by the mass of the bourgeoisie, which justly impounds this republic as its property. This bourgeois mass was, however, royalist. …
Before we finish with this period we must still cast a retrospective glance at the two powers, one of which annihilates the other on December 2, 1851, whereas from December 10, 1848, until the exit of the Constituent Assembly they lived in conjugal relations. We mean Louis Bonaparte, on the one hand, and the party of the royalist coalition, the Party of Order, of the big bourgeoisie, on the other. On his entry into the presidency, Bonaparte at once formed a ministry of the Party of Order, at the head of which he placed Odilon Barrot, the old leader, nota bene, of the most liberal section of the parliamentary bourgeoisie. …
The Prussian King Receives a Much-Needed Pep Talk
Otto von Bismarck
(1863)
In the beginning of October [1863] I went as far as Juterbogk [a town south of Berlin] to meet the King, who had been at Baden-Baden for September 30, his wife’s birthday, and waited for him in the still unfinished railway station, filled with third-class travellers and workmen, seated in the dark on an overturned wheelbarrow. My object in taking this opportunity for an interview was to set his Majesty at rest about a speech made by me in the Budget Commission on September 30, which had aroused some excitement, and which, though not taken down in shorthand, had still been reproduced with tolerable accuracy in the newspapers.
For people who were less embittered and blinded by ambition, I had indicated plainly enough the direction in which I was going. Prussia–such was the point of my speech–as a glance at the map will show, could no longer wear unaided on its long narrow figure the panoply which Germany required for its security; that must be equally distributed over all German peoples. We should get no nearer the goal by speeches, associations, decisions of majorities; we should be unable to avoid a serious contest, a contest which could only be settled by blood and iron. In order to secure our success in this, the deputies must place the greatest possible weight of blood and iron in the hands of the King of Prussia, in order that according to his judgment he might throw it into one scale or the other. I had already given expression to the same idea in the House of Deputies in 1849, in answer to Schramm on the occasion of an amnesty debate.
Roon [the minister of war], who was present, expressed his dissatisfaction with my remarks on our way home, and said, among other things, that he did not regard these ‘witty digressions’ as advantageous for our cause. For my part, I was torn between the desire of winning over members to an energetic national policy, and the danger of inspiring the King, whose own disposition was cautious, and shrank from violent measures, with mistrust in me and my intentions. My object in going to meet him at Juterbogk was to counteract betimes the probable effect of press criticisms.
I had some difficulty in discovering from the curt answers of the officials the carriage in the ordinary train, in which the King was seated by himself in an ordinary first-class carriage. The after-effect of his intercourse with his wife was an obvious depression, and when I begged for permission to narrate the events which had occurred during his absence, he interrupted me with the words: ‘I can perfectly well see where all this will end. Over there, in front of the Opera House, under my windows, they will cut off your head, and mine a little while afterwards.’
I guessed, and it was afterwards confirmed by witnesses, that during his week’s stay in Baden his mind had been worked upon with variations in the theme of Polignac, Strafford, and Lewis XVI. When he was silent, I answered with the short remark, ‘Et apres, Sire.’ ‘Apres, indeed; we shall be dead,’ answered the King. ‘Yes,’ I continued, ‘then we shall be dead; but we must all die sooner or later, and can we perish more honourably? I, fighting for my King’s cause, and your Majesty sealing with your own blood your rights as King by the grace of God; whether on the scaffold or the battlefield, makes no difference to the glory of sacrificing life and limb for the rights assigned to you by the grace of God. Your Majesty must not think of Lewis XVI; he lived and died in a condition of mental weakness, and does not present a heroic figure in history. Charles I, on the other hand, will always remain a noble historical character, for after drawing his sword for his rights and losing the battle, he did not hesitate to confirm his royal intent to retain their position in Germany, the Austrians declared war in 1866. The with his blood. Your Majesty is bound to fight, you cannot capitulate; you must, even at the risk of bodily danger, go forth to meet any attempt at coercion.’
As I continued to speak in this sense, the King grew more and more animated, and began to assume the part of an officer fighting for kingdom and fatherland. In [the] presence of external and personal danger he possessed a rare and absolutely natural fearlessness, whether on the field of battle or in the face of attempts on his life; his attitude in any external danger was elevating and inspiring. The ideal type of the Prussian officer who goes to meet certain death in the service with the simple words, ‘At your orders,’ but who, if he has to act on his own responsibility, dreads the criticism of his superior officer or of the world more than death, even to the extent of allowing his energy and correct judgment to be impaired by the fear of blame and reproof–this type was developed in him to the highest degree. Hitherto, on his journey, he had only asked himself whether, under the superior criticism of his wife and public opinion in Prussia, he would be able to keep steadfast on the road on which he was entering with me. The influence of our conversation in the dark railway compartment counteracted this sufficiently to make him regard the part which the situation forced upon him more from the standpoint of the officer. He felt as though he had been touched in his military honour, and was in the position of an officer who has orders to hold a certain position to the death, no matter whether he perishes in the task or not. This set him on a course of thought which was quite familiar to him; and in a few minutes he was restored to the confidence which he had lost at Baden, and even recovered his cheerfulness. To give up his life for King and Fatherland was the duty of an officer; still more that of a King, as the first officer in the land. As soon as he regarded his position from the point of view of military honour, it had no more terror for him than the command to defend what might prove a desperate position would have for any ordinary Prussian officer. This raised him above the anxiety about the criticism which public opinion, history, and his wife might pass on his political tactics. He fully entered into the part of the first officer in the Prussian monarchy, for whom death in the service would be an honourable conclusion to the task assigned him. The correctness of my judgment was confirmed by the fact that the King, whom I had found at Juterbogk weary, depressed, and discouraged, had, even before we arrived at Berlin, developed a cheerful, I might almost say joyous and combative disposition, which was plainly evident to the ministers and officials who received him on his arrival. …
The Dual Monarchy Is Born: The Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich
Austro-Hungarian Government
(1867)
Article 1. The following affairs are declared common to Austria and Hungary:
a. Foreign affairs, including diplomatic and commercial representation abroad, as well as measures relating to international treaties, reserving the right of the representative bodies of both parts of the empire [Reichsrat and Hungarian Diet] to approve such treaties, in so far as such approval is required by the Constitution.
b. Military and naval affairs. …
c. The finances, with reference to matters of common expense. …
Article 2. Besides these, the following affairs shall not indeed be administered in common, but shall be regulated upon uniform principles to be agreed upon from time to time:
1. Commercial affairs. …
2. Legislation concerning indirect taxes which stand in close relation to industrial production.
3. The establishment of a monetary system and monetary standards.
4. Regulations concerning railway lines which affect the interests of both parts of the empire.
5. The establishment of a system of defense.
Article 3. The expenses of affairs common to both Austria and Hungary shall be borne by the two parts of the empire in proportion to be fixed from time to time by an agreement between the two legislative bodies (Reichsrat and Diet), approved by the emperor. If an agreement can not be reached between the two representative bodies, the proportion shall be fixed by the emperor, but for the term of one year only. The method of defraying its quota of the common expense shall belong exclusively to each of the parts of the empire.
Nevertheless, joint loans may be made for affairs of common interest. …
The decision as to whether a joint loan shall be made is reserved for legislation by each of the two parts of the empire.
Article 4. The contribution towards the expense of the present public debt shall be determined by an agreement between the two parts of the empire.
Article 5. The administration of common affairs shall be conducted by a joint responsible ministry, which is forbidden to direct at the same time the administration of joint affairs and those of either part of the empire.
The regulation of the management, conduct, and internal organization of the joint army shall belong exclusively to the emperor.
Article 6. The legislative power belonging to the legislative bodies of each of the two parts of the empire [Reichsrat and Hungarian Diet] shall be exercised by them, in so far as it relates to joint affairs, by means of delegations. …
Article 11. The delegations shall be convened annually by the emperor, who shall determine the place of their meeting. …
Article 13. The powers of the delegations shall extend to all matters concerning common affairs.
All other matters shall be beyond their power.
Article 14. The projects of the government shall be submitted by the joint ministry to each of the delegations separately.
Each delegation shall also have the right to submit projects concerning affairs which are within its competence.
Article 15. For the passage of a law concerning matters within the power of the delegations the agreement of both delegations shall be necessary, or in default of such agreement, a vote of the full assembly of the two delegations sitting together; in either case the approval of the emperor shall be necessary.
Article 16. The right to hold the joint ministry to its responsibility shall be exercised by the delegations. …
Article 19. Each delegation shall act, deliberate and vote in separate session. …
Article 21. The delegates and substitutes from the Reichsrat shall receive no instructions from their electors. …
Article 27. The session of the delegation shall be closed, after the completion of its work, by the president with the consent of the emperor or by his order.
Article 29. The sessions of the delegation shall be as a rule public.
Exceptionally the public may be excluded if it is so decided by the assembly in secret session, upon the request of the president or of not less than five members.
Every decision, however, shall be made in public session. …
“What Is to Be Done” with Russia?
Nikolai Chernyshevsky
(1864)
“I will find employment in my profession, though it will not pay me much; but there will be time left to attend to patients, and, taking all things together, we shall be able to live.”
“Yes, dear friend, we shall need so little; only I do not wish to live by your labor. I too will live by my labor; isn’t that fair? I should not live at your expense.”
“Who told you that, dear Verochka?”
“Oh! he asks who told me! Your books are full of such thoughts.”
“In my books? At any rate I never said such a thing to you. When, then, did I say so?”
“When? Haven’t you always told me that everything rests on money?”
“Well?”
“And do you really consider me so stupid that I cannot understand books and draw conclusions from premises?
Everything rests on money, you say, Dmitry Sergeich; consequently, whoever has money has power and freedom, say your books; then, as long as woman lives at man’s expense, she will be dependent on him, will she not? You thought that I could not understand that, and would be your slave? I know that you intend to be a good and benevolent despot, but I do not intend that you should be a despot at all. And now this is what we will do. You shall cut off arms and legs and administer drugs; I, on the other hand, will give lessons on the piano.”
Russian Society Meets Nihilism
Ivan Turgenev
(1862)
“What is Bazarov?” Arcadii smiled, “I’ll tell you just what Bazarov is–would you like me to, Uncle?”
“Do oblige me, Nephew.”
“He is a nihilist.”
“How?” Nicholai Petrovich asked, while his brother lifted up his knife with a pat of butter at its tip and arrested his hand in midair.
“He’s a nihilist,” Arcadii repeated.
“A nihilist,” his father uttered. “That comes from the Latin, nihil, meaning nothing, if I am any judge; the word, then, designates a man who … who recognizes nothing?”
“Say: one who respects nothing,” Pavel Petrovich interjected and went back to buttering his bread.
“One who regards everything from a critical point of view,” Arcadii commented.
“But isn’t that all one?” his uncle queried.
“No, it’s not. A nihilist is a man who does not accede to any authority, who does not accept a single principle on faith, no matter how great the aura of respect which surrounds that principle.
“Well, and is that a good thing?” Pavel Petrovich cut him short.
“That all depends on the person, Uncle. One man may find it a very good thing for him, while another may find it very bad.”
“So, that’s how things are. Well, now, I can see that’s outside our province. We who belong to an older age, we go upon the assumption that without principles”–he gave the word a soft pronunciation, after the French manner, while Arcadii, on the contrary, gave it a harsh sound, placing the accent on the first syllable–”principles accepted on faith, as you said, a man cannot take a step, cannot draw a breath. Vous avez change tout cela–you have changed all that. May God grant you good health and a general’s rank, but as for us, we will merely look on and admire you, Messieurs les–what was that term you used?”
“Nihilists,” Arcadii told him, enunciating the word clearly.
“Yes. Before we had the Hegelists, but now we have the nihilists. We’ll see how you’ll manage to exist in a void, in a vacuum; but right now please ring, brother Nicholai–it’s time for my cocoa.”
Post-emancipation Problems for Russian Peasants
Balashov District Peasants
(1862)
Your Imperial Excellency! Most gracious sire! Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich!
Most magnanimous prince, given by God for the welfare of people in the Russian Empire! The countless acts of mercy and humanitarianism of Your Imperial Excellency toward the loyal subjects have emboldened us to fall to your feet and plead:
Show you steadfast and just protection of oppressed humanity! Following the example of our fathers, grandfathers and ancestors, we have always and without complaint obeyed the laws of Russian monarchs and the authority of its rulers. Hence, as peasants in the hamlet of Blagoveshchenskoe and three villages (Avdot’evka, Aleksandrovka and Uspenskaia) in Balashov District of Saratov province, we and our families, while under the authority of the squire, a retired colonel, Prince Vasil’chikov, have always enjoyed the blessings of the all-merciful God: fertile land.
The monarch’s mercy–which has no precedent in the chronicles of all peoples in the universe–has now changed the attitude of our squire, who has reduced us 1,500 peasants to a pitiable condition. … [sic] After being informed of the Imperial manifesto on the emancipation of peasants from serfdom in 1861 (which was explained to us by the constable of township 2 of Balashov District), we received this [news] with jubilation, as a special gift from heaven, and expressed our willingness to obey the square’s will in every respect during the coming two-year [transition] period [and to remain] on the fertile land which we occupy, where we could realise our life. … [sic]
But from this moment, our squire ordered that the land be cut off from the entire township. But this is absolutely intolerable for us: it not only denies us profit, but threatens us with a catastrophic future. He began to hold repeated meetings and [tried to] force us to sign that we agreed to accept the above land allotment. But, upon seeing so unexpected a change, and bearing in mind the gracious manifesto, we refused. Then Prince Vasil’chikov, with terrible threats, went to the city of Saratov, and soon afterwards the squires, Prince Prozorovskii, Golitsyn, Colonel Globbe, and the peace arbitrator Baishev came to our township office. After assembling the entire township, they tried to force us into making illegal signatures accepting the land cut-offs. But when they saw that this did not succeed, they had a company of soldiers sent in and said that they had been sent–by the Tsar!–to restore peace between us and the squires. We heard this and, despite the unsuitability of the land, we were ready to accept it–at first as 3 dessiatines per soul, than later 4 dessiatines.[1] But we did not give the demanded signatures, suspecting here a scheme by the squires’ accomplices. Then [Col.] Globbe came from their midst, threatened us with exile to Siberia, and ordered the soldiers to strip the peasants and to punish seven people by flogging in the most inhuman manner. They still have not regained consciousness.
These inhuman acts and intolerable oppression have forced us to fall to the sacred feet of Your Imperial Excellency: 1,500 voices most humbly ask for just, most august defense, which can save weeping families from certain death, and [we ask] that You issue a decree [on our case].
________________________________________
[1] A dessiatine equalled 2.7 acres.
At Home with the Russian Gentry: Fathers and Daughters
Sonya Kovalevsky
(1862)
In such cases, the governess had recourse to the most extreme measures: she sent me to my father with orders to relate my guilt to him myself. I feared this more than all other punishments.
In reality father was not at all severe with us; but I saw him rarely–only at dinner. He never permitted himself the slightest familiarity with us except when one of the children was ill. Then he was completely changed. We simply adored him at such times, and retained the memory of them for a long while. But on ordinary occasions, when all were well, he stuck to the rule that “a man must be severe,” and therefore was very sparing of his caresses.
Hence, when the governess used to say, “Go to your father; make your boast to him of how you have been behaving,” I felt genuine despair. I cried and resisted, but the governess was implacable, and taking me by the hand, she led me, or, to speak more correctly, she dragged me through the long suite of rooms to the door of the study, left me to my fate, and went away.
I knock, but very softly. Several moments, which seem to me interminable, elapse.
There is nothing to be done; I knock again.
“Who’s there? Come in,” calls father’s voice at last from the study.
I enter, but halt in the semi-darkness on the threshold. Father sits at his writing-table with his back to the door, and does not see me.
“Who’s there? What’s wanted?” he cries impatiently.
“It is I, papa. Margarita Frantzovna has sent me,” I gulp out in reply.
Then for the first time father divines what is the matter.
“Ah, ah! you have been naughty again, of course,” he says, trying to communicate to his voice as stern an intonation as possible. “Come, tell your story. What have you been doing?”
After I told it, he responded, “What a horrid, naughty little girl you are. I am very much displeased with you,” he says, and pauses because he does not know what else to say. “Go, stand in the corner,” he pronounces judgment at last, because, out of all his pedagogic wisdom, his memory has retained nothing beyond the fact that naughty children are made to stand in the corner.
And so you may picture to yourself how I, a big girl of twelve–I, who a few minutes previously had been going through the most complicated dramas with the heroine of a romance perused on the sly,–I am obliged to go and stand in the corner like a foolish little child.
The Liberal Dilemma: Extension of the Franchise–A Yes Vote
John Bright
(1866)
Well, then, there is this question that will not sleep–the question of the admission of the people of this country to the rights which are guaranteed to them, and promised to them by everything that we comprehend as the Constitution of this United Kingdom. …
I have always thought that it was one of the great objects of statesmen in our time not to separate the people into sections and classes, but rather to unite them all in one firm and compact body of citizenship, equally treated by the law, and equally loyal to the law and to the government of the country. …
… Sir, I protest against … the theory that the people of this country have an unreasonable and violent desire to shake or overturn institutions which they may not theoretically approve of. … I am perfectly content to live under the institutions which the intelligence, and the virtue, and the experience of my countrymen fairly represented in Parliament shall determine upon. …
The House of Commons is in reality the only guarantee we have for freedom. If you looked at any other country, and saw nothing but a monarch, he might be a good king and might do his best, but you would see that there is no guarantee for freedom–you know not who will be his successor. If you saw a country with no crown, but with a handful of nobles, administering the government of the country, you would say there is no guarantee there for freedom, because a number of individuals acting together have not the responsibility, or the feeling of responsibility, that one man has, and they do things which one man would not dare to do. … It is only the existence of that House which makes the institution they are so fond of safe and permanent at all–and they are afraid that the five millions somehow or other will get into it. Now, I beg to tell them that the five millions will get into it, though they may not get into it all at once; and perhaps few men desire that they should, for I am opposed myself to great and violent changes, which create needless shocks, and which are accepted, if they are accepted, with great alarm.
But I will undertake to say that some portion, a considerable and effective portion, of those five millions will before many years are passed be freely allowed to vote for members of the House of Commons. It is not the democracy which these gentlemen are always afraid of that is the peril of this country. It was not democracy in 1832 that was the peril. It was the desperate antagonism of the class that then had power to the just claims and rights of the people. …
England has long been famous for the enjoyment of personal freedom by her people. They are free to think, they are free to speak, they are free to write; and England has been famed of late years, and is famed now the world over, for the freedom of her industry and the greatness and the freedom of her commerce. I want to know then why it is that her people should not be free to vote.
Revolutionary Socialism Turns to Social Democracy: The Eisenach Program
German Social Democrats
(1869)
1. The Social-Democratic Labour party aims at the establishment of a free Democratic State.
2. Every member of the party pledges himself to insist with all his might on the following principles:–
(a) The present political and social conditions are in the highest degree unjust and therefore to be opposed with the utmost energy.
(b) The struggle for the emancipation of the working-classes is not a struggle for class privileges and prerogatives, but for equal rights and equal duties and for the abolition of all class domination.
(c) The economic dependence of the worker on the capitalist is the basis of his servitude in all its forms, and the Social-Democratic party aims, by the abolition of the present method of production (the wages system) at assuring, by means of co-operative labour, that every worker shall receive the full product of his work.
(d) Political freedom is the indispensable basis of the economic emancipation of the working-classes. The social question is therefore inseparable from the political question; its solution depends upon the solution of the political question and is only possible in a democratic State.
(e) In consideration of the fact that the political and economic emancipation of the working-class is only possible if this class wages war in common and united, the Social-Democratic Labour party adopts a united organisation which yet makes it possible for every one of its members to make his influence felt for the benefit of the whole.
(f) Considering that the emancipation of labour is neither a local nor a national but a social question, which embraces all countries in which there is a modern society, the Social-Democratic Labour party regards itself, as far as the laws of association permit, as a branch of the “International,” and adopts its aims.
3. The following are to be regarded as the most urgent questions of propaganda:–
(a) Equal universal and direct suffrage by secret ballot for all men over twenty, in the elections for the Reichstag, the Diets of the several Federal States, the provincial and local assemblies, and all other representative bodies. The deputies are to be paid salaries.
(b) The introduction of direct legislation (Initiative and Referendum) by the people.
(c) Abolition of all privileges of class, property, birth, and creed.
(d) Substitution of a National Militia for standing armies.
(e) Separation of Church and State and secularisation of schools.
(f) Compulsory education in Elementary Schools and gratuitous instruction in all public educational establishments.
(g) Independence of the Courts, introduction of the jury system, industrial courts, public and oral procedure, and gratuitous jurisdiction.
(h) Abolition of all legal restriction of the Press, the right of association and combination, the introduction of a normal working day, the restriction of female labour, and the abolition of child labour.
(i) Abolition of all indirect taxation and the introduction of a single direct progressive income tax and a tax on inheritance.
(j) State help for co-operative undertakings and State credit for free productive co-operative associations, with democratic guarantees.
A Papal Condemnation of Modernity
Pope Pius IX
(1864)
15. Every man is free to embrace and profess the religion he shall believe true, guided by the light of reason.
18. Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which it is possible to be equally pleasing to God as in the Catholic Church.
20. The ecclesiastical power must not exercise its authority without the permission and assent of the civil government.
39. The commonwealth is the origin and source of all rights, and possesses rights which are not circumscribed by any limits.
41. The civil power, even when exercised by an unbelieving sovereign, possesses an indirect and negative power over religious affairs.
43. The civil power has a right to break, and to declare and render null, the conventions (commonly called Concordats) concluded with the Apostle See, relative to the exercise of rights pertaining to the ecclesiastical immunity, without the consent of the Holy See, and even contrary to its protests.
44. The civil authority may interfere in matters relating to religion, morality, and spiritual government.
47. The most approved theory of civil society requires that popular schools open to the children of all classes, and, generally, all public institutes intended for instruction in letters and philosophy, and for conducting the education of the young, should be freed from all ecclesiastical authority, government, and interference, and should be completely subject to the civil and political power, in conformity with the will of rulers and the prevalent opinions of the age. …
53. The laws for the protection of religious establishments, and securing their rights and duties, ought to be abolished; nay, more, the civil government may lend its assistance to all who desire to quit the religious life they have undertaken, and to break their vows. The government may also suppress religious orders.
55. The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.
63. It is allowable to refuse obedience to legitimate princes; nay, more, to rise in insurrection against them.
79. Moreover, it is false that the civil freedom granted to every mode of worship, and the full power given to all of overtly and publicly manifesting their opinions and their ideas, whatsoever their nature, conduce more easily to corrupt the morals and minds of the people, and facilitate the propagation of the pest of indifferentism.
80. The Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself to, and agree with, progress, liberalism, and civilization, as lately introduced.
An Eyewitness Account of the Paris Commune
Louise Michel
(1871)
In Montmartre, in the Eighteenth Arrondissement, we organized the Montmartre Vigilance Committee. Few of its members still survive, but during the Siege the committee made the reactionaries tremble. Every evening, we would burst out onto the streets from our headquarters at 41, chaussee Clignancourt, sometimes simply to talk up the Revolution, because the time for duplicity had passed. We knew how little the reactionary regime, in its death throes, valued its promises and the lives of its citizens, and the people had to be warned. …
The members of the men’s Montmartre Vigilance Committee were remarkable persons. Never have I seen minds so direct, so unpretentious, and so elevated. Never have I seen individuals so clearheaded. I don’t know how this group managed to do it. There were no weaknesses. Something good and strong supported people.
The women were courageous also, and among them, too, there were some remarkable minds. I belonged to both committees, and the leanings of the two groups were the same. Sometime in the future the women’s committee should have its own history told. Or perhaps the two should be mingled, because people didn’t worry about which sex they were before they did their duty. That stupid question was settled. …
Ultimately the Montmartre Vigilance Committees were mowed down, like all revolutionary groups. The rare members still alive know how proud we were there and how fervently we flew the flag of the Revolution. Little did it matter to those who were there whether they were beaten to the ground unnoticed in battle or died alone in the sunlight. It makes no difference how the millstone moves so long as the bread is made.
Everything was beginning, or rather, beginning again, after the long lethargy of the Empire. The first organization of the Rights of Women had begun to meet on the rue Thevenot with Mmes Jules Simon, Andre Leo, and Maria Deraismes. At the meetings of the Rights of Women group, and at other meetings, the most advanced men applauded the idea of equality. I noticed–I had seen it before, and I saw it later–that men, their declarations notwithstanding, although they appeared to help us, were always content with just the appearance. This was the result of custom and the force of old prejudices, and it convinced me that we women must simply take our place without begging for it. The issue of political rights is dead. Equal education, equal trades, so that prostitution would not be the only lucrative profession open to a woman–that is what was real in our program. The Russian revolutionaries are right; evolution is ended and now revolution is necessary or the butterfly will die in its cocoon.
Heroic women were found in all social positions. At the professional school of Mme Poulin, women of all social levels organized the Society for the Victims of the War. They would have preferred to die rather than surrender, and dispensed their efforts the best way they could, while demanding ceaselessly that Paris continue to resist the Prussian siege. …
… [B]efore dawn on March 18 the Versailles reactionaries sent in troops to seize the cannon now held by the National Guard. One of the points they moved toward was the Butte of Montmartre, where our cannon had been taken. The soldiers of the reactionaries captured our artillery by surprise, but they were unable to haul them away as they had intended, because they had neglected to bring horses with them.
Learning that the Versailles soldiers were trying to seize the cannon, men and women of Montmartre swarmed up the Butte in a surprise maneuver. Those people who were climbing believed they would die, but they were prepared to pay the price.
The Butte of Montmartre was bathed in the first light of day, through which things were glimpsed as if they were hidden behind a thin veil of water. Gradually the crowd increased. The other districts of Paris, hearing of the events taking place on the Butte of Montmartre, came to our assistance.
The women of Paris covered the cannon with their bodies. When their officers ordered the soldiers to fire, the men refused. The same army that would be used to crush Paris two months later decided now that it did not want to be an accomplice of the reaction. They gave up their attempt to seize the cannon from the National Guard. They understood that the people were defending the Republic by defending the arms that the royalists and imperialists would have turned on Paris in agreement with the Prussians. When we had won our victory, I looked around and noticed my poor mother, who had followed me to the Butte of Montmartre, believing that I was going to die.
On this day, the eighteenth of March, the people wakened. If they had not, it would have been the triumph of some king; instead it was a triumph of the people. The eighteenth of March could have belonged to the allies of kings, or to foreigners, or to the people. It was the people’s. …
Several of our side perished. Turpin, who was wounded near me on the eighteenth in the predawn attack on 6, rue des Rosiers, died at Lariboisiere several days later. He told me to commend his wife to Georges Clemenceau, the mayor of the Eighteenth Arrondissement, and I carried out his dying wish.
I have never heard Clemenceau’s testimony at the inquiry into the events of March 18; we weren’t able to read newspapers when he gave his evidence. Clemenceau’s indecisiveness, for which people reproach him, comes from the illusion he holds that he should wait for parliamentarianism to bring progress. But parliamentarianism is dead, and Clemenceau’s illusion is some kind of infection he caught from the Bordeaux Assembly. When that assembly became the Versailles government, he fled from it. Properly, his place is in the streets, and when his anger is finally roused, he will go there. That is what remains of his revolutionary temperament. His indignation at some infamy will bring him out of his illusions, as he came out of the Bordeaux Assembly. …
If the reaction had had as many enemies among women as it did among men, the Versailles government would have had a more difficult task subduing us. Our male friends are more susceptible to faintheartedness than we women are. Asupposedly weak woman knows better than any man how to say: “It must be done.” She may feel ripped open to her very womb, but she remains unmoved. Without hate, without anger, without pity for herself or others, whether her heart bleeds or not, she can say, “It must be done.” Such were the women of the Commune. During Bloody Week, women erected and defended the barricade at the Place Blanche–and held it till they died. …
The Marxist Analysis of The Civil War in France: The Paris Commune
Karl Marx
(1871)
The direct antithesis to the empire was the Commune. The cry of “social republic” with which the Revolution of February was ushered in by the Paris proletariat, did but express a vague aspiration after a republic that was not only to supersede the monarchical form of class rule, but class rule itself. The Commune was the positive form of that republic. …
The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time. Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible and at all times revocable agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workmen’s wages. The vested interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of the Central Government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the state was laid into the hands of the Commune. …
[N]o sooner do the working men anywhere take the subject into their own hands with a will, than uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology of the mouthpieces of present society. … The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilisation! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labour of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labour, into mere instruments of free and associated labour. But this is communism, “impossible” communism! …
The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par decret du peuple [by decree of the people]. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realise, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. In the full consciousness of their historic mission, and with the heroic resolve to act up to it, the working class can afford to smile at the coarse invective of the gentlemen’s gentlemen with the pen and inkhorn, and at the didactic patronage of well-wishing bourgeois-doctrinaires, pouring forth their ignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility.
When the Paris Commune took the management of the revolution in its own hands; when plain working men for the first time dared to infringe upon the governmental privilege of their “natural superiors,” and, under circumstances of unexampled difficulty, performed their work modestly, conscientiously, and efficiently–performed it at salaries the highest of which barely amounted to one-fifth of what, according to high scientific authority, is the minimum required for a secretary to a certain metropolitan school-board–the old world writhed in convulsion of rage at the sight of the Red Flag, the symbol of the Republic of Labour, floating over the Hotel de Ville. …
An Austrian Girl is Introduced to the Realities of the Work Place
Adelheid Popp
(1883)
I didn’t give up hope, and one day I decided to put the few kreuzers I had for my lunch into the collection box for the Holy Father. On the same day I found a purse containing twelve guilders. I could scarcely contain my joy, and I thanked all the saints for this favor. It never occurred to me that some other poor devil might have been driven to despair by the loss of the purse. To me twelve guilders was such a great amount that I never thought that a poor person could have lost it. I didn’t know anything about the responsibility of handing in things you found to the police. All I saw was the merciful hand of the saints in the purse lying in the way. That evening I joyously embraced my mother; I was so happy I couldn’t speak; I could only get out the words “twelve guilders, twelve guilders.” There was nothing but joy in our room now; and as if to crown our good luck, the next day I was summoned to report to a sandpaper and emery board factory, where I’d asked about work a few days earlier and they had taken down my name.
My new workplace was on the third floor of a building that was used exclusively for industrial purposes. Not having known the bustle of a factory, I had never felt so uncomfortable. Everything displeased me–the dirty, sticky work; the unpleasant glass dust; the crowd of people; the crude tone; and the whole way that the girls and even married women behaved.
The owner’s wife–the “gracious lady,” as she was called–was the actual manager of the factory, and she talked just like the girls. She was a nice-looking woman, but she drank brandy, took snuff, and made unseemly rude jokes with the workmen. The owner was very ill, and when he came himself, there was always a violent scene. I pitied him. He seemed to me to be so good and noble, and I gathered from the behavior and whole manner of his wife that he must be unhappy. At his instructions I received a different, much more pleasant job. Up to then my job had been to hang the papers, which were smeared with glue and sprinkled with glass, unto lines strung rather high across the workroom. This work exhausted me greatly, and the owner must have noticed that it wasn’t suitable for me, because he instructed that from then on I was to keep count of the papers that were ready for processing. This work was clean and I liked it a lot better. Of course when there wasn’t anything to count, I had to do other kinds of work. …
They [the other working women] often spoke of a Herr Berger, who was the company’s traveling representative and was expected back about then. All the women raved about him, so I was curious to see the man. I had been there for two weeks when he came. Everything was in a dither, and the only talk was of the looks of the traveler they so admired. Accompanied by the owner’s wife, he came into the room where I worked. I didn’t like him at all. That afternoon I was called into his office; Herr Berger sent me on an errand and made a silly remark about my “beautiful hands.” It was already dark when I returned; I had to pass through an empty anteroom that wasn’t lighted; it was half-dark since it got light only through the glass door leading into the workroom. Herr Berger was in the anteroom when I came. He took me by the hand and inquired sympathetically about my circumstance. I answered him truthfully and told of our poverty. He spoke a few words, taking pity on me and promising to use his influence to get me higher wages. Of course I was delighted with the prospect opening up to me, for I was getting only two and a half guilders a week, for which I had to work twelve hours a day. I stammered a few words of thanks and assured him that I would prove myself worthy of his solicitude. Before I even knew what was happening, Herr Berger had kissed me. He tried to calm my fright with the words, “It was just a fatherly kiss.” He was twenty-six years old, and I was almost fifteen, so fatherliness was out of the question.
Beside myself, I hurried back to my work. I didn’t know how I should interpret the incident; I thought the kiss was disgraceful, but Herr Berger had spoken so sympathetically and had held out the prospect of higher wages! At home I did tell of the promise, but I said nothing about it in front of my brother. But my mother and my brother were happy that I had found such an influential protector.
The next day I was overwhelmed with reproaches from one of my coworkers, a young blond girl whom I liked most of all. She reproached me for having taken her place with the traveler; up to now, if he had something to do or an errand to run, she had done it; he loved her, she protested through tears and sobs, and now I’d put an end to everything. The other girls joined in too; they called me a hypocrite, and the gracious lady herself asked me how I’d liked the kisses of the “handsome traveler.” The incident of the previous evening had been observed through the glass door, and they interpreted it in a way very insulting to me.
I was defenseless against their taunts and sneers and longed for the hour when I could go home. It was Saturday, and when I received my wages, I went home with the intention of not returning Monday.
When I spoke of the matter at home, I was severely scolded. It was strange. My mother, who was always so intent on raising me to be a respectable girl, who always gave me instructions and warnings not to talk to men (“You should only allow yourself to be kissed by the man you’re going to marry,” she used to impress upon me)–in this instance my mother was against me. She said I was going too far. A kiss was nothing bad, and if I was getting more wages as a result, then it would be silly to give up my job. In the end she held my books responsible for my “overexcitement.” My mother got so mad about my “pigheadedness” that all the splendid things I’d been lent– The Book for Everyone [Das Buch Fur Alle], Over Land and Sea [Uber Land und Meer], and Chronicle of the Times [Chronik der Zeit ] (that’s how far advanced I was in literature)–were thrown out the door. I collected them all again, but I didn’t dare read in the evening, although I’d usually been allowed to read longer on Saturdays.
That was a sad Sunday! I was depressed, and what’s more I was scolded the whole day. …
Modern Anti-Semitism Defined
Richard Wagner
(1878)
All of a sudden, there is “the modern world.” This does not apparently refer to the world of today, the time in which we live, or–as modern German puts it so beautifully–”nowadays.” No, in the heads of our latest culture bearers, it signifies a world that has never yet existed, namely a “modern” world such as the world has never known at any time. Thus, a new world that previous worlds do not even approach and that therefore must be measured completely and arbitrarily according to its own standards. To the Jews, who, as a national entity, until half a century ago stood completely outside our cultural strivings, this present-day world, which they have entered so suddenly and which they appropriate to themselves with increasing force, this world must in fact seem a wholly new and hitherto nonexistent one. …
It is extraordinary how difficult … [it] seems to be for Jews [to learn proper German, as opposed to Yiddish]. We may suppose that they went too hastily to work in appropriating what was too alien to them and that their unripe knowledge of our language, that is, their jargon, may have led them astray. It belongs to another discussion to illuminate the character of language falsification and what we owe to Jewish journalism for the intrusion of “the modern” into our cultural development. To elaborate further on the present theme, however, we must point out the weighty destiny under which our language had to labor for so long and how it took the most ingenious instincts of our greatest poets and sages to restore it to its productive character. And how this remarkable, linguistic-literary process of development was encountered by decadents who frivolously abandon the deadly seriousness of their predecessors and proclaim themselves “Moderns.” …
For the Moderns to explain what we ought to think about this term “modern” is not so easy, especially if they concede that it is something quite lamentable and even dangerous, particularly to us Germans. We will not suppose this because we are assuming that our Jewish fellow citizens mean well by us. Shall we, on this assumption, believe that they don’t know what they are saying and only talk twaddle? It is useless here to trace the historical paths of the concept “modern,” a term originally coined for the plastic arts of Italy to differentiate them from those of the classical age. It suffices that we have come to know the significance of “modishness” for the French national character. With an idiosyncratic pride, the Frenchman can call himself “modern,” for he creates fashion and thereby dominates the external appearance of the entire world.
If, presently, the Jews, by dint of their “colossal efforts, in common with liberal Christians,” are making us into articles of fashion, then let the God of their fathers reward them for “doing so well by us” poor German slaves of French fashion! For the time being, it still appears otherwise, however. For, in spite of all their power, they have no remedy for their lack of originality. And this applies particularly to the employment of that power that they insist none can deny them: “the power of the quill.” They can deck themselves out with foreign feathers [quills], just as they can with the delicious names under which our new Jewish fellow citizens come to us–as surprising as they are enrapturing–and this while we poor old peasants and burghers have to satisfy ourselves forever with quite wretched names like “Schmidt,” “Muller,” “Weber,” “Wagner,” etc. …
The Gotha Program: Social Reformism over Social Revolution
German Social Democratic Party
(1875)
1. Labor is the source of all wealth and of all civilization; and since it is only through society that generally productive labor is possible, the whole product of labor, where there is a general obligation to work, belongs to society,–that is, to all its members, by equal right, and to each according to his reasonable needs.
In the society of to-day the means of production are a monopoly of the capitalistic class; the dependence of the working class, which results from this, is the cause of misery and servitude in all its forms.
The emancipation of labor requires the conversion of the means of production into the common property of society and the social regulation of all labor and its application for the general good, together with the just distribution of the product of labor.
The emancipation of labor must be the work of the laboring class itself, opposed to which all other classes are reactionary groups.
2. Proceeding from these principles, the socialist labor party of Germany endeavors by every lawful means to bring about a free State and a socialistic society, to effect the destruction of the iron law of wages by doing away with the system of wage labor, to abolish exploitation of every kind, and to extinguish all social and political inequality.
The socialist labor party of Germany, although for the time being confining its activity within national bounds, is fully conscious of the international character of the labor movement, and is resolved to meet all the obligations which this lays upon the laborer, in order to bring the brotherhood of all mankind to a full realization.
The socialist labor party of Germany, in order to prepare the way for the solution of the social question, demands the establishment of socialistic productive associations with the support of the State and under the democratic control of the working people. These productive associations, for both industry and agriculture, are to be created to such an extent that the socialistic organization of all labor may result therefrom.
[In addition to the demand for universal suffrage for all above twenty years of age, secret ballot, freedom of the press, free and compulsory education, etc.,] the socialist labor party of Germany demands the following reforms in the present social organization: (1) the greatest possible extension of political rights and freedom in the sense of the above-mentioned demands; (2) a single progressive income tax, both State and local, instead of all the existing taxes, especially the indirect ones, which weigh heavily upon the people; (3) unlimited right of association; (4) a normal working day corresponding with the needs of society, and the prohibition of work on Sunday; (5) prohibition of child labor and all forms of labor by women which are dangerous to health or morality; (6) laws for the protection of the life and health of workmen, sanitary control of workmen’s houses, inspection of mines, factories, workshops, and domestic industries by officials chosen by the workmen themselves, and an effective system of enforcement of the same; (7) regulation of prison labor.
A Scathing Denunciation of Socialist Reformism
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
(1876)
“The German Workers’ Party, in order to pave the way to the solution of the social question, demands the establishment of producers’ co-operative societies with state aid under the democratic control of the toiling people. The producers’ co-operative societies are to be called into being for industry and agriculture in such dimensions that the socialist organisation of the total labour will arise from them.”
After the Lassallean “iron law of wages,” the remedy of the prophet. The way to it is “paved” in worthy fashion. In place of the existing class struggle appears a newspaper scribbler’s phrase: “the social question,” to the “solution” of which one ” paves the way.” Instead of the revolutionary process of transformation of society, the “socialist organisation of the total labour” “arises” from the “state aid” that the state gives to the producers’ co-operative societies and which the state, not the worker, “calls into being.” This is worthy of Lassalle’s imagination that one can build a new society by state loans just as well as a new railway!
From the remnants of a sense of shame, “state aid” has been put–under the democratic control of the “toiling people.”
In the first place the majority of the “toiling people” in Germany consists of peasants and not of proletarians.
Secondly, “democratic” is in German “volksherrschaftlich,” ["by the rule of the people"]. But what does “control by the rule of the people of the toiling people” mean? And particularly in the case of a toiling people which, through these demands that it puts to the state, expresses its full consciousness that it neither rules nor is ripe for ruling! …
… The chief offence does not lie in having inscribed these specific nostrums in the programme, but in that in general a retrograde step from the standpoint of a class movement to that of a sectarian movement is being taken.
That the workers desire to establish the conditions of co-operative production on a social, and first of all on a national, scale in their own country, only means that they are working to revolutionise the present conditions of production, and has nothing in common with the foundation of co-operative societies with state aid. But as far as the present co-operative societies are concerned they are of value only in so far as they are the independent creations of the workers and not proteges either of the government or of the bourgeoisie.
I come now to the democratic section.
A. “The free basis of the state . ”
First of all, according to II, the German Workers’ Party strives for the “free state.”
Free state–what is this?
It is by no means the aim of the workers, who have got rid of the narrow mentality of humble subjects, to set the state free. In the German empire the “state” is almost as “free” as in Russia. Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ standing above society into one completely subordinated to it, and today also the forms of the state are more free or less free to the extent that they restrict the “freedom of the state.”
The German Workers’ Party–at least if it adopts the programme–shows that its socialist ideas are not even skin-deep, in that, instead of treating existing society (and this holds good of any future one) as the basis of the existing state (or of the future state in the case of future society) it treats the state rather as an independent entity that possesses its own intellectual, moral and free basis. …
The Mayor of Vienna Connects Christianity to Anti-Semitism
Karl Lueger
(1887)
At this meeting the first speaker was the Hungarian anti-Semitic leader Dr. Komlossy, who was received with an ovation lasting several minutes, and, constantly interrupted by cries of assent, made a strongly anti-Semitic speech. … Lueger, as the second speaker, was meanwhile sitting near the chairman, Psenner, and asked him anxiously what he should speak on so as not to fall foul of Komlossy. Psenner’s advice was that he could become the hero of the evening only if he outdid Komlossy in his anti-Semitism. Lueger appreciated this at once and, amid storms of applause, made a speech which, as Psenner said, set the seal on his transformation from a Democrat into an anti-Semite. …
(2) For my part, I like to ignore the small differences which might exist between one or other of the parties about the method of the struggle; I have very little regard for words and names, and much more for the cause. Whether Democrat or anti-Semite, the matter really comes to one and the same thing. The Democrats in their struggle against corruption come up against the Jews at every step, and the anti-Semites, if they want to carry out their economic programme, have to overcome not only the bad Jews but the bad Christians also. …
All my party comrades share my opinion that it is the first duty of a Democrat to take the side of the poor, oppressed people and to even harmful domination of a small fraction of the population. To be sure, the Manchester-Liberal papers have the habit of describing a Democrat in somewhat different terms. They claim, for instance, that it would be the duty of such a Democrat to come forward as an enemy of the Christian religion, to mock and ridicule its believers and priests. But we know that the motive of such a manoeuvre is solely to mislead the people, which we may deduce from the remarkable fact that were anybody to come forward against the Jewish religion and ridicule its doctrines and believers he would be branded by the same organs as a reactionary obscurantist. However, this strange conception can be seen even more clearly in an economic question. Quite shamelessly the Liberal organs threaten the confiscation of the property of the Church and claim that the goods of the “dead hand” are harmful. By this means an attempt is made to divert the attention of the people from the property of the “living hand” which, in my view, harms the people in the most grievous way. But what a yell of rage would go up from the Liberal press if one were to substitute the slogan “confiscation of Church property” with the slogan “confiscation of the goods of the conscious, living hand!” He who would dare this would risk at once being portrayed as injuring the sacred rights of property, as an anarchist, a communist who wanted to subvert the social order and destroy all existing things. And now I ask: is the title of property of the conscious, living hand stronger or more sacred than the title to the property of the Church? Surely not. And so it is more than extraordinary if one were to confiscate the property of the comparatively poor priests and through this help the rich of another denomination to increase their wealth!
A Papal Encyclical Analyzes the Modern World
Pope Leo XIII
(1891)
Let it be laid down, in the first place, that humanity must remain as it is. It is impossible to reduce human society to a level. The socialists may do their utmost, but all striving against nature is vain. There naturally exist among mankind innumerable differences of the most important kind; people differ in capability, in diligence, in health, and in strength; an unequal fortune is a necessary result of inequality in condition. Such inequality is far from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the community; social and public life can only go on by the help of various kinds of capacity and the playing of many parts; and each man, as a rule, chooses the part which peculiarly suits his case.
As regards bodily labor, even had man never fallen from “the state of innocence,” he would not have been wholly unoccupied; but that which would then have been his free choice and delight became afterwards compulsory, and the painful expiation of his sin. “Cursed be the earth in thy work; in thy labor thou shall eat of it all the days of thy life.” In like manner, the other pains and hardships of life will have no end or cessation on this earth; for the consequences of sin are bitter and hard to bear, and they must be with man as long as life lasts. To suffer and to endure, therefore, is the lot of humanity; let men try as they may, no strength and no artifice will ever succeed in banishing from human life the ills and troubles which beset it. If any there be who pretend differently,–who hold out to a hard-pressed people freedom from pain and trouble, undisturbed repose, and constant enjoyment,–they cheat the people and impose upon them; and their lying promises will only make the evil worse than before. There is nothing more useful than to look at the world as it really is,–and at the same time to look elsewhere for a remedy to its troubles.
The great mistake that is made in the matter now under consideration, is to possess one’s self of the idea that class is naturally hostile to class; that rich and poor are intended by nature to live at war with one another. So irrational and so false is this view that the exact contrary is the truth. Just as the symmetry of the human body is the result of the disposition of the members of the body, so in a State it is ordained by nature that these two classes should exist in harmony and agreement, and should, as it were, fit into one another, so as to maintain the equilibrium of the body politic. Each requires the other; capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital. Mutual agreement results in pleasantness and good order; perpetual conflict necessarily produces confusion and violence.
Now, in preventing such strife as this, and in making it impossible, the efficacy of Christianity is marvelous and manifold. First of all, there is nothing more powerful than religion (of which the Church is the interpreter and guardian) in drawing rich and poor together, by reminding each class of its duties to the other, and especially of the duties of justice. Thus religion teaches the laboring man and the workman to carry out honestly and well all equitable agreements freely made; never to injure capital, or to attack the person of an employer; never to employ violence in representing his own cause, or to engage in riot or disorder; and to have nothing to do with men of evil principles, who work upon the people with artful promises, and raise foolish hopes which usually end in disaster and in repentance when too late.
Religion teaches the rich man and the employer that their work people are not their slaves; that they respect in every man his dignity as a man and as a Christian; that labor is nothing to be ashamed of, if we listen to right reason and to Christian philosophy, but is an honorable employment, enabling a man to sustain his life in an upright and creditable way; and that it is shameful and inhuman to treat men like chattels to make money by, or to look upon them merely as so much muscle or physical power.
If we turn now to things exterior and corporeal, the first concern of all is to save the poor workers from the cruelty of grasping speculators, who use human beings as mere instruments for making money. It is neither justice nor humanity so to grind men down with excessive labor as to stupefy their minds and wear out their bodies. Finally, work which is suitable for a strong man cannot reasonably be required from a woman or a child. And, in regard to children, great care should be taken not to place them in workshops and factories until their bodies and minds are sufficiently mature. For just as severe weather destroys the buds of spring, so too early an experience of life’s hard work blights the young promise of a child’s powers and makes any real education impossible.
We now approach a subject of very great importance, and one on which, if extremes are to be avoided, right ideas are absolutely necessary. Wages, we are told, are fixed by free consent; and therefore the employer, when he pays what was agreed upon, has done his part, and is not called upon for anything further. The only way, it is said, in which injustice could happen would be if the master refused to pay the whole of the wages, or the workman would not complete the work undertaken; when this happens the State should intervene, to see that each obtains his own,–but not under any other circumstances. …
The Narodnik Executive Committee Reveals the Rationale for Assassination
The Narodnik Executive Committee
(1881)
Your Majesty: March 10, 1881
Although the Executive Committee understands fully the grief that you must experience at this moment, it believes that it has no right to yield to the feeling of natural delicacy which would perhaps dictate the postponements of the following explanation to another time. There is something higher than the most legitimate human feeling, and that is, duty to one’s country,–the duty for which a citizen must sacrifice himself and his own feelings, and even the feelings of others. In obedience to this all-powerful duty we have decided to address you at once, waiting for nothing, as will wait for nothing the historical process that threatens us with rivers of blood and the most terrible convulsions. …
You are aware, your Majesty, that the government of the late Tsar could not be reproached with the lack of energy. It hanged the innocent and the guilty, and filled prisons and remote provinces with exiles. Scores of socalled “leaders” were captured and hanged, and died with the courage and tranquillity of martyrs; but the movement did not cease,–on the contrary it grew and strengthened. The revolutionary movement, your Majesty, is not dependent upon any particular individuals; it is a process of the social organism; and the scaffolds raised for its more energetic exponents are as powerless to save the outgrown order of things as the cross that was erected for the Redeemer was powerless to save the ancient world from the triumph of Christianity. The government, of course, may yet capture and hang an immense number of separate individuals, it may break up a great number of separate revolutionary groups; but all this will not change, in the slightest degree, the condition of affairs. …
A dispassionate glance at the grievous decade through which we have just passed will enable us to forecast accurately the future progress of the revolutionary movement, provided the policy of the government does not change. The movement will continue to grow and extend; deeds of a terroristic nature will increase in frequency and intensity. Meanwhile the number of the discontented in the country will grow larger and larger; confidence in the government, on the part of the people, will decline; and the idea of a revolution–of its possibility and inevitability–will establish itself in Russia more and more firmly. A terrible explosion, a bloody chaos, a revolutionary earthquake throughout Russia, will complete the destruction of the old order of things. …
From such a state of affairs there can be only two modes of escape: either a revolution,–absolutely inevitable and not to be averted by any punishments; or a voluntary turning of the supreme power to the people. In the interest of our native land, in the hope of preventing the useless waste of energy, in the hope of averting the terrible miseries that always accompany revolution, the Executive Committee approaches your Majesty with the advice to take the second course. Be assured, so soon as the supreme power ceases to rule arbitrarily, so soon as it firmly resolves to accede to the demands of the people’s conscience and consciousness, you may, without fear, discharge the spies that disgrace the administration, send your guards back to their barracks, and burn the scaffolds that are demoralizing the people. The Executive Committee will voluntarily terminate its own existence, and the organizations formed about it will disperse, in order that their members may devote themselves to the work of promoting culture among the people of their native land. …
We set no conditions for you; do not let our proposition irritate you. The conditions that are prerequisite to a change from revolutionary activity to peaceful labor are created, not by us, but by history. These conditions are, in our opinion, two.
1. A general amnesty to cover all past political crimes; for the reason that they were not crimes but fulfillments of civil duty.
2. The summoning of representatives of the whole Russian people to examine the existing framework of social and governmental life, and to remodel it in accordance with the people’s wishes.
We regard it as necessary, however, to remind you that the legalization of the supreme power, by the representatives of the people, can be valid only in case the elections are perfectly free. We declare solemnly, before the people of our native land and before the whole world, that our party will submit unconditionally to the decisions of a National Assembly elected in the manner above indicated, and that we will not allow ourselves, in future, to offer violent resistance to any government that the National Assembly may sanction.
The Dreyfus Affair Awakens Anti-Semitism in France
Civilita Cattolica
(1897)
The emancipation of the Jews was the corollary of the so-called principles of 1789, the yoke of which weighs on the neck of all Frenchmen. These French Jews grew in number by the immigration of German Jews, and now they total 130,000.
They got control of Masonry (Dreyfus is a Jew and a Mason as well), and Masonry is notoriously the master of the French State. This is the way they keep the Republic in their hands; it is more Hebrew than French. … Of 260 billions that constitute the wealth of France, the Jews possess 80. They direct home as well as foreign policy. The abandonment of Egypt [a reference to the concession to the British of De Lesseps' Suez Canal] was the work of these Jews who, at the behest of the government of London, corrupted the press, the government and parliament.
The condemnation of Dreyfus was a terrible blow for Israel. It branded the forehead of all Jews in the world, most of all in their French colonies. This mark they swore to wipe off. But how? With their usual subtlety, they invented a case of miscarriage of justice. The plot was hatched in Basle at the Zionist Congress, held under the pretext of discussing the deliverance of Jerusalem. The Protestants joined in common cause with the Jews and established a Syndicate. The money came mostly from Germany. Pecuniae obediunt omnia is the principle of the Jews. They bought consciences and those newspapers which were for sale in every country of Europe. …
The Jew was created by God to serve as a spy wherever treason is in preparation. Moreover, ethnic solidarity ties the Jews to each other and prevents them from becoming loyal citizens in spite of naturalization. The Dreyfus affair reveals this fact clearly. Thus anti-Semitism will become, as it should, economic, political, and national. The Jews allege an error of justice. The true error was, however, that of the Constituante which accorded them French nationality. That law has to be revoked. … Not only in France, but in Germany, Austria, and Italy as well, the Jews are to be excluded from the nation.
Then the old harmony will be re-established and the peoples will again find their lost happiness.
“J’Accuse” the French Army
Emile Zola
(1898)
Dreyfus knows several languages: a crime. No compromising papers were found in his possession: a crime. He sometimes visited his native country: a crime. He is industrious and likes to find out about everything: a crime. He is calm: a crime. He is worried: a crime. …
I accuse Lieutenant-Colonel du Paty de Clam of having been the diabolical, but I would fain believe the unwitting, artisan of the miscarriage of justice, and thereafter of having defended his unhallowed work for three years by the most clumsy and culpable machinations.
I accuse General Mercier of having become, at all events through weakness, an accomplice in one of the greatest iniquities of the age.
I accuse General Billot of having had in his hands sure proofs of the innocence of Dreyfus and of having hushed them up, of having incurred the guilt of crimes against humanity and justice, for political ends and to save the face of the General Staff.
I accuse General de Boisdeffre and General Gonse of having been participators in the same crime, actuated, the one no doubt by clerical partisanship, the other, it may be, by that esprit de corps which would make the Army and the War Office the sacred Ark of the Covenant.
I accuse General de Pellieux and Major Ravary of conducting a disgraceful inquiry, by which I mean an inquiry characterized by the most monstrous partiality, of which we have, in the report of the latter of these two men, an imperishable monument of stupid audacity.
I accuse the three handwriting experts, MM. Belhomme, Varinard, and Couard, of drawing up misleading and lying reports, unless, indeed, a medical examination should reveal them to be suffering from some pathological abnormality of sight and judgment.
I accuse the War Office of conducting an abominable campaign in the Press, and particularly in the newspapers l’Eclair and l’Echo de Paris, in order to mislead public opinion and to conceal their own misdeeds.
I accuse the first Court-Martial of acting contrary to law by condemning an accused man on the strength of a secret document; and I accuse the second Court-Martial of having, in obedience to orders, concealed that illegality, and of committing in its turn the crime of knowingly acquitting a guilty man.
In bringing these charges, I am not unaware that I render myself liable to prosecution under Clauses 30 and 31 of the Act of the 29th of July, which deals with defamation of character in the public Press. But I do so of my own free will and with my eyes open.
As for those whom I accuse, I do not know them, I have never seen them. I entertain for them neither hatred nor ill-will. They are so far as I am concerned mere entities, spirits of social maleficence, and the action to which I have here committed myself is but a revolutionary means of hastening the explosion of Truth and Justice.
I have but one passion, and that is for light, and I plead in the name of that humanity which has so greatly suffered and has a right to happiness. My fiery protest is but the outcry of my soul. Let them drag me, then, into a Court of Justice and let the matter be thrashed out in broad daylight. I am ready.
Bloody Sunday: Tsarist Repression at Its Worst
Father Georgi Gapon
(1905)
Sire: We, workingmen and inhabitants of St. Petersburg of various classes, our wives and our children and our helpless old parents, come to Thee, Sire, to seek for truth and defense. We have become beggars; we have been oppressed; we are burdened by toil beyond our powers; we are scoffed at; we are not recognized as human beings; we are treated as slaves who must suffer their bitter fate and who must keep silence. We suffered, but we are pushed farther into the den of beggary, lawlessness, and ignorance. We are choked by despotism and irresponsibility, and we are breathless. We have no more power, Sire; the limit of patience has been reached. There has arrived for us that tremendous moment when death is better than the continuation of intolerable tortures. We have left off working, and we have declared to the masters that we shall not begin to work until they comply with our demands. We beg but little: we desire only that without which life is not life, but hard labor and eternal torture. The first request which we made was that our masters should discuss our needs with us; but this they refused, on the ground that no right to make this request is recognized by law. They also declared to be illegal our requests to diminish the working hours to eight hours daily, to agree with us about the prices for our work, to consider our misunderstandings with the inferior administration of the mills, to increase the wages for the labor of women and of general laborers, so that the minimum daily wage should be one ruble per day, to abolish overtime work, to give us medical attention without insulting us, to arrange the workshops so that it might be possible to work there, and not find in them death from awful draughts and from rain and snow. All these requests appeared to be, in the opinion of our masters and of the factory and mill administrations, illegal. Everyone of our requests was a crime, and the desire to improve our condition was regarded by them as impertinence, and as offensive to them.
Sire, here are many thousands of us, and all are human beings only in appearance. In reality in us, as in all Russian people, there is not recognized any human right, not even the right of speaking, thinking, meeting, discussing our needs, taking measures for the improvement of our condition. We have been enslaved, and enslaved under the auspices of Thy officials, with their assistance, and with their co-operation. Everyone of us who dares to raise a voice in defense of working-class and popular interests is thrown into jail or is sent into banishment. For the possession of good hearts and sensitive souls we are punished as for crimes. Even to pity a beaten man–a man tortured and without rights–means to commit a heavy crime. …
Russia is too great. Its necessities are too various and numerous for officials alone to rule. National representation is indispensable. It is indispensable that people should assist and should rule themselves. To them only are known their real necessities. Do not reject their assistance, accept it, order immediately the convocation of representatives of the Russian land from all ranks, including representatives from the workingmen. Let there be capitalists as well as workingmen–official and priest, doctor and teacher–let all, whatever they may be, elect their representatives. Let everyone be equal and free in the right of election, and for this purpose order that the elections for the Constitutional Assembly be carried on under the condition of universal, equal and secret voting. This is the most capital of our requests. In it and upon it everything is based. This is the principal and only plaster for our painful wounds, without which our wounds will fester and will bring us rapidly near to death. Yet one measure alone cannot heal our wounds. Other measures are also indispensable. Directly and openly as to a Father we speak to Thee, Sire, about them, in person, for all the toiling classes of Russia. …
II
With naive belief in thee as father of thy people, I was going peacefully to thee with the children of these very people. Thou must have known, thou didst know this. The innocent blood of workers, their wives and children, lies forever between thee, O soul destroyer, and the Russian people. Moral connection between thee and them may never be any more. The mighty river during its overflowing thou art already unable to stem by any half measures, even by a Zemsky Sobor (Popular Assembly). Bombs and dynamite, the terror by individuals and by masses, against thy breed and against the robbers of rightless people–all this must be and shall absolutely be. Asea of blood–unexampled–will be shed. Because of thee, because of thy whole family, Russia may perish. Once for all, understand this and remember, better soon with all thy family abdicate the throne of Russia and give thyself up to the Russian people for trial. Pity thy children and the Russian lands, O thou offerer of peace for other countries and blood drunkard for thine own!
Otherwise let all blood which has to be shed fall upon thee, Hangman, and thy kindred!
GEORGE GAPON.
Postscriptum–Know that this letter is justifying document of the coming revolutionary terroristic occurrences in Russia. G. G.
Liberalism Transformed: A Defense of Social Welfare
Leonard Hobhouse
(1911)
On all sides we find the State making active provision for the poorer classes and not by any means for the destitute alone. We find it educating the children, providing medical inspection, authorizing the feeding of the necessitous at the expense of the ratepayers, helping them to obtain employment through free Labour Exchanges, seeking to organize the labour market with a view to the mitigation of unemployment, and providing old age pensions for all whose incomes fall below thirteen shillings a week, without exacting any contribution. Now, in all this, we may well ask, is the State going forward blindly on the paths of broad and generous but unconsidered charity? Is it and can it remain indifferent to the effect on individual initiative and personal or parental responsibility? Or may we suppose that the wiser heads are well aware of what they are about, have looked at the matter on all sides, and are guided by a reasonable conception of the duty of the State and the responsibilities of the individual? Are we, in fact–for this is really the question–seeking charity or justice?
We said above that it was the function of the State to secure the conditions upon which mind and character may develop themselves. Similarly we may say now that the function of the State is to secure conditions upon which its citizens are able to win by their own efforts all that is necessary to a full civic efficiency. It is not for the State to feed, house, or clothe them. It is for the State to take care that the economic conditions are such that the normal man who is not defective in mind or body or will can by useful labour feed, house, and clothe himself and his family. The “right to work” and the right to a “living wage” are just as valid as the rights of person or property. That is to say, they are integral conditions of a good social order.
An Eerie Prescient Vision of the Coming War
Jean Jaures
(1911)
But no matter what we do, gentlemen, we remain surrounded by an atmosphere of suspicion and defiance from which, it seems to me, the clouds of war may descend upon us at any minute. As far as it is our responsibility, as far as it is the responsibility of a great people, we must constantly apply ourselves to dissipate this atmosphere of defiance and to combat the causes of the renewed danger of conflicts. It is our primary duty to reject the pessimism and the fatalism of those who say that war is inevitable.
Gentlemen, I do not disregard the forces for war in this world; but one also has to see and to recognize the forces for peace and to salute them. In its own way, war fosters peace–since the horrors of a modern war are frightening. Gentlemen, when one sometimes speaks lightly of the possibility of this terrible catastrophe one forgets the hitherto unknown extent of the horror and greatness of the disaster that would occur. …
The present-day armies of each nation represent entire peoples, as in the times of primitive barbarism; but this time they would be let loose amidst all the complexity and wealth of human civilization. Each of these nations would employ instruments of terrifying destruction created by modern science. Do not imagine that it will be a short war, consisting of a few thunderbolts and flashes of lightning. On the contrary, there will be slow and formidable collisions like the ones which have taken place over there in Manchuria between the Russians and the Japanese. Untold numbers of human beings will suffer from the sickness, the distress, the pain, the ravages of this multiple explosion. The sick will die of fever; commerce will be paralyzed; factories will stop working; oceans, which steamboats nowadays cross in every direction, will again be empty and silent as in former times.
This terrible spectacle will over-stimulate all human passions. Listen to the words of a man who is passionately attached to the ideals of his party and who is convinced that we must revolutionize our form of property holding, but who also believes that it will be the greatness of this movement to proceed in an evolutionary manner, without unleashing the destructive hatreds which have hitherto accompanied all great movements for social reform throughout history. But we must watch out, for it is in the fever of wars that passions for social reform are aroused to a paroxysm of violence. It was during the War of 1870 and the siege of Paris that convulsions seized that city; it was during the Russo-Japanese War that the fever broke out in Russia. Therefore, the conservatives should be the ones who desire peace more than any others, for once peace is broken the forces of chaos will be let loose. …
Primary Sources – Unit Fourteen – The West and the World
European Imperialism in Africa: A Veteran Explains the Rules of the Game
Sir Henry Stanley
(1909)
Some explorers say: “One must not run through a country, but give the people time to become acquainted with you, and let their worst fears subside.”
Now on the expedition across Africa I had no time to give, either to myself or to them. The river bore my heavy canoes downward; my goods would never have endured the dawdling requirement by the system of teaching every tribe I met who I was. To save myself and my men from certain starvation, I had to rush on and on, right through. But on this expedition, the very necessity of making roads to haul my enormous six-ton wagons gave time for my reputation to travel ahead of me. My name, purpose, and liberal rewards for native help, naturally exaggerated, prepared a welcome for me, and transformed my enemies of the old time into workmen, friendly allies, strong porters, and firm friends. I was greatly forbearing also; but, when a fight was inevitable, through open violence, it was sharp and decisive. Consequently, the natives rapidly learned that though everything was to be gained by friendship with me, wars brought nothing but ruin.
When a young white officer quits England for the first time, to lead blacks, he has got to learn to unlearn a great deal. We must have white men in Africa; but the raw white is a great nuisance there during the first year. In the second year, he begins to mend; during the third year, if his nature permits it, he has developed into a superior man, whose intelligence may be of transcendent utility for directing masses of inferior men.
My officers were possessed with the notion that my manner was “hard,” because I had not many compliments for them. That is the kind of pap which we may offer women and boys. Besides, I thought they were superior natures, and required none of that encouragement, which the more childish blacks almost daily received.
Imperial Conquest: The Nation’s Savior
Le Petit Journal
(1883)
The future and wealth of France depend above all on the extension and prosperity of our colonies. … When factories produce more than consumers need, work must stop for a time, and workers, condemned to inactivity for a more or less long period, must live off their savings and suffer without there being any possibility to institute a remedy for the evil. … The reasons for the abnormal situation can be boiled down to a lack of markets for our products….Once the French genius is put to colonization … we will find a draining of our overflow of our factories, and at the same time we will be able to secure, at the source of production, the primary materials needed in our factories.
The “Poet Laureate of Empire” Issues a Word of Warning
Rudyard Kipling
(1897)
Recessional
God of our fathers, known of old–
Lord of our far-flung battle line–
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine–
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget–lest we forget!
The tumult and the shouting die–
The Captains and the Kings depart–
Still stands thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, …
Far-called, our navies melt away–
On dune and headland sinks the fire–
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget …
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe–
Such boasting as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the Law–
Lord God of Hosts, …
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard–
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy Mercy on thy People, Lord!
An Immigrant’s Tale
Rose Schneiderman
(ca. 1890s)
Mother had been here only a short time when I noticed that she looked older and more old-fashioned than father. It was so with most of our women, especially those who wore wigs or kerchiefs on their heads. So I thought that if I could persuade her to leave off her kerchief she would look younger and more up to date. So, one day, when we two were alone in the house, I asked her playfully to take off her kerchief and let me do her hair, just to see how it would look.
She consented reluctantly. She had never before in her married life had her hair uncovered before anyone. I was surprised how different she looked. I handed her our little mirror. She glanced at herself, admitted frankly that it looked well and began hastily to put on her kerchief.
“Mamma,” I coaxed, “please don’t put the kerchief on again–ever!”
At first she would not even listen to me. I began to coax and reason. I pointed out that wives often looked so much older because they were so old-fashioned, that the husbands were often ashamed to go out with them.
Mother put her finger on my lips.
“But father trims his beard,” I still argued. Her face looked sad. “Is that why,” she said, “I too must sin?”
An Academic Nationalist Lectures the Next Generation of Germany’s Leaders
Heinrich von Treitschke
(ca. 1880s)
The next essential function of the State is the conduct of war. The long oblivion into which this principle had fallen is a proof of how effeminate the science of government had become in civilian hands. In our century this sentimentality was dissipated by Clausewitz, but a one-sided materialism arose in its place, after the fashion of the Manchester school, seeing in man a biped creature, whose destiny lies in buying cheap and selling dear. It is obvious that this idea is not compatible with war, and it is only since the last war [1870-71] that a sounder theory arose of the State and its military power.
Without war no State could be. All those we know of arose through war, and the protection of their members by armed force remains their primary and essential task. War, therefore, will endure to the end of history, as long as there is multiplicity of States. The laws of human thought and of human nature forbid any alternative, neither is one to be wished for. The blind worshipper of an eternal peace falls into the error of isolating the State, or dreams of one which is universal, which we have already seen to be at variance with reason.
Even as it is impossible to conceive of a tribunal above the State, which we have recognized as sovereign in its very essence, so it is likewise impossible to banish the idea of war from the world. It is a favourite fashion of our time to instance England as particularly ready for peace. But England is perpetually at war; there is hardly an instant in her recent history in which she has not been obliged to be fighting somewhere. The great strides which civilization makes against barbarism and unreason are only made actual by the sword. Between civilized nations also war is the form of litigation by which States make their claims valid. The arguments brought forward in these terrible law suits of the nations compel as no argument in civil suits can ever do. Often as we have tried by theory to convince the small States that Prussia alone can be the leader in Germany, we had to produce the final proof upon the battlefields of Bohemia and the [river] Main [in 1866].
Moreover war is a uniting as well as a dividing element among nations; it does not draw them together in enmity only, for through its means they learn to know and to respect each other’s peculiar qualities.
It is important not to look upon war always as a judgment from God. Its consequences are evanescent; but the life of a nation is reckoned by centuries, and the final verdict can only be pronounced after the survey of whole epochs.
William II Offers Characteristic Bombast
William II
(1897)
The voyage on which you are starting and the task you have to perform have nothing essentially novel about them. They are the logical consequences of the political labors of my late grandfather and his great Chancellor,[1] and of our noble father’s achievements with the sword on the battlefield. They are nothing more than the first effort of the reunited and reestablished German Empire to perform its duties across the seas. In the astonishing development of its commercial interests the empire has attained such dimensions that it is my duty to follow the new German Hansa, and to afford it the protection it has a right to demand from the empire and the emperor. Our German brethren in holy orders, who have gone out to work in peace, and who have not shrunk from risking their lives in order to carry our religion to foreign soil and among foreign nations, have placed themselves under my protection, and we have now to give permanent support and safety to these brethren, who have been repeatedly harassed and often hard pressed.
For this reason, the enterprise which I have intrusted to you, and which you will have to carry out conjointly with the comrades and the ships already on the spot, is essentially of a defensive and not of an offensive nature. Under the protecting banner of our German war flag, the rights we are justified in claiming are to be secured to German commerce, German merchants, and German ships,–the same rights that are accorded by foreigners to all other nations. Our commerce is not new, for the Hansa was, in old times, one of the mightiest enterprises the world has ever seen, and the German towns were able to fit out fleets such as the broad expanse of the sea had hardly ever borne before.
The Hansa decayed, however, and could not but decay, for the one condition, namely imperial protection, was wanting. Now things are altered. As the first preliminary condition, the German Empire has been created. As the second preliminary condition, German commerce is flourishing and developing, and it can develop and prosper securely only if it feels safe under the power of the empire. Imperial power means naval power, and they are so mutually dependent that the one cannot exist without the other.
As a sign of imperial and of naval power, the squadron, strengthened by your division, will now have to act in close intercourse and good friendship with all the comrades of the foreign fleets out there, for the protection of our home interests against everybody who tries to injure Germany. That is your vocation and your task. May it be clear to every European out there, to the German merchant, and, above all, to the foreigner whose soil we may be on, and with whom we shall have to deal, that the German Michael[2] has planted his shield, adorned with the eagle of the empire, firmly on that soil, in order, once and for all, to afford protection to those who apply to him for it. May our countrymen abroad, whether priests or merchants or of any other calling, be firmly convinced that the protection of the German Empire, as represented by the imperial ships, will be constantly afforded them.
Should, however, any one attempt to affront us, or to infringe our good rights, then strike out with mailed fist, and, if God will, weave round your young brow the laurel which nobody in the whole German Empire will begrudge you.
[1] William I and Bismark; the latter, of course, William II forced from office.
[2] The symbol of Germany
Primary Sources – Unit Fifteen – The Great Break: War and Revolution
The Bismarckian Alliance System at Work: The Reinsurance Treaty
Otto von Bismarck (1887)
The Imperial Courts of Germany and of Russia, animated by an equal desire to strengthen the general peace by an understanding destined to assure the defensive position of their respective States, have resolved to confirm the agreement established between them by a special arrangement, in view of the expiration on June 15/27, 1887, of the validity of the secret Treaty and Protocol, signed in 1881 and renewed in 1884 by the three Courts of Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. …
Article I. In case one of the High Contracting Parties should find itself at war with a third great Power, the other would maintain a benevolent neutrality towards it, and would devote its efforts to the localization of the conflict. This provision would not apply to a war against Austria or France in case this war should result from an attack directed against one of these two latter Powers by one of the High Contracting Parties.
Article II. Germany recognizes the rights historically acquired by Russia in the Balkan Peninsula, and particularly the legitimacy of her preponderant and decisive influence in Bulgaria and in Eastern Rumelia. The two Courts engage to admit no modification of the territorial status quo of the said peninsula without a previous agreement between them, and to oppose, as occasion arises, every attempt to disturb this status quo or to modify it without their consent.
Article III. The two Courts recognize the European and mutually obligatory character of the principle of the closing of the Straits of the Bosphorus and of the Dardanelles, founded on international law, confirmed by treaties, and summed up in the declaration of the second Plenipotentiary of Russia at the session of July 12 of the Congress of Berlin (Protocol 19).
They will take care in common that Turkey shall make no exception to this rule in favor of the interests of any Government whatsoever, by lending to warlike operations of a belligerent power the portion of its Empire constituted by the Straits. In case of infringement, or to prevent it if such infringement should be in prospect, the two Courts will inform Turkey that they would regard her, in that event, as putting herself in a state of war towards the injured Party, and as depriving herself thenceforth of the benefits of the security assured to her territorial status quo by the Treaty of Berlin.
Article IV. The present Treaty shall remain in force for the space of three years, dating from the day of the exchange of ratifications.
Article V. The High Contracting Parties mutually promise secrecy as to the contents and the existence of the present Treaty and of the Protocol annexed thereto. …
Bismarck‘s Worst Nightmare: A Franco-Russian Rapprochement
Russian and French Governments
(1892)
(1) Draft of Military Convention
France and Russia, being animated by an equal desire to preserve peace, and having no other object than to meet the necessities of a defensive war, provoked by an attack of the forces of the Triple Alliance against the one or the other of them, have agreed upon the following provisions:
1. If France is attacked by Germany, or by Italy supported by Germany, Russia shall employ all her available forces to attack Germany.
If Russia is attacked by Germany, or by Austria supported by Germany, France shall employ all her available forces to fight Germany.
2. In case the forces of the Triple Alliance, or of one of the Powers composing it, should mobilize, France and Russia, at the first news of the event and without the necessity of any previous concert, shall mobilize immediately and simultaneously the whole of their forces and shall move them as close as possible to their frontiers.
3. The available forces to be employed against Germany shall be on the part of France, 1,300,000 men, on the part of Russia, 700,000 or 800,000 men.
These forces shall engage to the full, with all speed, in order that Germany may have to fight at the same time on the East and on the West.
4. The General Staffs of the Armies of the two countries shall cooperate with each other at all times in the preparation and facilitation of the execution of the measures above foreseen.
They shall communicate to each other, while there is still peace, all information relative to the armies of the Triple Alliance which is or shall be within their knowledge.
Ways and means of corresponding in times of war shall be studied and arranged in advance.
5. France and Russia shall not conclude peace separately.
6. The present Convention shall have the same duration as the Triple Alliance.
7. All the clauses above enumerated shall be kept rigorously secret. …
(2) General de Boisdeffre’s interview with the Tsar regarding the Military Convention. “Mobilization is a declaration of war.
Saint Petersburg, August 18, 1892
This morning, Tuesday, I received from the Minister of War a letter dated August 5/17, in which … he made known to me that the Emperor had approved in principle the project as a whole. [The draft of the Military Convention.] … The Emperor had evidently held that the basis of the entente would have to be precisely and officially fixed before his audience.
We have now, awaiting the exchange of ratifications with ministeries signatures, an official basis for a definite convention, a basis that can be considered as absolutely sure and decisive when one knows the reserve and the prudence of the Russian Government and the firmness of the Emperor in his engagements.
At eleven o’clock, I was received by the Emperor. His Majesty declared to me immediately that he had read, re-read, and studied the project of the convention, that he gave it his full approbation, taking it as a whole, and that he thanked the French Government for accepting some changes of wording that he had requested.
His Majesty added that the convention contained, to his mind, some political articles which he desired to have examined by the Minister of Foreign Affairs; that there might be, as a result, some minor changes of wording to be made. Finally, His Majesty repeated that the project gave him entire satisfaction and that everything seemed to him to be adjusted to the best interests of the two countries.
I did not believe it necessary to take up again the defence of the first text, since the new text had received the approval of the Government. I only said to the Emperor that the French Government had wished to testify once more through this concession to its confidence in him. The Emperor did not fail to tell me of his strong desire that we guard the secret absolutely….
The Emperor spoke of his desire for peace. I remarked to him that we were no less pacific than His Majesty. “I know it,” he responded. “You have given proof of it for twenty-two years. I believe, moreover, that at this moment, peace is not threatened. The German Emperor has enough internal troubles, and England has as many. Moreover, with our convention, I estimate that our situation will be favorable. I surely desire to have at least two more years of peace, for it is necessary for us to complete our armament, our railways, and to recover from want and from the cholera. In fine, it is necessary to hope that peace will be maintained for a long time yet, and let us wish for it.”
The Emperor then spoke of mobilization under Article 2. I ventured to remark that mobilization was the declaration of war; that to mobilize was to oblige one’s neighbor to do so also; that the mobilization entailed the execution of strategic transportation and of concentration. Without that, to allow the mobilization of a million men on one’s frontier without doing the same simultaneously was to deny to one’s self all possibility of stirring later. It would be like the situation an individual would be in if he had a pistol in his pocket and would allow his neighbor to point a gun at his forehead without drawing his own. “That is the way I understand it,” the Emperor responded. …
What Is to Be Done with Russia?
Vladimir I. Lenin
(1903)
The history of the revolutionary movement is so little known among us that the name “Narodnaya Volya” [People's Will, the original populist revolutionary movement of the earlier generation] is used to denote any idea of a militant centralized organisation which declares determined war upon tsarism. … [N]o revolutionary trend, if it seriously thinks of struggle, can dispense with such an organization. The mistake the Narodnaya Volya committed was not in striving to enlist all the discontented in the organisation and to direct this organisation to resolute struggle against autocracy; on the contrary, that was its great historical merit. The mistake was in relying on a theory which in substance was not a revolutionary theory at all, and the Narodnaya Volya members either did not know how, or were unable, to link their movement inseparably with the class struggle in the developing capitalist society. Only a gross failure to understand Marxism … could prompt the opinion that the rise of a mass, spontaneous working-class movement relieves us of the duty of creating as good an organisation of revolutionaries as the Zemlya i Volya[1] had, or, indeed, an incomparably better one. On the contrary, this movement imposes the duty upon us; for the spontaneous struggle of the proletariat will not become its genuine “class struggle” until this struggle is led by a strong organisation of revolutionaries.
We have always protested, and will, of course, continue to protest against confining the political struggle to conspiracy. But this does not, of course, mean that we deny the need for a strong revolutionary organisation. … In form such a strong revolutionary organisation in an autocratic country may also be described as a “conspiratorial” organisation, because the French word conspiration is the equivalent of the Russian wordzagovor (“conspiracy”), and such an organisation must have the utmost secrecy. Secrecy is such a necessary condition for this kind of organisation that all the other conditions (number and selection of members, functions, etc.) must be made to conform to it. It would be extremely naive indeed, therefore, to fear the charge that we Social-Democrats desire to create a conspiratorial organisation. …
The objection may be raised that such a powerful and strictly secret organisation, which concentrates in its hands all the threads of secret activities, an organisation which of necessity is centralised, may too easily rush into a premature attack, may thoughtlessly intensify the movement before the growth of political discontent, the intensity of the ferment and anger of the working class, etc., have made such an attack possible and necessary. Our reply to this is: Speaking abstractly, it cannot be denied, of course, that a militant organisationmay thoughtlessly engage in battle, which may end in defeat entirely avoidable under other conditions. But we cannot confine ourselves to abstract reasoning on such a question, because every battle bears within itself the abstract possibility of defeat, and there is no way of reducing this possibility except by organised preparation for battle. If, however, we proceed from the concrete conditions at present obtaining in Russia, we must come to the positive conclusion that a strong revolutionary organisation is absolutely necessary precisely for the purpose of giving stability to the movement and of safeguarding it against the possibility of making thoughtless attacks. Precisely at the present time, when no such organisation yet exists, and when the revolutionary movement is rapidly and spontaneously growing, we already observe two opposite extremes (which, as it is to be expected, “meet”). These are: the utterly unsound Economism [concentrating on gaining economic improvements for the workers] and the preaching of moderation, and the equally unsound “excitative terror” which strives “artificially to call forth symptoms of the end of the movement, which is developing and strengthening itself, when this movement is as yet nearer to the start than the end … “[2]
Only a centralised, militant organisation that consistently carries out a Social-Democratic policy, that satisfies, so to speak, all revolutionary instincts and strivings, can safeguard the movement against making thoughtless attacks and prepare attacks that hold out the promise of success.
A further objection may be raised, that the views on organisation here expounded contradict the “democratic principle.” …
… For the present, we shall examine more closely the “principle” that the Economists advance. Everyone will probably agree that “the broad democratic principle” presupposes the two following conditions: first, full publicity, and secondly, election to all offices. It would be absurd to speak of democracy without publicity, moreover, without a publicity that is not limited to the membership of the organisation. We call the German Socialist Party a democratic organisation because all its activities are carried out publicly; even its party congresses are held in public. But no one would call an organisation democratic that is hidden from every one but its members by a veil of secrecy. What is the use, then, of advancing “the broad democratic principle” when the fundamental condition for this principle cannot be fulfilled by a secret organisation? “The broad principle” proves itself simply to be a resounding but hollow phrase. Moreover, it reveals a total lack of understanding of the urgent tasks of the moment in regard to organisation. Everyone knows how great the lack of secrecy is among the “broad” masses of our revolutionaries. We have heard the bitter complaints of B–v on this score and his absolutely just demand for a “strict selection of members” ( Rabocheye Dyelo, No. 6, p. 42). Yet, persons who boast a keen “sense of realities” urge, in a situation like this, not the strictest secrecy and the strictest (consequently, more restricted) selection of members, but “the broad democratic principle”! This is what you call being wide of the mark.
Nor is the situation any better with regard to the second attribute of democracy, the principle of election. In politically free countries [Lenin cites Germany as an example], this condition is taken for granted. …
Try to fit this picture into the frame of our autocracy! Is it conceivable in Russia for all “who accept the principles of the Party programme and render the Party all possible support” to control every action of the revolutionary working in secret? Is it possible for all to elect one of these revolutionaries to any particular office, when, in the very interests of the work, the revolutionary must conceal his identity from nine out of ten of these “all”? Reflect somewhat over the real meaning of the high-sounding phrases [about democracy] … and you will realise that “broad democracy” in Party organisation, amidst the gloom of the autocracy and the domination of gendarmerie, is nothing more than a useless and harmful toy. It is a useless toy because, in point of fact, no revolutionary organisation has ever practised, or could practise, broad democracy, however much it may have desired to do so. It is a harmful toy because any attempt to practise “the broad democratic principle” will simply facilitate the work of the police in carrying out large-scale raids, will perpetuate the prevailing primitiveness, and will divert the thoughts of the practical workers from the serious and pressing task of training themselves to become professional revolutionaries to that of drawing up detailed “paper” rules for election systems. Only abroad, where very often people with no opportunity for conducting really active work gather, could this “playing at democracy” develop here and there, especially in small groups. …
[1] Land and Freedom, the most militant of the (Populist) revolutionary groups that arose out of Narodnaya Volya before 1881
[2] Lenin here is quoting the veteran populist revolutionary Vera Zasulich.
An Unanswerable Demand: The Austro-Hungarian Ultimatum to Serbia
The Austro-Hungarian Government
(1914)
On the 31st of March, 1909, the Serbian Minister in Vienna, on the instructions of the Serbian Government, made the following declaration to the Imperial and Royal Government:
“Serbia recognizes that the fait accompli regarding Bosnia has not affected her rights, and consequently she will conform to the decisions that the Powers may take in conformity with Article 25 of the Treaty of Berlin. In deference to the advice of the Great Powers, Serbia undertakes to renounce from now onwards the attitude of protest and opposition which she has adopted with regard to the annexation since last autumn. She undertakes, moreover, to modify the direction of her policy with regard to Austria-Hungary and to live in future on good neighborly terms with the latter.”
The history of recent years, and in particular the painful events of the 28th June last, have shown the existence of a subversive movement with the object of detaching a part of the territories of Austria-Hungary from the Monarchy. The movement which had its birth under the eye of the Serbian Government has gone so far as to make itself manifest on both sides of the Serbian frontier in the shape of acts of terrorism and a series of outrages and murders.
Far from carrying out the formal undertakings contained in the declaration of the 31st March, 1909, the Royal Serbian Government has done nothing to repress these movements. It has permitted the criminal machinations of various societies and associations directed against the Monarchy, and has tolerated unrestrained language on the part of the press, the glorification of the perpetrators of outrages, and the participation of officers and functionaries in subversive agitation. It has permitted an unwholesome propaganda in public instruction, in short, it has permitted all manifestations of a nature to incite the Serbian population to hatred of the Monarchy and contempt of its institutions.
This culpable tolerance of the Royal Serbian Government had not ceased at the moment when the events of the 28th June last proved its fatal consequences to the whole world.
It results from the depositions and confessions of the criminal perpetrators of the outrage of the 28th June that the Sarajevo assassinations were planned in Belgrade; that the arms and explosives with which the murderers were provided had been given to them by Serbian officers and functionaries belonging to the Narodna Odbrana;[1] and finally that the passage into Bosnia of the criminals and their arms was organized and effected by the chiefs of the Serbian frontier service.
The above-mentioned results of the magisterial investigation do not permit the Austro-Hungarian Government to pursue any longer the attitude of expectant forbearance which they have maintained for years in the face of the machinations hatched in Belgrade, and thence propagated in the territories of the Monarchy. The results, on the contrary, impose on them the duty of putting an end to the intrigues which form a perpetual menace to the tranquillity of the Monarchy.
To achieve this end the Imperial and Royal Government see themselves compelled to demand from the Royal Serbian Government a formal assurance that they condemn this dangerous propaganda against the Monarchy; in other words, the whole series of tendencies, the ultimate aim of which is to detach from the Monarchy territories belonging to it; and that they undertake to suppress by every means this criminal and terrorist propaganda.
In order to give a formal character to this undertaking the Royal Serbian Government shall publish on the front page of their Official Journal of the 13/26 July the following declaration:
“The Royal Government of Serbia condemn the propaganda directed against Austria-Hungary–i.e. the general tendency of which the final aim is to detach from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy territories belonging to it, and they sincerely deplore the fatal consequences of these criminal proceedings.
“The Royal Government regret that Serbian officers and functionaries participated in the above-mentioned propaganda and thus compromised the good neighborly relations to which the Royal Government were solemnly pledged by their declaration of March 31,1909.
“The Royal Government, who disapprove and repudiate all idea of interfering or attempting to interfere with the destinies of the inhabitants of any part whatsoever of Austria-Hungary, consider it their duty formally to warn officers and functionaries and the whole population of the kingdom, that henceforward they will proceed with the utmost rigor against persons who may be guilty of such machinations, which they will use all their efforts to anticipate and suppress.”
This declaration shall simultaneously be communicated to the Royal Army as an order of the day by His Majesty the King and shall be published in the Official Bulletin of the Army.
The Royal Serbian Government further undertake:
1. To suppress any publication which incites to hatred and contempt of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the general tendency of which is directed against its territorial integrity;
2. To dissolve immediately the society styled “Narodna Odbrana,” to confiscate all its means of propaganda, and to proceed in the same manner against other societies and their branches in Serbia which engage in propaganda against the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The Royal Government shall take the necessary measures to prevent the societies dissolved from continuing their activities under another name and form;
3. To eliminate without delay from public instruction in Serbia, both as regards the teaching body and also as regards the methods of instruction, everything that serves, or might serve, to foment the propaganda against Austria-Hungary;
4. To remove from the military service, and from the administration in general, all officers and functionaries guilty of propaganda against the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy whose names and deeds the Austro-Hungarian Government reserve to themselves the right of communicating to the Royal Government;
5. To accept the collaboration in Serbia of representatives of the Austro-Hungarian Government for the suppression of the subversive movement directed against the territorial integrity of the Monarchy;
6. To take judicial proceedings against accessories to the plot of the 28th June who are on Serbian territory; delegates of the Austro-Hungarian Government will take part in the investigation relating thereto;
7. To proceed without delay to the arrest of Major Voija Tankositch and of the individual named Milan Ciganovitch, a Serbian State employee, who have been compromised by the results of the magisterial inquiry at Sarajevo;
8. To prevent by effective measures the cooperation of the Serbian authorities in the illicit traffic in arms and explosives across the frontier, to dismiss and punish severely the officials of the frontier service in Schabatz and Loznica guilty of having assisted the perpetrators of the Sarajevo crime by facilitating their passage across the frontier;
9. To furnish the Imperial and Royal Government with explanations regarding the unjustifiable utterances of high Serbian officials, both in Serbia and abroad, who, notwithstanding their official position, have not hesitated since the crime of 28th June to express themselves in interviews in terms of hostility to the Austro-Hungarian Government; and finally,
10. To notify the Imperial and Royal Government without delay of the execution of the measures comprised under the preceding heads.
The Austro-Hungarian Government expect the reply of the Royal Government by 6 o’clock on Saturday evening the 25th of July.
[1] “National Defense,” a prominent Serbian nationalist organization considered by the Habsburg authorities responsible for promoting anti-Austrian terrorism
[2]
The British Rationale for Entering World War I
Sir Edward Grey
(1914)
In the present crisis, it has not been possible to secure the peace of Europe; because there has been little time, and there has been a disposition–at any rate in some quarters on which I will not dwell–to force things rapidly to an issue, at any rate, to the great risk of peace, and, as we now know, the result of that is that the policy of peace, as far as the Great Powers generally are concerned, is in danger. I do not want to dwell on that, and to comment on it, and to say where the blame seems to us to lie, which powers were most in favor of peace, which were most disposed to risk or endanger peace, because I would like the House to approach this crisis in which we are now, from the point of view of British interests, British honor, and British obligations, free from all passion, as to why peace has not been preserved. …
We have great and vital interests in the independence–and integrity in the least part–of Belgium. If Belgium is compelled to submit to allow her neutrality to be violated, of course the situation is clear. Even if by agreement she admitted the violation of her neutrality, it is clear she could only do so under duress. The smaller states in that region of Europe ask but one thing. Their one desire is that they should be left alone and independent. The one thing they fear is, I think, not so much that their integrity but that their independence should be interfered with. If in this war which is before Europe the neutrality of one of those countries is violated, if the troops of one of the combatants violate its neutrality and no action be taken to resist it, at the end of the war, whatever the integrity may be, the independence will be gone.
No, Sir, if it be the case that there has been anything in the nature of an ultimatum to Belgium, asking her to compromise or violate her neutrality, whatever may have been offered to her in return, her independence is gone if that holds. If her independence goes, the independence of Holland will follow. I ask the House from the point of view of British interests, to consider what may be at stake. If France is beaten in a struggle of life or death, beaten to her knees, loses her position as a great power, becomes subordinate to the will and power of one greater than herself–consequences which I do not anticipate, because I am sure that France has the power to defend herself with all the energy and ability and patriotism which she has shown so often–still, if that were to happen, and if Belgium fell under the same dominating influence, and then Holland, and then Denmark, then would not Mr. Gladstone’s words come true, that just opposite to us there would be a common interest against the unmeasured aggrandizement of any power? …
We are going to suffer, I am afraid, terribly in this war whether we are in it or whether we stand aside. …
… I do not believe for a moment, that at the end of this war, even if we stood aside and remained aside, we should be in a position, a material position to use our force decisively to undo what had happened in the course of the war, to prevent the whole of the west of Europe opposite to us–if that has been the result of the war–falling under the domination of a single power, and I am quite sure that our moral position would be such as to have lost us all respect. …
Mobilization: A French Soldier Remembers
Henri Desagneaux
(1914)
2 August, Sunday
Mobilized as a reserve lieutenant in the Railway Transport Service, I am posted to [assigned to] Gray. At 6 in the morning, after some painful good-byes, I go to Nogentle-Perreux station. The train service is not yet organized. There are no more passenger or goods trains. The mobilization timetable is now operative but nobody at the station has any idea when a train is due.
Sad day, sad journey. At 7 A.M. a train comes, it arrives at its terminus–Troyes–at 2 P.M. I didn’t bring anything to eat, the refreshment room has already sold out. The rush of troops is beginning and consuming everything in its path. Already you find yourself cut off from the world, the newspapers don’t come here any more. But, on the other hand, how much news there is! Everyone has his bit of information to tell–and it’s true! …
At last in the afternoon I catch the first train which comes along: a magnificent row of first-class carriages (a Paris-Vienna de-luxe; all stock is mobilized) which is going no one knows precisely where, except that it is in the direction of the Front. The compartments and corridors are bursting at the seams with people from all classes of society. The atmosphere is friendly, enthusiastic, but the train is already clearly suffering from this influx from every stratum of society! The blinds are torn down, luggage-racks and mirrors broken, and the toilets emptied of their fittings; it’s (typical) French destruction.
At midnight, I am at Vesoul; nothing to eat there either; no train for Gray. I go to sleep on a bench in the refreshment room.
The most fantastic rumours are going around; everyone is seeing spies unbolting railway track or trying to blow up bridges.
The World of the Trenches: A Deadly Life
Alfons Ankenbrand
1915)
Souchez, March 11th, 1915
“So fare you well, for we must now be parting,” so run the first lines of a soldier-song which we often sang through the streets of the capital. These words are truer than ever now, and these lines are to bid farewell to you, to all my nearest and dearest, to all who wish me well or ill, and to all that I value and prize.
Our regiment has been transferred to this dangerous spot, Souchez. No end of blood has already flowed down this hill. Aweek ago the 142nd attacked and took four trenches from the French. It is to hold these trenches that we have been brought here. There is something uncanny about this hill-position. Already, times without number, other battalions of our regiment have been ordered here in support, and each time the company came back with a loss of twenty, thirty or more men. In the days when we had to stick it out here before, we had 22 killed and 27 wounded. Shells roar, bullets whistle; no dug-outs, or very bad ones; mud, clay, filth, shell-holes so deep that one could bathe in them.
This letter has been interrupted no end of times. Shells began to pitch close to us–great English 12-inch ones–and we had to take refuge in a cellar. One such shell struck the next house and buried four men, who were got out from the ruins horribly mutilated. I saw them and it was ghastly!
Everybody must be prepared now for death in some form or other. Two cemeteries have been made up here, the losses have been so great. I ought not to write that to you, but I do so all the same, because the newspapers have probably given you quite a different impression. They tell only of our gains and say nothing about the blood that has been shed, of the cries of agony that never cease. The newspaper doesn’t give any description either of how the “heroes” are laid to rest, though it talks about “heroes’ graves” and writes poems and such-like about them. Certainly in Lens I have attended funeral-parades where a number of dead were buried in one large grave with pomp and circumstance. But up here it is pitiful the way one throws the dead bodies out of the trench and lets them lie there, or scatters dirt over the remains of those which have been torn to pieces by shells.
I look upon death and call upon life. I have not accomplished much in my short life, which has been chiefly occupied with study. I have commended my soul to the Lord God. It bears His seal and is altogether His. Now I am free to dare anything. My future life belongs to God, my present one to the Fatherland, and I myself still possess happiness and strength.
Good Soldier Schweik Describes the Austrian Officer Corps
Jaroslav Hasek
(1921)
Apparently by way of encouraging the rank and file as a whole, he asked where the young recruit came from, how old he was, and whether he had a watch. The young recruit had a watch, but as he thought that he was going to get another one from the old gentleman, he said he hadn’t got one, whereupon the aged general gave a fatuous smile, such as Franz Josef used to put on … and said, “That’s fine, that’s fine,’” whereupon he honored a corporal, who was standing near, by asking him whether his wife was well.
“Beg to report, sir,” bawled the corporal, “I’m not married.”
Whereupon the general, with a patronizing smile, repeated, “That’s fine, that’s fine.”
Then the general, lapsing still further into senile infantility, asked Captain Sagner to show him how the troops number off in twos from the right, and after a while, he heard them yelling, “One–two, one–two, one–two.”
The aged general was very fond of this. At home he had two orderlies, and he used to line them up in front of him and make them number off: “One–two, one–two.”
Austria had lots of generals like this.
The Homefront in Vienna
Anna Eisenmenger
(1918)
Ten dekagrammes [3 1/2 ounces] of horse-flesh per head are to be given out to-day for the week. The cavalry horses held in reserve by the military authorities are being slaughtered for lack of fodder, and the people of Vienna are for a change to get a few mouthfuls of meat of which they have so long been deprived. Horse-flesh! I should like to know whether my instinctive repugnance to horse-flesh as food is personal, or whether my dislike is shared by many other housewives. My loathing of it is based, I believe, not on a physical but on a psychological prejudice.
I overcame my repugnance, rebuked myself for being sentimental, and left the house. A soft, steady rain was falling, from which I tried to protect myself with galoshes, waterproof, and umbrella. As I left the house before seven o’clock and the meat distribution did not begin until nine o’clock, I hoped to get well to the front of the queue.
No sooner had I reached the neighbourhood of the big market hall than I was instructed by the police to take a certain direction. I estimated the crowd waiting here for a meagre midday meal at two thousand at least. Hundreds of women had spent the night here in order to be among the first and make sure of getting their bit of meat. Many had brought with them improvised seats–a little box or a bucket turned upside down. No one seemed to mind the rain, although many were already wet through. They passed the time chattering, and the theme was the familiar one: What have you had to eat? What are you going to eat? One could scent an atmosphere of mistrust in these conversations: they were all careful not to say too much or to betray anything that might get them into trouble.
At length the sale began. Slowly, infinitely slowly, we moved forward. The most determined, who had spent the night outside the gates of the hall, displayed their booty to the waiting crowd: a ragged, quite freshly slaughtered piece of meat with the characteristic yellow fat. [Others] alarmed those standing at the back by telling them that there was only a very small supply of meat and that not half the people waiting would get a share of it. The crowd became very uneasy and impatient, and before the police on guard could prevent it, those standing in front organized an attack on the hall which the salesmen inside were powerless to repel. Everyone seized whatever he could lay his hands on, and in a few moments all the eatables had vanished. In the confusion stands were overturned, and the police forced back the aggressors and closed the gates. The crowds waiting outside, many of whom had been there all night and were soaked through, angrily demanded their due, whereupon the mounted police made a little charge, provoking a wild panic and much screaming and cursing. At length I reached home, depressed and disgusted, with a broken umbrella and only one galosh.
We housewives have during the last four years grown accustomed to standing in queues; we have also grown accustomed to being obliged to go home with empty hands and still emptier stomachs. Only very rarely do those who are sent away disappointed give cause for police intervention. On the other hand, it happens more and more frequently that one of the pale, tired women who have been waiting for hours collapses from exhaustion. The turbulent scenes which occurred to-day inside and outside the large market hall seemed to me perfectly natural. In my dejected mood the patient apathy with which we housewives endure seemed to me blameworthy and incomprehensible.
A British Feminist Analyzes the Impact of the War on Women
Helena Swanwick
(1916)
How has the war affected women? How will it affect them? Women, as half the human race, are compelled to take their share of evil and good with men, the other half. The destruction of property, the increase of taxation, the rise of prices, the devastation of beautiful things in nature and art–these are felt by men as well as by women. Some losses doubtless appeal to one or the other sex with peculiar poignancy, but it would be difficult to say whose sufferings are the greater, though there can be no doubt at all that men get an exhilaration out of war which is denied to most women. When they see pictures of soldiers encamped in the ruins of what was once a home, amidst the dead bodies of gentle milch cows, most women would be thinking too insistently of the babies who must die for need of milk to entertain the exhilaration which no doubt may be felt at “the good work of our guns.” When they read of miles upon miles of kindly earth made barren, the hearts of men may be wrung to think of wasted toil, but to women the thought suggests a simile full of an even deeper pathos; they will think of the millions of young lives destroyed, each one having cost the travail and care of a mother, and of the millions of young bodies made barren by the premature death of those who should have been their mates. The millions of widowed maidens in the coming generation will have to turn their thoughts away from one particular joy and fulfilment of life. While men in war give what is, at the present stage of the world’s development, the peculiar service of men, let them not forget that in rendering that very service they are depriving a corresponding number of women of the opportunity of rendering what must, at all stages of the world’s development, be the peculiar service of women. After the war, men will go on doing what has been regarded as men’s work; women, deprived of their own, will also have to do much of what has been regarded as men’s work. These things are going to affect women profoundly, and one hopes that the reconstruction of society is going to be met by the whole people–men and women–with a sympathetic understanding of each other’s circumstances. When what are known as men’s questions are discussed, it is generally assumed that the settlement of them depends upon men only; when what are known as women’s questions are discussed, there is never any suggestion that they can be settled by women independently of men. Of course they cannot. But, then, neither can “men’s questions” be rightly settled so. In fact, life would be far more truly envisaged if we dropped the silly phrases “men’s and women’s questions”; for, indeed, there are no such matters, and all human questions affect all humanity.
Now, for the right consideration of human questions, it is necessary for humans to understand each other. This catastrophic war will do one good thing if it opens our eyes to real live women as they are, as we know them in workaday life, but as the politician and the journalist seem not to have known them. When war broke out, a Labour newspaper, in the midst of the news of men’s activities, found space to say that women would feel the pinch, because their supply of attar of roses would be curtailed. It struck some women like a blow in the face. When a great naval engagement took place, the front page of a progressive daily was taken up with portraits of the officers and men who had won distinction, and the back page with portraits of simpering mannequins in extravagantly fashionable hats; not frank advertisement, mind you, but exploitation of women under the guise of news supposed to be peculiarly interesting to the feeble-minded creatures. When a snapshot was published of the first women ticket collectors in England, the legend underneath the picture ran “Super-women”! It took the life and death of Edith Cavell[1] to open the eyes of the Prime Minister to the fact that there were thousands of women giving life and service to their country. “A year ago we did not know it,” he said, in the House of Commons. Is that indeed so? Surely in our private capacities as ordinary citizens, we knew not only of the women whose portraits are in the picture papers (mostly pretty ladies of the music hall or of society), but also of the toiling millions upon whose courage and ability and endurance and goodness of heart the great human family rests. Only the politicians did not know, because their thoughts were too much engrossed with faction fights to think humanly; only the journalists would not write of them, because there was more money in writing the columns which are demanded by the advertisers of feminine luxuries. Anyone who has conducted a woman’s paper knows the steady commercial pressure for that sort of “copy.” …
The Need for Production
It is often forgotten that for full prosperity a country needs to be producing as much wealth as possible, consistently with the health, freedom, and happiness of its people. To arrive at this desired result, it is quite clear that as many people as possible should be employed productively, and it is one of the unhappy results of our economic anarchy that employers have found it profitable to have a large reserve class of unemployed and that wage-earners have been driven to try and diminish their own numbers and to restrict their own output. To keep women out of the “labour market” (by artificial restrictions, such as the refusal to work with them, or the refusal to allow them to be trained, or the refusal to adapt conditions to their health requirements) is in truth anti-social. But it is easy to see how such antisocial restrictions have been forced upon the workers, and it is futile to blame them. A way must be found out of industrial war before we can hope that industry will be carried on thriftily. Men and women must take counsel together and let the experience of the war teach them how to solve economic problems by co-operation rather than conflict. Women have been increasingly conscious of the satisfaction to be got from economic independence, of the sweetness of earned bread, of the dreary depression of subjection. They have felt the bitterness of being “kept out”; they are feeling the exhilaration of being “brought in.” They are ripe for instruction and organisation in working for the good of the whole. …
Readjustment of Employment
Most people were astonished in 1914 at the rapidity with which industry and social conditions adapted themselves to the state of war, and there are those who argue that, because the fears of very widespread and continued misery at the outbreak of the war were not justified, we need not have any anxiety about any widespread and continued misery at the establishment of peace. Certainly depression or panic are worse than useless, and a serene and cheerful heart will help to carry the nation beyond difficulties. But comfortable people must beware of seeming to bear the sorrows of others with cheerfulness, and a lack of preparation for easily foreseen contingencies will not be forgiven by those who suffer from carelessness or procrastination. We know quite well what some, at least, of our problems are going to be, and the fool’s paradise would lead straight to revolution.
It would be wise to remember that the dislocation of industry at the outbreak of the war was easily met; first, because the people thrown out by the cessation of one sort of work were easily absorbed by the increase of another sort; second, because there was ample capital and credit in hand; third, because the State was prepared to shoulder many risks and to guarantee stability; fourth, because there was an untapped reservoir of women’s labour to take the place of men’s. The problems after the war will be different, greater, and more lasting. …
Because it will obviously be impossible for all to find work quickly (not to speak of the right kind of work), there is almost certain to be an outcry for the restriction of work in various directions, and one of the first cries (if we may judge from the past) will be to women: “Back to the Home!” This cry will be raised whether the women have a home or not. … We must understand the unimpeachable right of the man who has lost his work and risked his life for his country, to find decent employment, decent wages and conditions, on his return to civil life. We must also understand the enlargement and enhancement of life which women feel when they are able to live by their own productive work, and we must realise that to deprive women of the right to live by their work is to send them back to a moral imprisonment (to say nothing of physical and intellectual starvation), of which they have become now for the first time fully conscious. And we must realise the exceeding danger that conscienceless employers may regard women’s labour as preferable, owing to its cheapness and its docility, and that women, if unsympathetically treated by their male relatives and fellow workers, may be tempted to continue to be cheap and docile in the hands of those who have no desire except that of exploiting them and the community. The kind of man who likes “to keep women in their place” may find he has made slaves who will be used by his enemies against him. Men need have no fear of free women; it is the slaves and the parasites who are a deadly danger.
The demand for equal wage for equal work has been hotly pressed by men since the war began, and it is all to the good so far as it goes. But most men are still far from realising the solidarity of their interests with those of women in all departments of life, and are still too placidly accepting the fact that women are sweated over work which is not the same as that of men. They don’t realise yet that starved womanhood means starved manhood, and they don’t enough appreciate the rousing and infectious character of a generous attitude on the part of men, who, in fighting the women’s battles unselfishly and from a love of right, would stimulate the women to corresponding generosity. There are no comrades more staunch and loyal than women, where men have engaged their truth and courage. But men must treat them as comrades; they must no longer think only of how they can “eliminate female labour”; they must take the women into their trade unions and other organisations, and they must understand that the complexities of a woman’s life are not of her invention or choosing, but are due to her function as mother of men.
The sexual side of a woman’s life gravely affects the economic side, and we can never afford to overlook this. As mothers and home-makers women are doing work of the highest national importance and economic value, but this value is one which returns to the nation as a whole and only in small and very uncertain part to the women themselves. The fact that a woman is a wife too much engrossed with faction fights to think humanly; only the journalists would not write of them, because there was more money in writing the columns and mother diminishes her value in the “labour market,” and even the fact that she is liable to become a wife and mother has done so in the past. Unless men are prepared to socialise the responsibilities of parenthood, one does not see how women’s labour is ever to be organized for the welfare of the whole, nor does one see how women are to perform their priceless functions of motherhood as well as possible if they are to be penalised for them in the future as they have been in the past. …
Enfranchisement and Emancipation
The course and conduct of the war, throwing upon women greater and greater responsibilities, bringing home to them how intimately their own lives and all they hold dear and sacred are affected by the government of the country, will tend greatly to strengthen and enlarge their claim for a share in the government. The growth of what was known as “militancy,” in the last few years of the British suffrage movement, was the disastrous result of the long denial of justice, the acrid fruit of government which had become coercion, because it was no longer by consent. Now that, for two years past, the women of Great Britain have made common cause with their men in this time of stress, the heat of the internal conflict has died down, and one hears on all sides that prominent anti-suffragists have become ardent suffragists, while others have declared their resolve at any rate never again to oppose the enfranchisement of women. The battle of argument was won long ago, but we are not, as a people, much given to theory; custom has a very strong hold over us. The shock of war has loosened that hold, and now almost every one who used to oppose, when asked whether women should be given votes, would reply: “Why not? They have earned them!” I cannot admit that representation is a thing that people should be called upon to “earn,” nor that, if essential contribution to the nation is to count as “earning,” the women have not earned the vote for just as long as the men. …
What the war has put in a fresh light, so that even the dullest can see, is that if the State may claim women’s lives and those of their sons and husbands and lovers, if it may absorb all private and individual life, as at present, then indeed the condition of those who have no voice in the State is a condition of slavery, and Englishmen don’t feel quite happy at the thought that their women are still slaves, while their Government is saying they are waging a war of liberation. Many women had long ago become acutely aware of their ignominious position, but the jolt of the war has made many more aware of it. …
[1] A British nurse executed by the Germans as an alleged spy
A New Diplomacy: The Fourteen Points
Woodrow Wilson
(1918)
1. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at. Diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.
2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters.
3. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions.
4. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced.
5. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims. In determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the Government whose title is to be determined.
6. The evacuation of all Russian territory.
7. Belgium must be evacuated and restored. Without this healing act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired.
8. All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored; and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine should be righted.
9. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.
10. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development.
11. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be evacuated; occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea; and international guarantees of the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of the several Balkan states should be entered into.
12. Nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an unmolested opportunity of autonomous development, and the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations.
13. An independent Polish state should be erected which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea.
14. A general association of nations must be formed, for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.
The April Theses: A Blueprint for Revolution
Vladimir I. Lenin
(1917)
I did not arrive in Petrograd until the night of April 3, and therefore at the meeting on April 4 I could, of course, deliver the report on the tasks of the revolutionary proletariat only on my own behalf, and with reservations as to insufficient preparation.
The only thing I could do to make things easier for myself–and for honest opponents–was to prepare the thesesin writing. I read them out, and gave the text to Comrade Tsereteli. I read them twice very slowly: first at a meeting of Bolsheviks and then at a meeting of both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
I publish these personal theses of mine with only the briefest explanatory notes, which were developed in far greater detail in the report.
Theses
1) In our attitude towards the war, which under the new government of Lvov and Co.[1] unquestionably remains on Russia’s part a predatory imperialist war owing to the capitalist nature of that government, not the slightest concession to “revolutionary defencism” is permissible.
The class-conscious proletariat can give its consent to a revolutionary war, which would really justify revolu tionary defencism, only on condition: (a) that the power pass to the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants aligned with the proletariat; (b) that all annexations be renounced in deed and not in word; (c) that a complete break be effected in actual fact with all capitalist interests. …
The most widespread campaign for this view must be organised in the army at the front. …
2) The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution–which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie–to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants.
This transition is characterised, on the one hand, by a maximum of legally recognised rights (Russia is now the freest of all the belligerent countries in the world); on the other, by the absence of violence towards the masses, and, finally, by their unreasoning trust in the government of capitalists, those worst enemies of peace and socialism.
This peculiar situation demands of us an ability to adapt ourselves to the special conditions of Party work among unprecedentedly large masses of proletarians who have just awakened to political life.
3) No support for the Provisional Government; the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear, particularly of those relating to the renunciation of annexations. Exposure in place of the impermissible, illusion-breeding “demand” that this government, a government of capitalists, should cease to be an imperialist government.
4) Recognition of the fact that in most of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies our Party is in a minority, so far a small minority, as against a bloc of all the pettybourgeois opportunist elements, from the Popular Socialists and the Socialist-Revolutionaries … who have yielded to the influence of the bourgeoisie and spread that influence among the proletariat.
The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government, and that therefore our task is, as long as this government yields to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses.
As long as we are in the minority we carry on the work of criticising and exposing errors and at the same time we preach the necessity of transferring the entire state power to the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, so that the people may overcome their mistakes by experience.
5) Not a parliamentary republic–to return a parliamentary republic from the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies would be a retrograde step–but a Republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies throughout the country, from top to bottom.
Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy.
The salaries of all officials, all of whom are elective and displaceable at any time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker.
6) The weight of emphasis in the agrarian programme to be shifted to the Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ Deputies.
Confiscation of all landed estates.
Nationalisation of alllands in the country, the land to be disposed of by the local Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. …
7) The immediate amalgamation of all banks in the country into a single national bank, and the institution of control over it by the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies.
8) It is not our immediate task to “introduce” socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the controlof the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies. …
[1] The liberal government proclaimed after the fall of tsarism
Revolutionary Peace is Decreed
Vladimir I. Lenin
(1917)
The Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, created by the Revolution of October 24-25 (November 6-7) and supported by the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, proposes to all combatant peoples and to their governments to begin immediate negotiations for an honest democratic peace.
The Government regards as an honest or democratic peace, which is yearned for by the overwhelming majority of the workers and the toiling classes of all the fighting countries, who are exhausted, tormented and tortured by the War, which the Russian workers and peasants demanded most definitely and insistently after the overthrow of the Tsarist monarchy,–an immediate peace without annexations (i.e., without the seizure of foreign land, without the forcible taking over of foreign nationalities) and without contributions.
Such a peace the Government of Russia proposes to all the fighting peoples to conclude immediately, expressing its readiness to take without the least delay immediately all the decisive steps, up to the final confirmation of all the conditions of such a peace by the authorized assemblies of peoples’ representatives of all countries and all nations.
As annexation or seizure of alien lands the Government understands, in conformity with the conception of justice, of democracy in general and of the toiling classes in particular, any addition to a large or strong state of a small or weak nationality, without the precisely, clearly and voluntarily expressed agreement and desire of this nationality, irrespective of when this forcible annexation took place, and also irrespective of how advanced or how backward is the nation which is violently annexed or violently held within the frontiers of another state. Irrespective, finally, of whether this nation lives in Europe or in faraway transoceanic countries.
If any nation is kept within the frontiers of another state by violence, if it is not granted the right, despite its expressed desire,–regardless of whether this desire is expressed in the press, in people’s meetings, in the decisions of parties or in riots and uprisings against national oppression,–to vote freely, with the troops of the annexationist or stronger nation withdrawn, to decide without the least compulsion the question of the form of its state existence, then the holding of such a nation is annexation, i.e., seizure and violence.
To continue this war in order to decide how to divide between strong and rich nations the weak nationalities which they have seized, the Government considers the greatest crime against humanity; and it solemnly avows its decision immediately to sign conditions of peace which will stop this War on the terms which have been outlined, equally just for all nationalities, without exception.
Along with this the Government states that it does not regard the above mentioned conditions of peace as ultimative, i.e., it is willing to consider any other conditions of peace, insisting only that these be presented as quickly as possible by one of the fighting countries, and on the fullest clarity, on the absolute exclusion of any ambiguity and secrecy in proposing conditions of peace.
The Government abolishes secret diplomacy, announcing its firm intention to carry on all negotiations quite openly before the whole people, proceeding immediately to the full publication of the secret treaties, ratified or concluded by the Government of landlords and capitalists between February and October 25, 1917. All the contents of these secret treaties, inasmuch as they are directed, as usually happened, toward the obtaining of advantages and privileges for Russian landlords and capitalists, toward the maintenance or the increase of Great Russian annexations, the Government declares unconditionally and immediately annulled.
Turning with its proposal to the Governments and peoples of all countries to begin immediately open negotiations for the conclusion of peace, the Government expresses its readiness to carry on these negotiations by means of written communications, by telegraph, by means of negotiations between representatives of different countries or at a conference of such representatives. To facilitate such negotiations the Government will nominate its plenipotentiary representative in neutral countries.
The Government proposes to all Governments and peoples of all combatant countries immediately to conclude an armistice, considering it desirable that this armistice should be concluded for a period of not less than three months, in the course of which time it would be quite possible both to complete negotiations for peace with the participation of representatives of all nationalities or nations which have been drawn into the War or have been forced to participate in it and to convoke authoritative assemblies of peoples’ representatives of all countries for the final confirmation of the peace conditions.
Turning with these proposals of peace to the Governments and the peoples of all the combatant countries, the Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of Russia also appeals especially to the class-conscious workers of the three leading nations of humanity and the largest states which are participating in the war, England, France and Germany. The workers of these countries rendered the greatest services to the cause of progress and socialism, and the great examples of the Chartist Movement in England, a number of revolutions of world significance, carried out by the French proletariat, finally the heroic struggle against the Exceptional Law in Germany and the long, stubborn, disciplined work of creating mass proletarian organizations in Germany (which was a model for the workers of the whole world),–all these examples of proletarian heroism and historic creation serve us as a guaranty that the workers of the above mentioned countries understand the problems which now fall on them, of liberating humanity from the horrors of war and its consequences, that these workers by their decisive and devotedly energetic activity will help us to bring successfully to its end the cause of peace and, along with this, the cause of freeing the toiling and exploited masses of the population from slavery and exploitation of every kind.
PRESIDENT OF THE SOVIET OF PEOPLES’ COMMISSARS,
VLADIMIR ULIANOV-LENIN.
The Bolshevik Seizure of Power at the Local Level
Alexis Babine
(1917)
October 27, 1917. An appeal has been published in the local papers to all good citizens to resist the expected Bolshevik attempt to overthrow the existing government in Saratov. Owing to the unpopularity of Kerensky and his rule and to the physical and moral flabbiness of our Christian citizens, only 150 persons are said to have answered the call to defend the city and to have entrenched themselves in the city duma building.
October 28, 1917. Some patriot has written on one of the macadam sidewalks of the Linden Park in chalk: “Down with the Jew Kerensky.” It is rumored that the soldiers are planning a Jewish pogrom. Last night and the night before, crowds were gathering around the newsstands awaiting and discussing the latest telegrams. The crowds behaved in an orderly way. This morning streets were full of dirty-looking workers armed with foreign muskets, and of armed soldiers. Soldiers are as opposed to Kerensky as they are to a new monarch. My landlady’s lawyer reports that all city banks are closed. She sent her jewelry and other valuables to some poor relations of hers for safekeeping. As a local millionaire, she fears an attack from the Bolshevik mob. She has no weapons and hardly a decent hatchet in the house. The front door was locked for the day, and an order has been given to the janitor to keep the iron yard gate securely barred. In case of need the house could make a good fortress and be defended against any number of the common rabble by spirited, well-armed inhabitants. …
November 15, 1917. The Soviet’s general and indiscriminate amnesty of all political and criminal prisoners, with all jails thrown open and court records burned, has filled the country with dangerous elements. The younger and the more enterprising jailbirds immediately after their liberation joined the Communist party. In many cases they were given responsible administrative positions and furnished the Bolsheviks with the fittest possible material for fighting and exterminating the enemies of the party, i.e., all idle and flabby lovers of law and order.
December 17, 1917. A peaceful demonstration was announced yesterday by various city and private organizations in favor of the Constituent Assembly, to take place today. The Bolsheviks replied by sponsoring an armed demonstration, turning out all their artillery and infantry, which have just defiled past our house, carrying red flags with the usual inscriptions and howling revolutionary songs as far as today’s bitter cold allowed. Many ugly faces turned up toward the upper story of our house. One armed scoundrel shook his fist at the spectators at a window, and another made a show of slipping in a cartridge, with a suggestive gesture.
The peaceful demonstration, under the circumstances, was indefinitely postponed.
Practical Advice for Dealing with Class Enemies
Vladimir I. Lenin
(1918)
The Paris Commune gave a great example of how to combine initiative, independence, freedom of action and vigour from below with voluntary centralism free from stereotyped forms. Our Soviets are following the same road. But they are still “shy,” they have not yet got into their stride, have not yet “bitten into” their new, great, creative task of building the socialist system. The Soviets must set to work more boldly and display greater initiative. Every “commune,” every factory, every village, every consumers’ society, every committee of supply, must compete with its neighbours as a practical organiser of accounting and control of labour and distribution of products. The programme of this accounting and control is simple, clear and intelligible to all; it is: everyone to have bread; everyone to have sound footwear and whole clothing; everyone to have warm dwellings; everyone to work conscientiously; not a single rogue (including those who shirk their work) should be allowed to be at liberty, but kept in prison, or serve his sentence of compulsory labour of the hardest kind; not a single rich man who violates the laws and regulations of socialism to be allowed to escape the fate of the crook, which should, in justice, be the fate of the rich man. “He who does not work, neither shall he eat”–this is thepractical commandment of socialism. This is how things should be organised practically. These are the practicalsuccesses our “communes” and our worker- and peasant-organisers should be proud of. And this appliesparticularly to the organisers among the intellectuals (particularly, because they are too much, far too much in the habit of being proud of their general instructions and resolutions).
Thousands of practical forms and methods of accounting and controlling the rich, the rogues and the idlers should be devised and put to a practical test by the communes themselves, by small units in town and country. Variety is a guarantee of vitality here, a pledge of success in achieving the single common aim–to cleanse the land of Russia of all sorts of harmful insects, of crook-fleas, of bedbugs–the rich, and so on and so forth. In one place half a score of rich, a dozen crooks, half a dozen workers who shirk their work (in the hooligan manner in which many compositors in Petrograd, particularly in the Party printing shops, shirk their work) will be put in prison. In another place they will be put to cleaning latrines. In a third place they will be provided with “yellow tickets” after they have served their time, so that all the people shall have them under surveillance, as harmful persons, until they reform. In a fourth place, one out of every ten idlers will be shot on the spot. In a fifth place mixed methods may be adopted, and by probational release, for example, the rich, the bourgeois intellectuals, the crooks and hooligans who are corrigible will be given an opportunity to reform quickly. The more variety there will be, the better and richer will be our general experience, the more certain and rapid will be the success of socialism, and the easier will it be for practice to devise–for only practice can devise–the best methods and means of struggle.
In what commune, in what district of a large town, in what factory and in what village are there no starving people, no unemployed, no idle rich, no scoundrelly lackeys of the bourgeoisie, saboteurs who call themselves intellectuals? Where has most been done to raise the productivity of labour, to build good new houses for the poor, to put the poor in the houses of the rich, to regularly provide a bottle of milk for every child of every poor family? It is on these points that competition should unfold itself between the communes, communities, producers-consumers’ societies and associations, and Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. This is the work in which organising talent should reveal itself in practice and be promoted to work in the administration of the state. There is a great deal of this talent among the people. It is merely suppressed. It must be given an opportunity to display itself. It, and it alone, with the support of the masses, can save Russia and save the cause of socialism.
Primary Sources – Unit Sixteen – The Age of Anxiety
Impressionism Defined
Emile Blemont (1876)
What is an Impressionist painter? We have been given no satisfactory definition, but it seems that the artists who group themselves, or who are grouped, under this name pursue a similar end through different methods of work. Their aim is to reproduce with absolute sincerity, without contrivance or palliation, by a treatment simple and broad, the impression awakened in them by the aspects of reality.
Art is not for them a minute and punctilious imitation of what was once called “the beauties of nature.” They are not concerned to reproduce more or less slavishly beings and things, or laboriously to reconstruct, minor detail by minor detail, a general picture. They do not imitate; they translate, they interpret, they apply themselves to extricate the consequence of the many lines and colors that the eye perceives in a view.
They are not analysts but synthesizers, and we believe that they are right in this; for if analysis is the scientific method par excellence, synthesis is the true method of operation for art. They have no other law than the necessary relations of things; they think, like Diderot, that the idea of beauty rests in the perception of these relations. And, as there are perhaps no two men in the world who perceive exactly the same relations in the same object, they see no reason to change, according to this or that convention, their personal and direct sensation of things.
In principle, in theory, we believe therefore that we can approve them wholeheartedly.
In practice, it is another matter. One does not always do what one wants to do, as it should be done; one does not always attain the end one sees clearly.
God Is Dead, the Victim of Science
Friedrich Nietzsche (1882)
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, “I seek God! I seek God!” As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Why, did he get lost? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances.
“Whither is God?” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him–you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever will be born after us–for the sake of this deed he will be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.”
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke and went out. “I come too early,” he said then; “my time has not come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering–it has not yet reached the ears of man. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars–and yet they have done it themselves.”
It has been related further that on that same day the madman entered divers churches and there sang hisrequiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said to have replied each time, “What are the churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?” …
The Interpretation of Dreams: Psychoanalysis Is Born
Sigmund Freud (1900)
An intelligent and refined young woman, who in real life is distinctly reserved, one of those people of whom one says that “still waters run deep,” relates the following dream: ” I dreamt that I arrived at the market too late, and could get nothing from either the butcher or the greengrocer woman. “ Surely a guileless dream, but as it has not the appearance of a real dream I induce her to relate it in detail. Her report then runs as follows: She goes to the market with her cook, who carries the basket. The butcher tells her, after she has asked him for something: “That is no longer to be obtained,” and wants to give her something else, with the remark: “That is good, too.” She refuses, and goes to the greengrocer woman. The latter tries to sell her a peculiar vegetable, which is bound up in bundles, and is black in colour. She says: “I don’t know that, I won’t take it.”
The connection of the dream with the preceding day is simple enough. She had really gone to the market too late, and had been unable to buy anything. The meatshop was already closed, comes into one’s mind as a description of the experience. But wait, is not that a very vulgar phrase which–or rather, the opposite of which–denotes a certain neglect with regard to a man’s clothing?[1] The dreamer has not used these words; she has perhaps avoided them; but let us look for the interpretation of the details contained in the dream.
When in a dream something has the character of a spoken utterance–that is, when it is said or heard, not merely thought–and the distinction can usually be made with certainty–then it originates in the utterances of waking life, which have, of course, been treated as raw material, dismembered, and slightly altered, and above all removed from their context. In the work of interpretation we may take such utterances as our starting-point. Where, then, does the butcher’s statement, That is no longer to be obtained, come from? From myself; I had explained to her some days previously “that the oldest experiences of childhood are no longer to be obtained as such, but will be replaced in the analysis by ‘transferences’ and dreams.” Thus, I am the butcher; and she refuses to accept these transferences to the present of old ways of thinking and feeling. Where does her dream utterance, I don’t know that, I won’t take it, come from? For the purposes of the analysis this has to be dissected. “I don’t know that” she herself had said to her cook, with whom she had a dispute the previous day, but she had then added: Behave yourself decently. Here a displacement is palpable; of the two sentences which she spoke to her cook, she included the insignificant one in her dream; but the suppressed sentence, “Behave yourself decently!” alone fits in with the rest of the dream-content. One might use the words to a man who was making indecent overtures, and had neglected “to close his meat-shop.” That we have really hit upon the trail of the interpretation is proved by its agreement with the allusions made by the incident with the greengrocer woman. A vegetable which is sold tied up in bundles (a longish vegetable, as she subsequently adds), and is also black: what can this be but a dreamcombination of asparagus and black radish? I need not interpret asparagus to the initiated; and the other vegetable, too (think of the exclamation: “Blacky, save yourself!”), seems to me to point to the sexual theme at which we guessed in the beginning, when we wanted to replace the story of the dream by “the meat-shop is closed.” We are not here concerned with the full meaning of the dream; so much is certain, that it is full of meaning and by no means guileless.[2]
[1] Its meaning is “Your fly is undone.” (Trans.)
[2] For the curious, I may remark that behind the dream there is hidden a phantasy of indecent, sexually provoking conduct on my part, and of repulsion on the part of the lady. If this interpretation should seem preposterous, I would remind the reader of the numerous cases in which physicians have been made the object of such charges by hysterical women, with whom the same phantasy has not appeared in a distorted form as a dream, but has become undisguisedly conscious and delusional.–With this dream the patient began her psychoanalytical treatment. It was only later that I learned that with this dream she repeated the initial trauma in which her neurosis originated, and since then I have noticed the same behaviour in other persons who in their childhood were victims of sexual attacks, and now, as it were, wish in their dreams for them to be repeated. [Freud's footnote]
Science and Art Compared
Max Weber (1905)
In the field of science only he who is devoted solelyto the work at hand has “personality.” And this holds not only for the field of science; we know of no great artist who has ever done anything but serve his work and only his work. As far as his art is concerned, even with a personality of Goethe’s rank, it has been detrimental to take the liberty of trying to make his “life” into a work of art. And even if one doubts this, one has to be a Goethe in order to dare permit oneself such liberty. Everybody will admit at least this much: that even with a man like Goethe, who appears once in a thousand years, this liberty did not go unpaid for. In politics matters are not different, but we shall not discuss that today. In the field of science, however, the man who makes himself the impresario of the subject to which he should be devoted, and steps upon the stage and seeks to legitimate himself through “experience,” asking: How can I prove that I am something other than a mere “specialist” and how can I manage to say something in form or in content that nobody else has ever said?– such a man is no “personality.” Today such conduct is a crowd phenomenon, and it always makes a petty impression and debases the one who is thus concerned. Instead of this, an inner devotion to the task, and that alone, should lift the scientist to the height and dignity of the subject he pretends to serve. And in this it is not different with the artist.
In contrast with these preconditions which scientific work shares with art, science has a fate that profoundly distinguishes it from artistic work. Scientific work is chained to the course of progress; whereas in the realm of art there is no progress in the same sense. It is not true that the work of art of a period that has worked out new technical means, or, for instance, the laws of perspective, stands therefore artistically higher than a work of art devoid of all knowledge of those means and laws–if its form does justice to the material, that is, if its object has been chosen and formed so that it could be artistically mastered without applying those conditions and means. A work of art which is genuine “fulfilment” is never surpassed; it will never be antiquated. Individuals may differ in appreciating the personal significance of works of art, but no one will ever be able to say of such a work that it is “outstripped by another work which is also ‘fulfilment.’”
In science, each of us knows that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty, fifty years. That is the fate to which science is subjected; it is the very meaning of scientific work, to which it is devoted in a quite specific sense, as compared with other spheres of culture for which in general the same holds. Every scientific “fulfilment” raises new “questions”; it asks to be “surpassed” and outdated. Whoever wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this fact. Scientific works certainly can last as “gratifications” because of their artistic quality, or they may remain important as a means of training. Yet they will be surpassed scientifically–let that be repeated–for it is our common fate and, more, our common goal. We cannot work without hoping that others will advance further than we have. In principle, this progress goes on ad infinitum. And with this we come to inquire into the meaning of science. For, after all, it is not self-evident that something subordinate to such a law is sensible and meaningful in itself. Why does one engage in doing something that in reality never comes, and never can come, to an end? …
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the “disenchantment of the world.” Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherlines of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental, nor is it accidental that today only within the smallest and intimate circles, in personal human situations, in pianissimo, that something is pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic pneuma, which in former times swept through the great communities like a firebrand, welding them together. If we attempt to force and to “invent” a monumental style in art, such miserable monstrosities are produced as the many monuments of the last twenty years. If one tries intellectually to construe new religions without a new and genuine prophecy, then, in an inner sense, something similar will result, but with still worse effects. And academic prophecy, finally, will create only fanatical sects but never a genuine community.
To the person who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man, one must say: may he rather return silently, without the usual publicity build-up of renegades, but simply and plainly. The arms of the old churches are opened widely and compassionately for him. After all, they do not make it hard for him. …
A Scientist Devotes Her Life to Her Work
Marya Sklodowska (1893)
I have already rented my room on the sixth floor in a clean and decent street which suits me very well. Tell Father that in that place where I was going to take a room there was nothing free, and that I am very satisfied with this room. It should not be cold here, especially as the floor is of wood and not tiles. Compared to my last year’s room it is a veritable palace.
I hardly need to say that I am delighted to be back in Paris. It was very hard for me to separate again from Father, but I could see that he was well, very lively, and that he could do without me–especially as you are living in Warsaw. As for me, it is my whole life that is at stake. It seemed to me, therefore, that I could stay on here without having remorse on my conscience.
Just now I am studying mathematics unceasingly, so as to be up to date when the courses begin. I have three mornings a week taken by lessons with one of my French comrades who is preparing for the examination I have just passed. Tell Father that I am getting used to this work, that it does not tire me as much as before, and that I do not intend to abandon it.
It seems that life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be obtained.
It is difficult for me to tell you about my life in detail; it is so monotonous and, in fact, so uninteresting. Nevertheless I have no feeling of uniformity and I regret only one thing, which is that the days are so short and that they pass so quickly. One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done, and if one didn’t like the work it would be very discouraging.
A Disillusioned German Veteran Seeks His Proper Place
Anonymous (ca. 1919)
I simply can’t live without my people … I can’t live without my corps … I have no other training, no wife or children, only my men … What place would I have in the world without my soldier’s greatcoat; what good would I be in this world without you?
When blood whirled through the brain and pulsed through the veins as before a longed-for night of love, but far hotter and crazier … The baptism of fire! The air was so charged then with an overwhelming presence of men that every breath was intoxicating, that they could have cried without knowing why. Oh, hearts-of-men, that are capable of this!
A Manifesto for the Twentieth Century?
The British Labour Party (1918)
The End of a Civilization
We need to beware of patchwork. The view of the Labour party is that what has to be reconstructed after the war is not this or that government department, or this or that piece of social machinery; but, so far as Britain is concerned, society itself. …
What this war is consuming is not merely the security, the homes, the livelihood and the lives of millions of innocent families, and an enormous proportion of all the accumulated wealth of the world, but also the very basis of the peculiar social order in which it has arisen. The individualist system of capitalist production, based on the private ownership and competitive administration of land and capital, which has in the past couple of centuries become the dominant form, with its reckless “profiteering” and wage-slavery; with its glorification of the unhampered struggle for the means of life and its hypocritical pretence of the “survival of the fittest”; with the monstrous inequality of circumstances which it produces and the degradation and brutalization, both moral and spiritual, resulting therefrom, may, we hope, indeed have received a death-blow. With it must go the political system and ideas in which it naturally found expression. We of the Labour party, whether in opposition or in due time called upon to form an administration, will certainly lend no hand to its revival. On the contrary, we shall do our utmost to see that it is buried with the millions whom it has done to death. …
The Pillars of the House
We need not here recapitulate, one by one, the different items in the Labour party’s program, which successive party conferences have adopted. These proposals, some of them in various publications worked out in practical detail, are often carelessly derided as impracticable, even by the politicians who steal them piecemeal from us! … The war, which has scared the old political parties right out of their dogmas, has taught every statesman and every government official, to his enduring surprise, how very much more can be done along the lines that we have laid down than he had ever before thought possible. What we now promulgate as our policy, whether for opposition or for office, is not merely this or that specific reform, but a deliberately thought out, systematic, and comprehensive plan for that immediate social rebuilding which any ministry, whether or not it desires to grapple with the problem, will be driven to undertake. The Four Pillars of the house that we propose to erect, resting upon the common foundation of the democratic control of society in all its activities, may be termed, respectively:
(a) The Universal Enforcement of the National Minimum;
(b) The Democratic Control of Industry;
(c) The Revolution in National Finance; and
(d) The Surplus Wealth for the Common Good.
The Universal Enforcement of a National Minimum
The first principle of the Labour party–in significant contrast with those of the capitalist system, whether expressed by the Liberal or by the Conservative party–is the securing to every member of the community, in good times and bad alike (and not only to the strong and able, the well-born or the fortunate), of all the requisites of healthy life and worthy citizenship. …
The Legislative Regulation of Employment
Thus it is that the Labour party to-day stands for the universal application of the policy of the national minimum [wage].
Securing Employment for All
The Labour party insists [that] … it is one of the foremost obligations of the government to find, for every willing worker, whether by hand or by brain, productive work at standard rates.
It is accordingly the duty of the government to adopt a policy of deliberately and systematically preventing the occurrence of unemployment, instead of (as heretofore) letting unemployment occur, and then seeking, vainly and expensively, to relieve the unemployed. …
Social Insurance Against Unemployment
In so far as the government fails to prevent unemployment–whenever it finds it impossible to discover for any willing worker, man or woman, a suitable situation at the standard rate–the Labour party holds that the government must, in the interest of the community as a whole, provide him or her with adequate maintenance, either with such arrangements for honorable employment or with such useful training as may be found practicable, according to age, health and previous occupation. …
The Democratic Control of Industry
… Unlike the Conservative and Liberal Parties, the Labour party insists on democracy in industry as well as in government. It demands the progressive elimination from the control of industry of the private capitalist, individual or joint-stock; and the setting free of all who work, whether by hand or by brain, for the service of the community, and of the community only. And the Labour party refuses absolutely to believe that the British people will permanently tolerate any reconstruction or perpetuation of the disorganization, waste and inefficiency involved in the abandonment of British industry to a jostling crowd of separate private employers, with their minds bent, not on the service of the community, but–by the very law of their being–only on the utmost possible profiteering. …
Immediate Nationalization
The Labour party stands not merely for the principle of the common ownership of the nation’s land, to be applied as suitable opportunities occur, but also, specifically, for the immediate nationalization of railways, mines and the production of electrical power. …
In quite another sphere the Labour party sees the key to temperance reform in taking the entire manufacture and retailing of alcoholic drink out of the hands of those who find profit in promoting the utmost possible consumption. …
Local Government
The Labour party is alive to the evils of centralization and the drawbacks of bureaucracy. To counteract these disadvantages it intends that the fullest possible scope shall be given, in all branches of social reconstruction, to the democratically elected local governing bodies. ..
A Revolution in National Finance
… For the raising of the greater part of the revenue now required the Labour party looks to the direct taxation of the incomes above the necessary cost of family maintenance; and for the requisite effort to pay off the national debt, to the direct taxation of private fortunes both during life and at death. The income tax and super-tax ought at once to be thoroughly reformed in assessment and collection, in abatements and allowances and in graduation and differentiation, so as to levy the required total sum in such a way as to make the real sacrifice of all the taxpayers as nearly as possible equal. …
The Street of To-morrow
The house which the Labour party intends to build, the Four Pillars of which have now been described, does not stand alone in the world. Where will it be in the Street of To-morrow? If we repudiate, on the one hand, the imperialism that seeks to dominate other races, or to impose our own will on other parts of the British Empire, so we disclaim equally any conception of a selfish and insular “non-interventionism,” unregarding of our special obligations to our fellow-citizens overseas; of the corporate duties of one nation to another; of the moral claims upon us of the non-adult races, and of our own indebtedness to the world of which we are part. We look for an ever increasing intercourse, a constantly developing exchange of commodities, a steadily growing mutual understanding, and a continually expanding friendly co-operation among all the peoples of the world. With regard to that great Commonwealth of all races, all colors, all religions and all degrees of civilization, that we call the British Empire, the Labour party stands for its maintenance and its progressive development on the lines of local autonomy and “Home Rule All Round”; the fullest respect for the rights of each people, whatever its color, to all the democratic self-government of which it is capable, and to the proceeds of its own toil upon the resources of its own territorial home; and the closest possible co-operation among all the various members of what has become essentially not an empire in the old sense, but a Britannic Alliance. …
An Economist Analyzes the Versailles Treaty and Finds It Lacking
John Maynard Keynes
(1920)
The Treaty includes no provisions for the economic rehabilitation of Europe,–nothing to make the defeated Central Empires into good neighbors, nothing to stabilize the new States of Europe, nothing to reclaim Russia; nor does it promote in any way a compact of economic solidarity amongst the Allies themselves; no agreement was reached at Paris for restoring the disordered finances of France and Italy, or to adjust the systems of the Old World and the New.
The Council of Four paid no attention to these issues, being preoccupied with others,–Clemenceau to crush the economic life of his enemy, Lloyd George to do a deal and bring home something which would pass muster for a week, the President to do nothing that was not just and right. It is an extraordinary fact that the fundamental economic problems of a Europe starving and disintegrating before their eyes, was the one question in which it was impossible to arouse the interest of the Four. Reparation was their main excursion into the economic field, and they settled it as a problem of theology, of politics, of electoral chicane, from every point of view except that of the economic future of the States whose destiny they were handling.
… For the immediate future events are taking charge, and the near destiny of Europe is no longer in the hands of any man. The events of the coming year will not be shaped by the deliberate acts of statesmen, but by the hidden currents, flowing continually beneath the surface of political history, of which no one can predict the outcome. In one way only can we influence these hidden currents,–by setting in motion those forces of instruction and imagination which change opinion. The assertion of truth, the unveiling of illusion, the dissipation of hate, the enlargement and instruction of men’s hearts and minds, must be the means.
In this autumn of 1919, in which I write, we are at the dead season of our fortunes. The reaction from the exertions, the fears, and the sufferings of the past five years is at its height. Our power of feeling or caring beyond the immediate questions of our own material well-being is temporarily eclipsed. The greatest events outside our own direct experience and the most dreadful anticipations cannot move us.
We have been moved already beyond endurance, and need rest. Never in the lifetime of men now living has the universal element in the soul of man burnt so dimly.
A Defense of Democracy in an Undemocratic Age
Thomas G. Masaryk
(1927)
Democracy was begotten of revolution. Our own Republic and democracy are no exceptions to this rule. Revolution is justified in self-defense for which the necessity arises when every other means has failed. In revolution, as in war, self-defense is morally permissible. Revolution is permissible when–as during the World War–administrative and political chaos threaten; and it is justified if it brings reform and improvement. But democracy does not mean perpetual revolution. The war, and the upheavals it brought on, stimulated revolutionary fancies. But war fever and the excitement of revolution die down. Men are compelled to resume steady and peaceful work; and, for some of them, it is not easy. Political and social Utopianism, such as the notion that the State is omniscient and all powerful, has swollen the demands upon it so inordinately that disillusionment has entailed dejection and weariness; and, as usual, men are apt to blame others, not themselves, for failure. We shall have to overcome the revolutionary spirit as we overcame militarism. Bloodshed is an evil inheritance of the past. We desire a State, a Europe and a mankind without war and without revolution. In a true democracy, war and revolution will be obsolete and inadequate, for democracy is a system of life. Life means work and a system of work; and work, unostentatious work, is peace. Work, bodily and mental, will get the better both of the aristocratic and the revolutionary spirit. Even Marx and Engels had to revise the view of revolution which they put forward in 1848, to recognize that machinery, invention, technical progress, applied science and work are the surest and most efficient means of social revolution, and to declare themselves in favor of Parliamentarism.
Democracy, say its opponents contemptuously, consists of perpetual compromise. Its partisans admit the impeachment, and take it as a compliment. Compromise, not of principles but of practice, is necessary in political life as in all fields of human activity. Even the extremest extremists as, for example, Lenin when in power, make compromises. The policy of cultured and conscientious statesmen and parties is not, however, to reach a compromise between opposites but to carry out a program based on knowledge and on the understanding of history and of the situation of their State and nation in Europe and in the world. … For the maintenance and development of democracy the thought and cooperation of all are needed; and, as none is infallible, democracy, conceived as tolerant cooperation, signifies the acceptance of what is good no matter from what quarter it may come. What is hateful is the readiness of puny, short-sighted men, without aim or conviction, to make compromise an end in itself, to waver between opinion and opinion, to seek haltingly a middle course which usually runs from one wall to another.
I defend democracy, moreover, against dictatorial absolutism, whether the right to dictate be claimed by the proletariate, the State or the Church. I know the argument that dictatorship is justified, since conscience and right, reason and science, are absolute; and I am not unfamiliar with talk about the dictatorship of “the heart.” Logic, mathematics, and some moral maxims may be absolute, that is to say, not relative as they would be if all countries, parties and individuals had a special morality, mathematics and logic of their own; but there is a difference between the epistemological absolutism of theory, and practical, political absolutism. The most scientific policy depends upon experience and induction. It can claim no infallibility. It offers no eternal truths and can form no warrant for absolutism. …
Daily Life in Berlin: A Working Woman’s Description
Deutscher Textilarbeitverband
(1930)
At six o’clock my alarm clock wakes me up and thus begins my workday. Washing and dressing are my first jobs; as for grooming, there’s not much to do in that regard because I have short hair. Then I put on water for coffee and get some bread and butter ready for my husband and me. With that I’m ready and it’s also time to wake my husband because he has a half hour bike ride to his workplace. While he’s getting dressed, I get his bicycle ready. I pump air in the tires and fasten on his lunchbox. He drinks his coffee and soon he’s on his way. I go to the front window and wave him good-bye. Now it’s 7:45 and I must quickly bring a little order to the place. I have only a small apartment, but it nonetheless takes some doing in order to make it look right. At 8:15 I also have to leave. I work in the colored-pattern weaving section from 8:30 to 12:30 without stop. I eat my breakfast about 9. But I don’t let my looms stop; they continue working, for when one works by contract, one has to keep going in order to earn something. At 12:30 it’s time for lunch and I return home quickly. After eating, I clean the hall and stairs, and meanwhile it’s 1:45 and time to go. Work then goes from 2 to 5 without stop. But when it’s five, I go back to my little place with a happy heart. Then my husband soon returns, and I have always taken great pains to have his dinner ready on time. Then I wash the dishes and my husband reads me the newspaper. When I’m ready, we go for a walk. If I had children, I’d probably have to stay home. In addition I go to women’s meetings of the union or SPD.[1] I never miss a general meeting of the SPD and so it goes one day after another until the weekend.
Saturday I get home from work at about 1 and quickly warm up the soup that I made Friday evening. Today I have to clean thoroughly, because for the rest of the week it only gets done superficially. After we have bathed and had some coffee, my husband goes to perform his union duties, and I help him. He is the first president of the metal workers’ union. When he’s finished, we go home well satisfied. After dinner we quietly read the union paper. Happy because we don’t have to work the next day, we go to bed. I usually wake up at 8:30 Sunday morning and we have a pleasant breakfast. Then I start preparing lunch. Today I have time to make a really elaborate meal. After that we fix ourselves up nicely and go for a walk. We attend union events or public associations of which my husband is a member. We always return home with the consciousness of having served a good cause. We go to sleep with the intention to struggle further for the trade unions, for trade unions are the stronghold of the workers’ movement.
[1] SPD is the abbreviation for the German Social Democratic Party.
The Great Depression Hits Germany
Rhein-Mainische Wirtschafts-Zeitung
(1931-1932)
City of Mainz Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Annual Report for 1931
The year 1931 saw a further rapid decline of the German economy. This downward trend has been in evidence since 1927. … No more needs to be said about the desperate condition of the Germany economy. No further proof is required than the findings of the report issued by the Geneva committee of experts, which determined that one-third of the economy and those individuals dependent on it is lying idle, the unemployment figures have reached new, undreamed-of highs, and the number of business failures and shutdowns is growing day by day….
Annual Report for 1932
The catastrophically low level of the German economy which we detailed in the previous annual report persisted during the first half of this reporting year as well. The fourth presidential emergency decree of December 8 [1931] did make the attempt to slow the further decline of the economy, but it soon became clear that the planned artificial and far-reaching encroachment on natural economic relationships could not produce the desired result. The concerns over this encroachment, which we emphatically expressed in our last report, have since proved well founded. Existing contractual agreements in all areas of the market, be it in the area of housing, money and interest, or salaries and wages, were all loosened and changed, while good faith was not taken into account. As a result a considerable insecurity has taken hold not only in the economic sphere, but among the entire population in general. All initiatives falter because of despondent attitudes, and commerce appears to have come to a standstill altogether. This critical situation has been intensified by the failure to solve the reparations problem. …
The situation in the field of public finances continues to be of concern. The situation at the community level is hopeless. [Local government finances] bear the main brunt of unemployment, since over the course of time more and more unemployed individuals drift from unemployment insurance to public crisis relief and finally into general welfare recipient status. It is of the utmost urgency to relieve the local communities of this pressure by coordinating the entire system of unemployment relief. The economy in general would stand to benefit from the restoration of the financial health of local communities. …
The Great Depression in Britain: The “Special Areas”
Parliament
(1934)
25. The Special Areas are in their present unfortunate position owing to the decline of the main industries, coal mining, ship building and iron and steel, which attracted such large numbers of workers to them during the nineteenth century under more prosperous conditions. It seems unlikely that these industries will again employ the numbers engaged in them even up to ten years ago. During the period of prosperity large communities with full equipment of railways, roads, houses, schools and other municipal and social services were created. Many millions of pounds were spent in building up these services. A large proportion of the inhabitants have been associated with the Areas for several generations; they are bound to the Areas by ties of home and family and religion, by local patriotism and, especially in Wales, by a fervent national spirit and, sometimes, a distinctive language. It is natural, therefore, that wherever one goes in these Areas one should be met by the demand that something should be done to attract fresh industries to the Area. This is the general request, and I regard it as at once the most important and the most difficult of my duties to try to satisfy it. I have given more time and personal attention to this side of my work than to any other, but it must be frankly admitted that up to the present the results have been negligible. Many of the negotiations I have initiated with this end in view were necessarily confidential, and it would only prejudice the present slender chances of success if I were to give a full account of them. The following paragraphs will, however, indicate the main lines on which I have been working.
26. In the first place I approached a number of the larger and more prosperous firms in the country in the hope that I might persuade them to open new branches of their industry in one or other of the Special Areas. Without exception they were sympathetic to my representations, but except in one case they had good reasons which made it impossible for them to accede to my request. …
29. Some hundreds of new factories have been established in recent years in the Midlands and South, but very few in the Special Areas. Why is this so? The main reasons appear to fall in the following categories:–
(1) Inaccessibility to markets. This applies particularly to Cumberland. …
(2) High rates. These probably have a deterrent effect on employers out of proportion to their real significance. …
(3) Fear of industrial unrest. This fear is very general and is bred from past disputes mainly in the coalmining industry. It prevails particularly with regard to South Wales, but the facts scarcely warrant the attitude adopted. Statistics apart from those of coal-mining do not justify the fear which undoubtedly exists in the minds of many employers. …
(4) The fact that the areas are, and for some years have been, suffering from industrial depression. This factor, coupled with the common application to them of the term “depressed” or “distressed” areas, has itself a deterrent effect. While it is true that “trade brings trade,” the converse unfortunately is equally true. Unemployment undermines business confidence and reduces purchasing power. A vicious circle is thus set up. …
(5) Difficulty in obtaining finance to start new industries. …
255. … Probably the most serious human problem of the Special Areas is that presented by unemployment among young men between 18 and 21. …
256. Many of these young persons have done practically no work; they have been brought up in a home where the father has been continuously out of work, and they have little or no conception that a man’s ordinary occupation should be such as will provide the means of subsistence for himself and for his family. They have seen their own families and their friends kept for years by the State, and they have come to accept this as a normal condition of life. It is hardly surprising in the circumstances that young persons with this background and upbringing should be ready victims of all manner of demoralizing influences. In short, these young persons present in my view the most tragic aspect of the problem of the Special Areas and one fraught with great danger to the State.
A United Stance Against Fascism
French Popular Front
(1936)
I. Defense of Freedom
1. A general amnesty.
2. Measures against the Fascist Leagues:
(a) The effective disarmament and dissolution of all semi-military formations, in accordance with the law.
(b) The enforcement of legal measures in cases of incitement to murder or any attempt against the safety of the State.
3. Measures for the cleansing of public life, especially by forbidding deputies to combine their parliamentary functions with certain other forms of activity.
4. The Press:
(a) The repeal of the infamous laws and decrees restricting freedom of opinion.
(b) Reform of the Press by the following legislative measures:
(i) Measures effectively repressing libel and blackmail.
(ii) Measures which will guarantee the normal means of existence to newspapers, and compel publication of their financial resources.
(iii) Measures ending the private monopoly of commercial advertising and the scandals of financial advertising, and preventing the formation of newspaper trusts.
(c) Organization by the State of radio broadcasts with a view to assuring the accuracy of news and equality of political and social organizations in radio programs.
5. Trade Union Liberties:
(a) Application and observance of trade-union freedom for all.
(b) Recognition of women’s labor rights.
6. Education and freedom of conscience:
(a) Measures safeguarding the development of public education by the necessary grants …
(b) Measures guaranteeing to all concerned, pupils and teachers, complete freedom of conscience …
7. Colonies: formation of a parliamentary committee of inquiry into the political, economic and cultural situation in France’s territories overseas, especially French North Africa and Indo-China.
II. Defense of Peace
… 2. International collaboration within the framework of the League of Nations for collective security, by defining the aggressor and by joint application of automatic sanctions in cases of aggression.
3. Ceaseless endeavor to pass from armed peace to disarmed peace, first by a convention of limitation, and then by the general, simultaneous, and effectively controlled reduction of armaments.
4. Nationalization of war industries and suppression of private trade in armaments.
5. Repudiation of secret diplomacy …
7. Extension of the system of pacts open to all nations, particularly in eastern Europe, on the lines of the Franco-Soviet Pact.
III. Economic Demands
1. Restoration of purchasing power destroyed or reduced by the crisis. … [Proposals follow for unemployment insurance, old age pensions, etc.]
2. Against the robbery of investors and for the better organization of credit. … [Proposals follow for banking and stockmarket regulation.]
IV . Financial Purification
Control of the trade in armaments, in conjunction with the nationalization of armaments industries. Prevention of waste in the civil and military departments. … [Proposals follow for "democratic reform of the system of taxation so as to relax the fiscal burden blocking economic recovery" and for raising taxes on the wealthy.]
Primary Sources – Unit Seventeen – Dictatorships and the Second World War
Lenin: A Revolutionary Prude, a Chauvinist Pig, or Both?
Clara Zetkin
(1920)
“The record of your sins, Clara, is even worse. I have been told that at the evenings arranged for reading and discussion with working women, sex and marriage problems come first. They are said to be the main objects of interest in your political instruction and educational work. I could not believe my ears when I heard that. The first state of proletarian dictatorship is battling with the counterrevolutionaries of the whole world. The situation in Germany itself calls for the greatest unity of all proletarian revolutionary forces, so that they can repel the counter-revolution which is pushing on. But active Communist women are busy discussing sex problems and the forms of marriage–’past, present and future.’ They consider it their most important task to enlighten working women on these questions. It is said that a pamphlet on the sex question written by a Communist authoress from Vienna enjoys the greatest popularity. What rot that booklet is! … The mention of Freud’s hypotheses is designed to give the pamphlet a scientific veneer, but it is so much bungling by an amateur. Freud’s theory has now become a fad. I mistrust sex theories expounded in articles, treatises, pamphlets, etc.–in short, the theories dealt with in that specific literature which sprouts so luxuriantly on the dung heap of bourgeois society. I mistrust those who are always absorbed in the sex problems, the way an Indian saint is absorbed in the contemplation of his navel. It seems to me that this superabundance of sex theories, which for the most part are mere hypotheses, and often quite arbitrary ones, stems from a personal need. It springs from the desire to justify one’s own abnormal or excessive sex life before bourgeois morality and to plead for tolerance towards oneself. … “
I interposed that where private property and the bourgeois social order prevail, questions of sex and marriage gave rise to manifold problems, conflicts and suffering for women of all social classes and strata. As far as women are concerned, the war and its consequences exacerbated the existing conflicts and suffering to the utmost precisely in the sphere of sexual relations. Problems formerly concealed from women were now laid bare. To this was added the atmosphere of incipient revolution. The world of old emotions and thoughts was cracking up. Former social connections were loosening and breaking. The makings of new relations between people were appearing. Interest in the relevant problems was an expression of the need for enlightnment and a new orientation. …
“Youth’s altered attitude to questions of sex is of course ‘fundamental,’ and based on theory. Many people call it ‘revolutionary’ and ‘communist.’ They sincerely believe that this is so. I am an old man, and I do not like it. I may be a morose ascetic, but quite often this so-called ‘new sex life’ of young people–and frequently of the adults too–seems to me purely bourgeois and simply an extension of the good old bourgeois brothel. All this has nothing in common with free love as we Communists understand it. No doubt you have heard about the famous theory that in communist society satisfying sexual desire and the craving for love is as simple and trivial as ‘drinking a glass of water.’ A section of our youth has gone mad, absolutely mad, over this ‘glass-of-water theory.’ It has been fatal to many a young boy and girl. Its devotees assert that it is a Marxist theory. I want no part of the kind of Marxism which infers all phenomena and all changes in the ideological superstructure of society directly and blandly from its economic basis, for things are not as simple as all that. A certain Frederick Engels has established this a long time ago with regard to historical materialism.
“I consider the famous ‘glass-of-water’ theory as completely unMarxist and, moreover, as anti-social. It is not only what nature has given but also what has become culture, whether of a high or low level, that comes into play in sexual life. Engels pointed out in his Origin of the Familyhow significant it was that the common sexual relations had developed into individual sex love and thus became purer. The relations between the sexes are not simply the expression of a mutual influence between economics and a physical want deliberately singled out for physiological examination. It would be rationalism and not Marxism to attempt to refer the change in these relations directly to the economic basis of society in isolation from its connection with the ideology as a whole. To be sure, thirst has to be quenched. But would a normal person normally lie down in the gutter and drink from a puddle? Or even from a glass whose edge has been greased by many lips? But the social aspect is more important than anything else. The drinking of water is really an individual matter. But it takes two people to make love, and a third person, a new life, is likely to come into being. This deed has a social complexion and constitutes a duty to the community. …
“Young people are particularly in need of joy and strength. Healthy sports, such as gymnastics, swimming, hiking, physical exercises of every description and a wide range of intellectual interests are what they need, as well as learning, study and research, and as far as possible collectively. This will be far more useful to young people than endless lectures and discussions on sex problems and the so-called living by one’s nature. Mens sana in corpore sano. Be neither monk nor Don Juan, but not anything in between either, like a German philistine. You know the young comrade X. He is a splendid lad, and highly gifted. For all that, I am afraid that he will never amount to anything. He has one love affair after another. This is not good for the political struggle and for the revolution. I will not vouch for the reliability or the endurance of women whose love affair is intertwined with politics, or for the men who run after every petticoat and let themselves in with every young female. No, no, that does not go well with revolution.”
Lenin sprang to his feet, slapped the table with his hand and paced up and down the room.
A Revolutionary Retreat: The New Economic Policy
Vladimir I. Lenin
(1922)
First, the New Economic Policy is important for us primarily as a means of testing whether we are really establishing a link with the peasant economy. In the preceding period of development of our revolution, when all our attention and all our efforts were concentrated mainly on, or almost entirely absorbed by, the task of repelling invasion, we could not devote the necessary attention to this link; we had other things to think about. To some extent we could and had to ignore this bond when we were confronted by the absolutely urgent and overshadowing task of warding off the danger of being immediately crushed by the gigantic forces of world imperialism. …
Retreat is a difficult matter, especially for revolutionaries who are accustomed to advance; especially when they have been accustomed to advance with enormous success for several years; especially if they are surrounded by revolutionaries in other countries who are They consider it their most important task to enlighten working women on these questions. It is said that a longing for the time when they can launch an offensive. Seeing that we were retreating, several of them burst into tears in a disgraceful and childish manner, as was the case at the last extended plenary meeting of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. Moved by the best communist sentiments and communist aspirations, several of the comrades burst into tears because–oh horror!–the good Russian Communists were retreating. Perhaps it is now difficult for me to understand this West-European mentality, although I lived for quite a number of years in those marvellous democratic countries as an exile. Perhaps from their point of view this is such a difficult matter to understand that it is enough to make one weep. We, at any rate, have no time for sentiment. It was clear to us that because we had advanced so successfully for many years and had achieved so many extraordinary victories (and all this in a country that was in an appalling state of ruin and lacked the material resources!), to consolidate that advance, since we had gained so much, it was absolutely essential for us to retreat. We could not hold all the positions we had captured in the first onslaught. On the other hand, it was because we had captured so much in the first onslaught, on the crest of the wave of enthusiasm displayed by the workers and peasants, that we had room enough to retreat a long distance, and can retreat still further now, without losing our main and fundamental positions. On the whole, the retreat was fairly orderly, although certain panic-stricken voices, among them that of the Workers’ Opposition (this was the tremendous harm it did!), caused losses in our ranks, caused a relaxation of discipline, and disturbed the proper order of retreat. The most dangerous thing during a retreat is panic. When a whole army (I speak in the figurative sense) is in retreat, it cannot have the same morale as when it is advancing. At every step you find a certain mood of depression. We even had poets who wrote that people were cold and starving in Moscow, that “everything before was bright and beautiful, but now trade and profiteering abound.” We have had quite a number of poetic effusions of this sort.
Of course, retreat breeds all this. That is where the serious danger lies; it is terribly difficult to retreat after a great victorious advance, for the relations are entirely different. During a victorious advance, even if discipline is relaxed, everybody presses forward on his own accord. During a retreat, however, discipline must be more conscious and is a hundred times more necessary, because, when the entire army is in retreat, it does not know or see where it should halt. It sees only retreat; under such circumstances a few panicstricken voices are, at times, enough to cause a stampede. The danger here is enormous. When a real army is in retreat, machine-guns are kept ready, and when an orderly retreat degenerates into a disorderly one, the command to fire is given, and quite rightly, too.
Lenin’s “Last Testament”
Vladimir I. Lenin
(1922Ã1923)
I would urge strongly that at this Congress a number of changes be made in our political structure.
I want to tell you the considerations to which I attach most importance.
At the head of the list I set an increase in the number of Central Committee members to a few dozen or even a hundred. It is my opinion that without this reform our Central Committee would be in great danger if the course of events were not quite favourable for us (and that is something we cannot count on).
Then, I intend to propose that the Congress should on certain conditions invest the decisions of the State Planning Commission with legislative force, meeting, in this respect, the wishes of Comrade Trotsky–to a certain extent and on certain conditions.
As for the first point, i.e., increasing the number of C.C. members, I think it must be done in order to raise the prestige of the Central Committee, to do a thorough job of improving our administrative machinery and to prevent conflicts between small sections of the C.C. from acquiring excessive importance for the future of the Party. …
… Our Party relies on two classes and therefore its instability would be possible and its downfall inevitable if there were no agreement between those two classes. In that event this or that measure, and generally all talk about the stability of our C.C., would be futile. No measures of any kind could prevent a split in such a case. But I hope that this is too remote a future and too improbable an event to talk about.
I have in mind stability as a guarantee against a split in the immediate future, and I intend to deal here with a few ideas concerning personal qualities.
I think that from this standpoint the prime factors in the question of stability are such members of the C.C. as Stalin and Trotsky. I think relations between them make up the greater part of the danger of a split, which could be avoided, and this purpose, in my opinion, would be served, among other things, by increasing the number of C.C. members to 50 or 100.
Comrade Stalin, having become secretary-general, has boundless power concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that power with sufficient caution. Comrade Trotsky, on the other hand, as his struggle against the C.C. on the question of the People’s Commissariat for Communications has already proved, is distinguished not only by outstanding ability. He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present C.C., but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work.
These two qualities of the two outstanding leaders of the present C.C. can inadvertently lead to a split, and if our Party does not take steps to avert this, the split may come unexpectedly.
I shall not give any further appraisals of the personal qualities of other members of the C.C. I shall just recall that the October episode with Zinoviev and Kamenev was, of course, no accident, but neither can the blame for it be laid upon them personally, any more than nonBolshevism can upon Trotsky.
Speaking of the young C.C. members, I wish to say a few words about Bukharin and Pyatakov. They are, in my opinion, the most outstanding figures (among the youngest ones), and the following must be borne in mind about them: Bukharin is not only a most valuable and major theorist of the Party; he is also rightly considered the favourite of the whole Party, but his theoretical views can be classified as fully Marxist only with great reserve, for there is something scholastic about him (he has never made a study of dialectics, and, I think, never fully understood it). …
Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a secretary-general. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear to be an insignificant trifle. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky it is not a trifle, or it is a trifle which can assume decisive significance.
Stalin’s Rise to Power: A Biased but Accurate Analysis
Leon Trotsky
(1940)
The prestige of the leaders as a whole, not only the personal prestige of Lenin, made up in its totality the authority of the Central Committee. The principle of individual leadership was utterly alien to the Party. The Party singled out the more popular figures for leadership, gave them its confidence and admiration, while always adhering to the view that the actual leadership came from the Central Committee as a whole. This tradition was used to tremendous advantage by the triumvirate, which insisted upon the paramountey of the Central Committee over any individual authority. Stalin, schemer, centrist and eclectic par excellence, master of small doses gradually administered, cynically misused that trust [in the Central Committee] for his own advantage.
At the end of 1925 Stalin still spoke of the leaders in the third person and instigated the Party against them. He received the plaudits of the middle layer of the bureaucracy, which refused to bend its neck to any leader. Yet in reality, Stalin himself was already dictator. He was a dictator, but he did not feel yet that he was leader, and no one recognized him as such. He was a dictator not through the force of his personality, but through the power of the political machine that had broken with the old leaders. As late as the Sixteenth Congress, in 1930, Stalin said: “You ask why we expelled Trotsky and Zinoviev? Because we did not want to have aristocrats in the Party, because we have only one law in the Party, and all the Party members are equal in their rights.” He reiterated this at the Seventeenth Congress in 1934.
He used the Right as a battering ram against the Left Opposition, for only the Right had a definite platform, interests, and principles, that were jeopardized by a triumph of Left policies. But when he saw that the expulsion of the Left Opposition provoked grave misgivings and dissatisfaction in the Party, and irritation with the triumphant Right, Stalin knew how to utilize this dissatisfaction for a blow against the Rightists. The conflict of class forces in this struggle between Right and Left was of less concern to him than his deceptive role as a conciliator or as the pacifying element which presumably would reduce the inevitable number of victims to a minimum and save the Party from a schism. In his role of super-arbiter, he was able to place the responsibility for the severe measures against certain popular Party members now on one, and now on the other wing of the Party. But classes cannot be fooled. As a maneuver, the pro-kulak policy of 1924Ã1928 was worse than criminal; it was absurd. The kulak is nobody’s fool. He judges by taxes, prices, profits, not by phrasemongering and declamations: he judges by deeds, not by words. Maneuvering can never replace the action and reaction of class forces; its usefulness is limited at best; and there is nothing so calculated to disintegrate the revolutionary morale of a mass party as clandestine unprincipled maneuvering. Nor is anything deadlier for the morale and the character of the individual revolutionists. Military trickery can never replace major strategy. …
The “Fundamental Ideas” of Fascism
Benito Mussolini
(1935)
Like all sound political conceptions, Fascism is action and it is thought; action in which doctrine is imminent, and doctrine arising from a given system of historical forces in which it is inserted, and working on them from within. It has therefore a form correlated to contingencies of time and space; but it has also an ideal content which makes it an expression of truth in the higher region of the history of thought. … To know men one must know man; and to know man one must be acquainted with reality and its laws. There can be no conception of the State which is not fundamentally a conception of life: philosophy or intuition, system of ideas evolving within the framework of logic or concentrated in a vision or a faith, but always, at least potentially, an organic conception of the world.
Thus many of the practical expressions of Fascism–such as party organisation, system of education, discipline–can only be understood when considered in relation to its general attitude toward life. … A spiritual attitude. Fascism sees in the world not only those superficial, material aspects in which man appears as an individual, standing by himself, self-centered, subject to natural law which instinctively urges him toward a life of selfish momentary pleasure; it sees not only the individual but the nation and the country; individuals and generations bound together by a moral law, with common traditions and a mission which suppressing the instinct for life closed in a brief circle of pleasure, builds up a higher life, founded on duty, a life free from the limitations of time and space, in which the individual, by self-sacrifice, the renunciation of self-interest, by death itself, can achieve that purely spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists.
The conception is therefore a spiritual one, arising from the general reaction of the century against the placid materialistic positivism of the XIXth century. …
In the Fascist conception of history, man is man only by virtue of the spiritual process to which he contributes as a member of the family, the social group, the nation, and in function of history to which all nations bring their contribution. … Outside history man is a nonentity. Fascism is therefore opposed to all individualistic abstractions based on eighteenth century materialism; and it is opposed to all Jacobinistic utopias and innovations. …
Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as a historic entity. It is opposed to classical liberalism which arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical function when the State became the expression of the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual. And if liberty is to be the attribute of living men and not of abstract dummies invented by individualistic liberalism, then Fascism stands for liberty, and for the only liberty worth having, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State. The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State–a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values–interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people. …
The Fascist “Corporative State”
Italian Fascist Government
(1927)
I. The Italian Nation is an organism endowed with a purpose, a life, and means of action transcending those of the individuals composing it. It is a moral, political and economic unit which finds its integral realisation in the Fascist State.
II. Work in all its various forms–intellectual, technical or manual–is a social duty. On these grounds, and on these grounds alone, it is brought under the supervision of the State. …
III. There is complete freedom of professional or syndical organisation. But syndicates legally recognised and subject to State control alone have the right to represent legally the whole category for which they are constituted; to protect their interests in their relations with the State or other professional associations; to stipulate collective labour contracts binding on all members of the particular category; to impose dues and to exercise on their account public functions delegated to them.
IV. The concrete expression of the solidarity existing between the various factors of production is represented by the collective labour contract which conciliates the opposing interests of employers of labour and of workers, subordinating them to the higher interests of production. …
VI. Legally recognised professional associations ensure legal equality between employers and workers, keep a strict control over production and labour and promote the improvement of both.
The Corporations constitute the unitary organisation of the forces of production and integrally represent their interests.
By virtue of this integral representation, and in view of the fact that the interests of production are the interests of the Nation, the law recognises the Corporations as State organisations.
VII. The Corporative State considers that in the sphere of production private enterprise is the most effective and useful instrument in the interests of the Nation.
In view of the fact that the private organisation of production is a function of national concern, the organiser of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production. Collaboration between the forces of production gives rise to reciprocal rights and duties. The worker, whether technician, clerk or labourer, is an active collaborator in the economic enterprise, the responsibility for the direction of which rests with the employer.
VIII. Professional associations of employers are required to promote by all possible means a continued increase in the quantity of production and a reduction of costs. …
IX. State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or is inadequate or when political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management. …
XI. Professional associations are required to regulate by means of collective contracts the labour relations existing between the categories of employers of labour and of workers represented by them. …
XII. The action of the syndicate, the conciliatory efforts of the Corporations and the decisions of the Labour Courts shall guarantee that wages shall correspond to the normal demands of life, to the possibilities of production and the output of labour.
Wages shall be determined entirely [by] reference to any general rules by agreement between the parties to the collective system.
XIII. The consequences of crises in production and of monetary phenomena should be shared equally by all the different factors of production. …
XIV. When the contract concerns piece-work and the payments due thereunder are made at intervals of more than fifteen days, adequate weekly or fortnightly sums on account are due.
Night work, with the exception of ordinary regular night shifts, must be paid at a higher rate than day work.
In cases where the work is paid at piece-rate, the rate must be such that a diligent workman, of a normal working capacity, will be able to earn a minimum amount over and above the basic wage.
XV. The worker has the right to a weekly day of rest which shall fall on Sunday. …
XVI. Workers in enterprises of continuous activity shall, after the expiry of a year of uninterrupted service, have the right to an annual period of rest with pay.
XVII. In enterprises of continuous activity the worker has the right, in the event of a cessation of labour relations on account of discharge without any fault on his part, to an indemnity proportional to his years of service. Similar indemnity is also due in the event of the death of a worker. …
XIX. Breaches of discipline or the performance of acts which disturb the normal working of the enterprise on the part of the workers, shall be punished according to the gravity of the offence, by fine, suspension from work, or in certain cases of gravity, by immediate discharge without indemnity.
The cases when the employer can impose fines, suspension from work or immediate discharge without payment of indemnity, shall be specified. …
XXII. The State alone can ascertain and control the phenomenon of employment and unemployment of workers, which is a complex of the conditions of production and work.
XXIII. Labour Employment Bureaus founded on a mutual basis are subjected to the control of the Corporations. Employers have the obligation to employ workers whose names are on the register of the said Bureaus and have the right of choice among the names of those who are members of the Party and the Fascist syndicates according to their seniority on the Register.
XXIV. The professional associations of employers are required to exercise a process of selection among the workers with the object of achieving continuous improvement in their technical capacity and moral education.
XXV. The Corporative bodies shall ensure the observance of the laws on the prevention of accidents and the discipline of work on the part of individuals belonging to the federated associations.
XXVI. Insurance is a further expression of the principle of collaboration, and the employer and the worker should both bear a proportional share of its burden. The State, through the medium of Corporations and professional associations, shall see to the coordination and unity, as far as possible, of the system and institutes of insurance.
XXVII. The Fascist State proposes:
1. the perfecting of accident insurance;
2. the improvement and extension of maternity assistance;
3. insurance against industrial diseases and tuberculosis as a step towards insurance against all forms of sickness;
4. the perfecting of insurance against involuntary unemployment;
5. the adoption of special forms of endowment insurance for young workers.
XXVIII. The workers’ associations are required to act as guardians of those they represent in administrative and judicial suits arising out of accident and social insurance. …
The Art of Propaganda: A Master Reveals His Secrets
Adolf Hitler
(1924)
The psyche of the great masses is not receptive to anything that is half-hearted and weak….
To whom should propaganda be addressed? To the scientifically trained intelligentsia or to the less educated masses?
It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses. …
All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. …
The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses. The fact that our bright boys do not understand this merely shows how mentally lazy and conceited they are.
Once we understand how necessary it is for propaganda to be adjusted to the broad mass, the following rule results:
It is a mistake to make propaganda many-sided, like scientific instruction, for instance.
The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way, the result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out. …
The broad mass of a nation does not consist of diplomats, or even professors of political law, or even individuals capable of forming a rational opinion; it consists of plain mortals, wavering and inclined to doubt and uncertainty. As soon as our own propaganda admits so much as a glimmer of right on the other side, the foundation for doubt in our own right has been laid. …
The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling. …
But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success. …
The purpose of propaganda is not to provide interesting distraction for blase young gentlemen, but to convince, and what I mean is to convince the masses. But the masses are slow-moving, and they always require a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them….
[During World War I] at first the claims of the [enemy] propaganda were so impudent that people thought it insane; later, it got on people’s nerves; and in the end, it was believed. …
A Nazi Describes the Early Years
Anonymous
(ca. 1920s)
In the workshops and offices of many large machine factories of the Reich, I became acquainted with Marxism and democracy in both party and labor unions as early as 1904. After the war, once I became aware of the shameful, treasonous action committed by the SPD [Social Democratic Party], Center, Democrats, and so forth against Germany, I instinctively fought against Marxism and its procurers wherever I possibly could. Even in my youth I was antisemitically predisposed and frequently paid for it with house detention because I did not tolerate the impudence and provocations of the Jewish boys. …
1922-23 I lived in a small village in the Catholic region near Ellwang. The only Catholic newspaper of that region delighted in tearing this new party and its leader to shreds. That was reason enough for me to connect with what this man wanted. Inflation raced through the land and ruined me, like many others.
As of January 1924 I lived in Ludwigsburg and from August 1924 on in Zuffenhausen, and was better able to follow the proceedings of the people’s court of justice in Munich. The manly bearing of Adolf Hitler prompted me to seek out like-minded individuals. At first I made the acquaintance of a young lady who accordingly supplied me with the requisite literature, and who later also procured the Volkischer Beobachter[1] for me. Only then did I get a true picture of the events in Munich and thereby became a fervent follower of Adolf Hitler. …
[In 1925] a long period of untiring, nerve-shattering work and stubborn, fanatical struggle began for my comrades and myself. Family life did not exist anymore. I rejected everything that was associated with middle-class clubs. The struggle for the Fuhrer and my job occupied my entire existence.
Ridiculed, laughed at, and scorned by former “friends”; likewise shunned and regarded as abnormal by my closest relatives; those were the immediate consequences. From the day of my entry into the party, there began a boycott of my father’s and brothers’ business by Jews and their cohorts which reached even into so-called German-Nationalist circles. Adding to this was the age difference that existed between me and my comrades which amounted to more than ten or fifteen years, and which my former friends and acquaintances pointed to as evidence of my stupidity and the inexperience of my comrades.
We began to collect and weld together the few faithful into a local group. Each and every one had to propagandize and persuade; we fought for every single individual with passionate, fanatical zeal. We established ties with other local groups and helped organize new locals in order to protect our meetings. It did not take long for our meetings to grow. They were no longer able to disrupt our meetings, although the attitude of many within the establishment police force was exceedingly deplorable in those days. We held meetings in the vicinity of Neustadt especially in the smaller towns, and on many Sundays I had to pay for the travel costs and provisions out of my own pocket because as speaker for the party I had to have a protection force for the meetings in order to have success. …
The first public meeting of the NSDAP in the town of Lambrecht occurred during this period. As the approximately twenty-five-man SA squad of the Neustadt local group marched into the hall, it was already heavily filled with opponents. The Marxists had brought in their heavy cannon–the Reichsbanner[2] leader Schuhmacher from Ludwigshafen. Our now deceased party member K. Faber spoke first, dealing with [Foreign Minister] Stresemann’s politics of illusion. I was supposed to make closing remarks. During the discussion period, Schuhmacher stepped up and railed in the most vile manner until finally a brawl broke out. Everything that was not nailed down was used as a missile: beer bottles, glasses, ashtrays, even the pieces of an entire oven were torn off and hurled at us. … We barricaded ourselves behind a table and threw everything that had been hurled our way back, toward the mob that was jamming the exit and howling and shrieking….
During working hours I found myself employed as workshop accountant in the reddest factory in Mannheim. For eight years prior to the revolution, I was the only one, of about a one-thousand-man labor force, who openly and without reserve wore the party insignia. I had to endure much in those days. I was hated by those of different political views, ridiculed and mocked by intellectuals, shunned by all, then later feared, fought, slandered, and denounced. … It was worse than hell sometimes … but nothing was able to turn me away from an intractable belief in the Fuhrer and ultimate victory. …
[1] The main Nazi newspaper
[2] The paramilitary unit of Social Democratic War veterans
German Workers Accept the Nazi Regime
German Social Democratic Party
(1934)
The reports from the Reich as yet do not provide a uniform picture. …
The following report is from southwestern Germany: “Judging by public attitudes, the regime seems to have the most support among workers. This is especially true for those who earlier had not been part of a political organization. … It also seems that workers submit more readily [than other social classes] to Nazi terror methods and allow themselves to be easily influenced.”
A similar report from Berlin: “Large segments of the working class continue to submit [to the regime]. Faith in Hitler is remarkably strong. The circle of old [Social Democratic] party members is for the most part unshaken and refuses to accept Nazi ideology. … ”
From northern Bavaria similar sentiments: “The mood among workers has changed abruptly. This is especially so among those large-income earners who were never satisfied with their pay; who were abusive toward Social Democracy and blamed it because they didn’t earn more; who never came to a single meeting, and who had no money to spend for a party newspaper. These indifferent egotists actually thought they would effortlessly earn more under Hitler. Now they have got their surprise. They are the ones grumbling the loudest in the factories, because now they earn barely half of their former pay and must make contributions and pay membership dues. …”
A different angle sheds light on the situation in southern Bavaria: “A large segment of the work force is indifferent toward the Third Reich. The percentage of workers in this category is changing, however. Much has to do with the ability and quality of the NSBO (Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellenorganisation, National Socialist Factory Cell Organization] people. In general it can be said that in factories where solid union organizations existed earlier the workers have remained skeptical. It is also evident that underground activity will be difficult to get going here. The workers are indecisive; they are not sure of the goal nor of the path toward it. Many are also afraid of losing their jobs. A not inconsiderable number of those not ‘coordinated’ [gleichgeschaltet] are discouraged and resigned to their fate.”
Much more optimistic is a report from western Saxony: “The situation here has changed markedly since Christmas. The change is a very unfavorable one for the National Socialists. Within factories, at construction sites and other workplaces, there is now much discussion during breaks. One can surmise from this that the workers are basically opposed to the regime. Even [National Socialist] party members are expressing their dissatisfaction and disappointment. … ”
A Berlin report analyzes the reasons for the more confident mood of the workers: “Workers today are not as afraid of unemployment. They do not have to fear losing their jobs from one day to the next because the regime, in its effort to provide work, is exerting heavy pressure on employers to retain even their surplus work force as long as possible. …
… The reports from the period of June 30 almost all express the opinion that of all segments of German society, the working class is most submissive toward the regime, and it is presenting the least opposition.
From East Saxony: The workers in the factories are, without exception, adopting a wait-and-see attitude toward the regime and do not believe the things the Nazis are prophesying. Doubts about the accuracy of the Marxist ideological basis surfaced during this past year amid the ranks of former low-level [Social Democratic] party functionaries. The reports of rapid dwindling of the masses of unemployed were not believed by all. Many are doubting the authenticity of the figures released publicly. In any case, the fact that it was possible to obtain large sums on credit, to create new jobs and new work projects without having serious difficulties surface during the first year has shaken the opinion of many who believed that the National Socialist economic program would collapse. …
The matter-of-fact way in which factory workers are accepting everything that is being thrust on them is frightening. They only grumble when the dozens of different collecting lists and the contribution collectors approach them. There is not even an inner resistance to the Hitler greeting. The fact that one has to greet others by raising the hand [and saying "Heil Hitler"] is regarded as an insignificant act, as is participating in the May 1 events. The number of those who could have excluded themselves from the beginning could have been much higher. There is a fear throughout the ranks that one will have difficulties at work and possibly lose one’s job. This fear induces the workers to act in a certain way. Moreover, these things are probably only demanded of the workers in order to gauge their response. I have encountered only a few who have said, “I can’t stand this rubbish anymore, I’d rather sacrifice my job.”
Nazi Recreation: Summer Camps for Girls
Reich Youth Headquarters
(ca. 1930s)
We are a political Organization of Girls and acknowledge herewith the task which has been set for us by the National Socialist State: to remain alert and ready for our duty and to help with all our strength in the building of a National Socialist Volk. Politics today means to us not only the consideration of daily political occurrences, but Politics means to us also the ideological, spiritual, and cultural forming of the entire German people in the sense of National Socialist Demands. Our educational work is determined by this great political task. It has to readjust itself continually to these demands. Then there will emerge from the community where such work is done the person who is the embodiment of our way, healthy and capable, inwardly strong and womanly, consciously German and consciously National Socialistic.
These recreation camps, where our community becomes closely cemented, are an essential expression of our way. Our chief work in the summer month is therefore consciously the holding of recreation camps in which our political education pattern takes shape. Recreation camps force a cementing of community. Girls from all walks of life, from overpopulated cities as well as the wide open country, stand together under our flag for days and weeks, leaving behind all their ordinary interests in life–school and machine, lecture hall and household–and finding a vigorous and healthful life.
Political education in the recreation camp is not synonymous with scientific discussions, but is rather determined by the experiences shared by the camp community and is shaped accordingly. Our recreation camps are organized more loosely than the leadership schools [Fuhrerinnenschulungen], but in spite of all fun, rigid discipline prevails. Our girls should really be able to leave their daily troubles and cares behind during this week to ten days.
Many who have not yet found us inwardly, acquaint themselves here with the life and the forms of the National Socialist League of Girls and become so attached to it that they cannot dissolve this bond upon their return to everyday life. …
Everything the girls experience here takes on a clear, visible pattern in their joint discussions, in which knowledge of their mission in our state, our educational pattern, and the National Socialist Ideology is imparted. During the domestic evenings [Heimabende] the work done during the forenoon, and the work of the Fuhrer and his assistants, the work of the young creative forces in our ranks, is brought closer to them. During the forenoons devoted to reading, they acquaint themselves with the literature of National Socialism and so absorb lasting values. …
In clear recognition we created these recreation camps not only for the girls already in our ranks, but also for all the others. We want to do our work with a joyful sense of responsibility, with loyal performance of our duty, and with industry. In order not to become tired and sluggish under the burden of work which each working girl carries however, we need a time which permits quiet collection of strength–free time: Our recreation camps, in which the girls are schooled and prepared for their responsibility and duty to the people and the State, are a political necessity.
Borderland
The circular which called us to camps stated: each junior girl leader will give a survey of the historical and native development of her subdistrict [Untergau] and will consider how she would work this out with junior girls [Jungmadel].
Each of us then realized anew how many living witnesses of ancient history, memorials, walls and bulwarks, legends, tales and jokes, songs and old customs are still alive in her subdistrict. We had been in camps for three days now. We had penetrated deeper and deeper into National Socialist ideology, emphasized especially the cultural desire of National Socialism; we had discussed our junior girl activities and had worked on the arrangement of our home; we had sung, gone on a short trip, and participated in practical junior girl sports. Today in our domestic evening we want to hear something about Pomeranian customs and Pomeranian History.[1]
After supper we march silently down to the sea. …
Our Pomeranian coast lies before our eyes. Now Traute, from the village of Leba up on the Polish border, tells us about the immensity of the shore and of the sea. …
Then she suddenly becomes serious: “In our subdistrict we have 200 kilometers of border. Consider what that means: 200 kilometers of border. The Versailles Treaty separates German soil from German soil, blocks our access to the nearest port, and cuts off traffic to the east. Our border city of Lauenburg is flooded with agricultural products. One farm after another in our country gets into great difficulties since, because of the demarcation of the border, there is no longer a market outlet for agricultural products. In Lauenburg itself the greatest amount of unemployment in Pomerania prevails. The Winter relief work tries to alleviate the worst conditions of misery and distress during the winter. Everything is shut down–the factories, the brickyards, and all large plants. These are the effects of the demarcation of the border on our Homeland. …
“And the border itself; visualize a forest, through which a road leads to a railroad station. The road is neutral, the forest is German on the right and Polish on the left. I cannot tell you how one feels on this road; you would have to come and experience it all yourselves.
“But we know that we are on outpost duty there. You can rely on us.” Traute is silent. We all get up, grasp each other’s hand, and our song is solemn now: “Holy Fatherland, in danger thy sons will flock around thee. … ” And then we stand around the flag and look silently toward the East.
[1] Pomerania was one of Germany’s eastern provinces along the Baltic coast. Since 1945 it has been part of Poland.
The Master Race Must Procreate, and Adopt!
Heinrich Himmler
(1936)
As early as December 13, 1934, I wrote to all SS leaders and declared that we have fought in vain if political victory was not to be followed by victory of births of good blood. The question of multiplicity of children is not a private affair of the individual, but his duty towards his ancestors and our people.
The SS has taken the first step in this direction long ago with the engagement and marriage decree of December 1931. However, the existence of sound marriage is futile if it does not result in the creation of numerous descendants.
I expect that here, too, the SS and especially the SS leader corps, will serve as a guiding example.
The minimum amount of children for a good sound marriage is four. Should unfortunate circumstances deny a married couple their own children, then every SS leader should adopt racially and hereditarily valuable children, educate them in the spirit of National Socialism, let them have education corresponding to their abilities.
The organization “Lebensborn eingetragener Verein [Spring of Life, registered society]” serves the SS leaders in the selection and adoption of qualified children. The organization “Lebensborn e. V.” is under my personal direction, is part of the Central Office for Race and Resettlement bureau of the SS, and has the following obligations:
1. Support racially, biologically, and hereditarily valuable families with many children.
2. Place and care for racially and biologically and hereditarily valuable pregnant women, who, after thorough examination of their and the progenitor’s families by the Central Office for Race and Resettlement central bureau of the SS, can be expected to produce equally valuable children.
3. Care for the children.
4. Care for the children’s mothers.
It is the honorable duty of all leaders of the central office to become members of the organization “Lebensborn e. V.” The application for admission must be filed prior to September 23, 1936.
The dues of the SS leaders of the central office, from the Hauptsturmfuehrer [rank of captain] on are determined in the enclosed tables.
I shall personally keep myself informed of the success of my appeal.
Let me remind every SS leader once more that only sacrifices of a personal and material nature have brought us success in the times of the battle, and that the further construction of Germany, to last hundreds and thousands of years, will not be possible unless each and every one of us is ready to keep doing his share in the fulfillment of his obvious duty.
Reichsfuhrer SS
[signed] H. HIMMLER
Sterilization for “The Unfit”: The Hitlerian Nightmare Begins
Nazi German Government
(1933)
1
(1) Whoever suffers from a heritable disease may be made unfruitful (sterilized) through surgical means if, in the experience of medical science, it may, with great likelihood, be expected that his descendants will suffer from serious heritable physical or mental defects.
(2) Whoever suffers from one of the following ailments is considered to be heritably diseased within the meaning of this law:
1. congenital feeble-mindedness
2. schizophrenia
3. manic-depression
4. congenital epilepsy
5. heritable St. Vitus’s dance (Huntington’s Chorea)
6. hereditary blindness
7. hereditary deafness
8. serious heritable malformations.
(3) Further, anyone suffering from chronic alcoholism may also be made unfruitful.
2
(1) Entitled to request [sterilization], is he who is to be made unfruitful. If he should be incapacitated or under guardianship because of feeble-mindedness or not yet 18 years of age, then his legal representative is empowered to make the motion. In the other cases of limited capacity the request must be consented to by the legal representative. If the person is of age and has a nurse, the consent of the latter is necessary.
(2) The request is to be accompanied by a certificate from a physician accredited by the German Reich stating that the one to be sterilized has been enlightened regarding the nature and consequences of sterilization.
(3) The request for sterilization is subject to recall.
3
Sterilization may also be recommended by
1. the official physician,
2. the official in charge of the institution in the case of inmates of a hospital, sanitarium, or prison.
4
The request is to be presented in writing to, or put into writing by the business office of, the Health-Inheritance Court (Erbgesundheitigericht). The facts underlying the request are to be certified to by a medical document or in some other way authenticated. The business office of the court must notify the official physician. …
7
(1) The proceedings before the Health-Inheritance Courts are secret. …
10
… (3) The Supreme Health-Inheritance Court has final jurisdiction.
11
(1) The surgical operation necessary for sterilization may be performed only in a hospital and by a physician accredited by the German Reich. …
18
This law becomes effective January 1, 1934.
The Centerpiece of Nazi Racial Legislation: The Nuremberg Laws
Nazi German Government
(1935)
Article 5
1. A Jew is anyone who descended from at least three grandparents who were racially full Jews. Article 2, par. 2, second sentence will apply.
2. A Jew is also one who descended from two full Jewish parents, if: (a) he belonged to the Jewish religious community at the time this law was issued, or who joined the community later; (b) he was married to a Jewish person, at the time the law was issued, or married one subsequently; (c) he is the offspring from a marriage with a Jew, in the sense of Section 1, which was contracted after the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor became effective … ; (d) he is the offspring of an extramarital relationship, with a Jew, according to Section 1, and will be born out of wedlock after July 31, 1936. …
Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor of 15 September 1935
Thoroughly convinced by the knowledge that the purity of German blood is essential for the further existence of the German people and animated by the inflexible will to safe-guard the German nation for the entire future, the Reichstag has resolved upon the following law unanimously, which is promulgated herewith:
Section 1
1. Marriages between Jews and nationals of German or kindred blood are forbidden. Marriages concluded in defiance of this law are void, even if, for the purpose of evading this law, they are concluded abroad. …
Section 2
Relation[s] outside marriage between Jews and nationals of German or kindred blood are forbidden.
Section 3
Jews will not be permitted to employ female nationals of German or kindred blood in their household.
Section 4
1. Jews are forbidden to hoist the Reich and national flag and to present the colors of the Reich. …
Section 5
1. A person who acts contrary to the prohibition of section 1 will be punished with hard labor.
2. A person who acts contrary to the prohibition of section 2 will be punished with imprisonment or with hard labor.
3. A person who acts contrary to the provisions of sections 3 or 4 will be punished with imprisonment up to a year and with a fine or with one of these penalties. …
Collectivization in the Soviet Union: A Peasant’s Report
Ivan Trofimovivh Chuyunkov
(1930)
For a long time I have wanted to write you about what you have written on collectivization in your newspaper Nasha Derevnya.
In the first place I will give you my address so that you will not suspect that I am a kulak or one of his parasites. I am a poor peasant. I have one hut, one barn, one horse, 3 dessyatins[1] of land, and a wife and three children. Dear Comrades, as a subscriber to your newspaper … I found in No. 13/85 for February 15 a letter from a peasant who writes about the life of kolkhoz construction. I, a poor peasant, reading this letter, fully agreed with it. This peasant described life in the kolkhoz completely correctly. Isn’t it true that all the poor peasants and middle peasants do not want to go into the kolkhoz at all, but that you drive them in by force? For example, I’ll take my village soviet of Yushkovo. A brigade of soldiers came to us. This brigade went into all the occupied homes, and do you think that they organized a kolkhoz? No, they did not organize it. The hired laborers, and the poor peasants came out against it and said they did not want corvee, they did not want serfdom … I’ll write more of my village soviet. When the Red Army brigade left, they sent us a kolkhoz organizer from Bryansk okrug. And whom do you think this Comrade signed up? Not poor peasants, not hired laborers, but kulaks, who, sensing their own ruin, enter the kolkhoz. And your organizer … takes to evil deeds. At night, together with the Komsomolites, he takes everything away from the peasants, both surpluses and taxes, which you fleece from the peasants. Of course agricultural taxes are necessary, self-taxation is necessary, fire taxes are necessary, tractorization is necessary. But where can the toiling peasant get this money if not from the seeds of his products? And these Party people stay up all night and rob the peasants. If he brings a pud, if he brings 5, it’s all the same. I would propose that you let the peasant live in greater freedom than he does now, and then we won’t beg you to get rid of such a gang, for we ourselves will eliminate them.
Trouble Down on the Kolkhoz: An Official Report on Collectivization
O.G.P.U. (Soviet Secret Police)
(ca. 1932)
In the kolkohz “Stalin,” Markovsk village soviet, Krasnyi raion, which includes more than 40 households, there exists the most complete negligence. Some members of the board of the kolkhoz systematically engage in drinking and abuses … The chairman of the board … a former middle peasant, systematically gets drunk and does not guide the work of the kolkhoz at all … about 20 hectares[1] of oats lie cut down, which, as a result of the fact that they were not harvested, almost completely rotted … There remained unmowed 1 1/2 hectares of oats, which were completely spoiled. The winter wheat, which was mowed on time, remained lying in the fields, thanks to which it rotted. Almost all the pulled flax is still lying in the field and is rotting, as a result of which the flaxseed is almost completely ruined. There are about 100 hectares of as yet unmown meadows, while the socialized livestock in the kolkhoz are not supplied with fodder for the winter, and according to calculations [feed] is about 4,000 puds [72 tons] short. With the funds of the kolkhoz 4 former kulak homes were bought for the reconstruction of a cattle yard which the kolkhoz greatly needed, but these buildings are being pilfered by the kolkhozniks and burned as firewood. The equipment and harnesses of the kolkhoz are not repaired on time, as a result of which future use has been made impossible … Up to the present time no income has been earned by the kolkhoz. At present, as a result of mismanagement and abuses on the part of the board of the kolkhoz, certain kolkhozniks … talk of leaving …
[1] A hectare is about 2.5 acres
The Workers Condemn Soviet Policies in the Factories
O.G.P.U. (Soviet Secret Police)
(1929)
As soon as the meeting opened, the weavers made their way to the exit, and, as a result, of all the weavers working in the second shift, not more than 100 remained … The weavers as they were leaving, shouted: “You well-fed devils have sucked the juices out of us enough. You hypocritical wall-eyes are pulling the wool over our eyes. For twelve years already you have driveled and agitated and stuffed our heads. Before you shouted that the factory owners exploited us, but the factory owners did not force us to work in 4 shifts, and there was enough of everything in the shops. Now we work in 4 shifts. Where before 4 men worked, now only one works. You are bloodsuckers, and that’s not all, you still want to draw blood out of our veins. If you go to a shop now and want to buy something, the shops are empty; there are no shoes, no clothing; there is nothing the worker needs. But the [cost of] shares in the cooperative increase[s] every day. Before we got along without any shares, and there was enough of everything. When the administration had to transfer the factory to an uninterrupted shift, they built refreshment stands, sold rolls, did everything for the worker so that he would support the proposal, but as soon as this project was put into effect what happened? They closed the refreshment stands, stopped selling rolls, again everything was as before. After 8 hours of work at the benches you are so worn out that your eyes are dimmed, and then they come to drown your senses completely. They have found a gimmick which they can keep using–you comrades are the managers of the factory. But when you look at the managers, you will see how they throw hundreds of us out of the factory onto the labor market. Here are managers for you! Before the bourgeoisie during a strike used to fire two or three participants and then let it go at that, and now not a year goes by without their cutting down. … ”
An American Worker Behind the Uralsat the Magnitogorsk Blast Furnaces
John Scott
(1932-1935)
I spent two days stumbling around the immense iron mine which was producing upwards of five million tons of ore a year–nearly twenty-five per cent of the Soviet Union’s total output. Twenty-five imported electric locomotives were at work pulling modern fifty-ton dump cars from cutting to crusher and thence to the agglomeration plant. I watched the electric excavators shoveling ore at the rate of fifty tons per minute, or else standing with their arms extended awaiting the arrival of empty cars to fill–a sight which always reminded me of a man surprised while eating, frozen with his fork halfway to his open mouth.
The mine did not appeal to me as a place to work. I went back to the blast furnaces to survey the possibilities there.
I had seldom seen any but the seedy side of the blast furnaces. Our gang of construction workers was called in only to do repair work when something went wrong.
During the winters of 1933 and 1934 the whole blast-furnace department was periodically shut down. The cold winds played havoc with the big furnaces. Gas lines, air lines, water pipes, all froze. Tons of ice hung down all around, sometimes collapsing steel structures with their weight. One of the four furnaces was shut down for general repairs most of the time.
One job we all remembered vividly was the demolition work after the disastrous explosion on No. 2 in 1934. We were kept busy night and day for two months. Owing to incorrect handling of the tapping hole a water jacket burned through and several cubic yards of water came into contact with the molten iron. The resultant blast blew the roof off the cast house, badly damaged the side of the furnace, and seriously injured everybody who was near-by at the time. No. 2 was shut down for two months for repairs, which cost the country some fifty thousand tons of iron. The repairs themselves cost a million and a half roubles, and occupied construction workers who could have been doing other things. Several people were tried in an attempt to fix responsibility for this accident, but there was no convictions. For two weeks previous to the disaster everybody connected with the furnace had known that the tapping hole was in bad shape. The foreman told the superintendent, who told the director, who told Zavenyagin, who telephoned Ordjonokidze, the People’s Commissar of the USSR for the whole industry. Nobody realized the dangers of a bad tapping hole, and no one wanted to take the responsibility for shutting down the furnace prematurely at a time when the country needed pig iron very badly.
Inexperience and carelessness took a heavy toll in the blast-furnace transport system also. There were never enough ladles, mainly because of the fact that the railroad workers failed to put them squarely under the iron spouts or else neglected to take them away in time. In either case the ladles were inundated with hot iron, which ate through axles, wheels, and rails. …
By 1935 conditions were much improved. When I went scouting for a job I was struck by the appearance of No. 2. It was clean as a billiard table, the walls were whitewashed, tools hung neatly in their places. The gang went about its work quietly and efficiently.
The personnel was getting enough to eat. Everybody had given up trying to idolize proletarian labor on a komsomol[1] blast furnace (work on any blast furnace in any country is hot, unhealthy, dangerous, and gruelingly hard). The workers were enjoying some of the good things of life outside the mill. Their living conditions had improved, so that their attention could be focused on these things and their work regarded more realistically, as necessary labor which must be done efficiently and well in order to make possible the sunnier side of life. This point of view made possible strict labor discipline and efficient work. …
I knew a number of people working on the rolling mills, and one afternoon I set out to visit some of them. I walked down the immense blooming mill, where eight-ton ingots were tossed and shot around by mechanized cranes and power-driven rollers, and entered the operator’s cabin where a close friend of Masha’s [Scott's Russian wife] worked.
Shura was an operator. She sat in a white cabin with large double glass windows directly over the rolls of the mill, and operated a score of control buttons and a dozen foot pedals. One set in motion the rolls which brought the ingots to the mill; another regulated their speed; several more controlled the large mechanical fingers which turned the ingot over; others reversed the direction, and so on. Shura had under her control a ten-thousand-horsepower direct-current motor which reversed its direction of rotation every ten or fifteen seconds and which had received the full benefit of several decades of the best electrical engineering experience in the United States, and a score of auxiliary motors of various kinds. The place was as clean as the operating room of a good hospital, and before I was fairly inside the door an electrician came up and told me no one was supposed to come in because it might upset the operator. They were trying to make a record, he told me. According to the project they should roll an ingot in less than a minute. Actually it took 3.2 minutes on the average and the record for an eight-hour shift was only two minutes, and an average of fifteen per cent of their production was not up to specifications. The electrician made a whole speech until a shortage of ingots caused a shutdown and Shura left her levers and came and talked to me.
She was a village girl who had been very sick, which had been the cause of her taking the operators’ course instead of doing more active work. She was twenty-three, had the high cheekbones and open features of peasant stock, and the rather pale, nervous expression which had come as a result of her months in the hospital and subsequent work as blooming-mill operator. She came to work always with a red kerchief around her head, and the same serious, high-strung expression. She was never late, did not have to take off for a smoke like many of the men, and never came with a hang-over. Moreover, she had learned the technique of operating the blooming mill. She understood the electrical controls which she operated, and while her knowledge of theoretical physics was not extensive (she had gone to school only seven years), she knew enough to be a thoroughly competent operator. Beyond this it was a question of a simple mechanical and nervous dexterity, and at this she was a master. She was one of the best operators in Magnitogorsk. …
The Party Cell in Mill 500 included fifty-six members and candidates and twenty-one sympathizers. (Before one can become a full-fledged party member, it is necessary to go through the preliminary stages of sympathizer and candidate.) Weissberg, two of his assistants, three of the four shift engineers, four foremen, and the general foreman were all members of the party. Party members were privileged in that it was easier for them to get scholarships to schools, obtain new apartments, or get vacations in August instead of November.
But, on the other hand, a great deal more responsibility was put on them. If something went wrong and the brigade spoiled a job, a worker who was a party member was held as much or more responsible than the nonparty brigadier. In case of vacancies in administrative posts, a party member was usually advanced faster than a non-party member of the same capabilities.
Mitya, as party organizer, probably more than any one person was responsible for the production successes in Mill 500. He had an efficient tongue, and knew how to talk to the workers, making them ashamed of bad work; getting them to try harder by making them understand what they were working for. He was fired with such tangible ardor for the construction of Socialism and everything connected with it that it impressed and influenced everyone with whom he came in contact.
Administrative and technical questions were discussed at regular closed party meetings, and inasmuch as most of the administrators were party members, important decisions could be, and were, made.
The development of ‘vigilance’ was a major party task. All party members had to be on the watch all the time for sabotage, spying, propaganda of the class enemy, counter-revolution, and similar phenomena. This boiled down to a rather abnormal interest of party members in other people’s business and continual ‘tattletaling,’ and resultant suspicion and distrust particuarly among the administrative personnel.
[1] Communist Youth League, to which many Magnitogorsk workers belonged
One Woman’s Struggle Against Stalinist Terror
Zinaida Cherkovskaya
(1936)
To the secretary of the Western Oblast Committee of the CPSU(b), Comrade Rumyantsev
Ivan Petrovich:
The matter about which I have decided to write you concerns the CPSU(b) member Melnikov, who works with you in the Obkom. In the investigation of Party documents he received a reprimand because of me, and because of this my life has been completely shattered, and therefore I cannot remain silent. I feel that I should write you everything frankly and honestly.
I am the daughter of a railroad employee. My father worked on the railroad for 35 years, 25 years at Pochinok Station, Western Oblast. A few years ago, at the age of 17, I married a veterinarian, who, upon finishing the institute, was assigned to Pochinok. It may have been because he was twice as old as I, or for another reason, but from the first days of our life together it became obvious that we had nothing in common, we were different types of people, strangers. At first I did not have enough resoluteness to speak of divorce, and then a baby came and I lived for the greater part of a year with my parents in Pochinok. When my husband was transferred to the Brasov stud farm, I started to study at the Brasov technical school, and he at the same time found himself a more suitable woman and began to live with her, although unofficially. I did not finish the technical school, because I did not want to live where he was, and I went to Moscow for a half-year course, leaving my daughter with my mother. After finishing the course, I returned to Pochinok and remained there to take care of my sick mother, who died within a year. From the moment I left Brasov I had no correspondence with my former husband. He lived openly with another woman, but no one in Pochinok, except my parents knew that we had separated. I was ashamed to talk about it. In 1932 I learned that he had been arrested for participation in a wreckers’ organization and was exiled for 3 years. When things went badly with him he remembered me and our daughter and began to write, to beg forgiveness, etc. I never loved him, and after all this he didn’t mean anything to me at all, but for the sake of our daughter I agreed to write him once in a while about her. After the death of my mother I continued to live with my daughter and my father in Pochinok. I began to work as a proofreader in the editorial office of the Pochinok Kolkhoznik. I worked enthusiastically, felt free, independent, wanted very much to live, wanted happiness, which I had never known. After a time Melnikov was appointed editor of the P.K. We became acquainted and liked each other. We began to see each other. On the first night I told him everything about myself, so that there would be no misunderstandings afterwards. I’m not going to begin to speak about him, but I fell head over heels in love with him. After some time we became intimate. Soon he was appointed assistant secretary of the raikom of the CPSU(b), and under the pretext that he had a great deal of work, we began to see each other less often, and after a time I was dismissed from work. It was Melnikov who did this, since there was not a new editor. It is impossible to express in words how I suffered. I had put my whole soul into my work, heard only approval from those around me, and the man who knew me best of all dismissed me from work. Often I was insistently pursued by the thought of suicide. This is cowardice, I know, but I felt that it was easier to die than to live without the man in whom I saw all happiness, all joy for myself. My little daughter forced me to dispel these thoughts.
I went to Smolensk and got a job as a proofreader in the House of the Press, and although I was the youngest proofreader, they soon appointed me copy editor on the kolkhoz newspaper. Soon Melnikov began to study in the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, and we met and spent our free time together, but he lived in the dormitory and I with my sister, since it was difficult to find a room in which to live together, and furthermore, it was easier and better for him to study while living with his fellow students. We lived in the hope that after he finished his studies we would finally settle things. But in the fall of 1935 I learned that they had created a whole case against Melnikov because he was seeing me. We began to see each other less frequently, and finally parted. Later I learned that they had reprimanded him because of me. I do not know to this day of what I was accused–nobody told me. But I was completely devoted to Melnikov, lived for his interests, and the fact that he had unpleasantness on account of me was painful and incomprehensible to me. My position was desperate.
After working a year in the House of the Press, I left work in August, as Melnikov had suggested. When I learned of his reprimand, I went to pieces. It seemed to me that not only had I no right to work, but that I could not live with people. I left my sister without telling her the reason, and I did not want to live with my father. I feared that there would be unpleasantness for him on account of me, although he was in the decline of life.
In January 1936 I received a letter from my former husband, in which he wrote that they had freed him before his term was up and that he had worked for a year in the system of the NKVD in Kazakhstan. At the end he wrote: if during these four years you did not get married, during your vacation come to visit me with your daughter, to see Kazakhstan. At that time I could not reason sensibly. I decided that my life was at an end anyway, and I went to him with my daughter, but I could not live with him for one day. I told him I had loved somebody else for three years now, and that only despair could have pushed me to this rash journey. He decided that I had sacrificed myself for the sake of my daughter. He really does not know the situation, and I did not want to tell him. He hopes that sometime I will “quiet down” and will be able to live with him. In April he went to a health resort and I went to my relatives in Smolensk. I am not deceived in regard to him. I am not a young girl. I am 24 years old and have lived through many adversities of life, and things were good with me only with Melnikov. I will not be able to fall out of love with him or forget him, and I never want to build my life without him. I met him accidentally in Smolensk, told him how much I had suffered without him, and he told me that I should live only in my work, but that we should not see each other.
But I think I shall go mad. I don’t want to be reconciled to it. I cannot get it through my head that in our free country, where the children of kulaks are not responsible for the crimes of their parents, I should be tortured my whole life because my former husband was once sentenced, and I do not have the right to be the wife of the man I love. Though he is a Party member, I am not an alien. I have concealed nothing, I have deceived no one, and I do not want to be a criminal without a crime.
I have recounted my whole life and all my “crimes” to you, Ivan Petrovich, more frankly than to my own father. At the cost of my life I would be happy to prove to you the truthfulness of my words.
I trust you implicitly, and whatever your opinion will be on this problem, it will be law for me.
ZINAIDA CHERKOVSKAYA
Stalinist Interrogation Techniques Revealed
Vladimir Tchernavin
(1930)
It was my second day in prison–my second cross-examination. I was called before the tea ration was given out and had only time to eat an apple.
“How do you do?” the examining officer asked, scanning me attentively to see if I showed signs of a sleepless night.
“All right.”
“It isn’t so good in your cell. You are in 22?”
“A cell like any other.”
“Well, did you do any thinking? Are you going to tell the truth today?”
“Yesterday I told only the truth.”
He laughed. “What will it be today–not the truth?”
Then he returned to the subject of the cell.
“I tried to choose a better cell for you, but we are so crowded. I hope we will come to an understanding and that I will not be forced to change the regime I have ordered for you. The third category is the mildest: exercise in the yard, permission to receive food parcels from outside, a newspaper and books. The first two categories are much stricter. Remember, however, that it depends entirely on me; any minute you may be deprived of everything and transferred to solitary confinement. Or rather, this depends not on me but on your own behavior, your sincerity. The more frank your testimony, the better will be the conditions of your imprisonment. … ”
He spoke slowly, looking me straight in the eye, emphasizing his words with evident pleasure and relish, watching for their effect.
“Did you know Scherbakoff? He was a strong man, but I broke him and forced him to confess.”
With great difficulty I controlled myself before replying.
“I don’t doubt for a minute that you use torture, and if you believe that this assists in discovering the truth and speeding up the investigation, and since Soviet laws permit its use, I would suggest that you don’t give up mediaeval methods: a little fire is a wonderful measure. Try it! I am not afraid of you. Even with that you can’t get anything out of me.”
“Well, we will see about that later. Now let’s get down to business. Let’s talk about your acquaintances. Did you know V. K. Tolstoy, the wrecker, executed in connection with the case of the ’48′?”
“Yes, I knew him. How could I not know him when he was the director of the fishing industry in the north?” I replied in frank astonishment. “We both worked in it for more than twenty years.”
“And did you knew him well?”
“Very well.”
“How long did you know him?”
“From childhood.”
His manner changed completely; he hurriedly picked up a statement sheet and placed it in front of me. “Write down your confession.”
“What confession?”
“That you knew Tolstoy, that you were in friendly relation with him from such and such a time. I see that we will come to an understanding with you; your frankness will be appreciated. Write.”
He evidently was in a hurry, did not quite know what he was saying, afraid that I might reverse my statements.
I took the sheet and wrote down what I had said.
“Excellent. Let’s continue.”
Then followed a barrage of questions about Tolstoy, about Scherbakoff and other people that I had known. He did not find me quite so tractable and we launched into a battle of wits that kept up hour after hour. He questioned me with insistence and in great detail, trying without success to make me give dates.
“You’ll not succeed in outwitting me,” he snapped sharply. “I advise you not to try. I am going home to dinner now and you will stay here till evening. This examination will continue–not for a day or two, but for months and, if necessary, for years. Your strength is equal to mine. I will force you to tell what we need.”
After threatening me still further he handed me some sheets of paper.
“You are going to state in writing your opinion regarding the building of a fertilization factory in Murmansk, its equipment and work in the future. I’ll soon be back; when I return, your comments on these questions must be completed.”
He put on his overcoat and left. His assistant took his place, and I busied myself with my writing. It was three or four hours before he returned, already evening.
Although I had eaten almost nothing for three days. I was still in good fighting form. He questioned me about the buying of a ship from abroad, trying to make me say that here was “wrecking,” because the price had been exorbitant and the ship itself had proved unsatisfactory. It was most confusing and his questions farfetched. We talked and we argued, but I would not give the answers he wanted.
He began on another tack. …
“All right,” he said. “And what is your attitude regarding the subject of the fish supply in the Sea of Barents in connection with the construction of trawlers as provided for by the Five-Year Plan?”
Now he had broached a subject with which I could have a direct connection. The evening was already changing into night, but I was still sitting in the same chair. I was becoming unconscious of time: was it my second day in prison or my tenth? In spite of the depressing weariness, mental and physical, which was taking hold of me, I told him that I thought the fresh fish supply should be minutely and thoroughly investigated. I tried to make him see the hazards of the fishing industry in Murmansk and the enormous equipment that would be necessary to meet the proposals of the Five-Year Plan.
“And thus you confess that you doubted the practicability of the Five-Year Plan?” he said with a smile of smug satisfaction.
What could one say? I believed, as did everybody, that the plan was absurd, that it could not be fulfilled. For exactly such statements–no, for only a suspicion of having such thoughts–forty-eight men had been shot. …
A Soviet “Show Trial” and Its Usual Resolution
Andrei Vyshinsky and Karl Radek
(1937)
The President: The session is resumed. Comrade Vyshinsky, Procurator of the U.S.S.R., will speak for the Prosecution.
Vyshinsky: Comrade Judges and members of the Supreme Court of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In proceeding to perform my last duty in the present case I cannot but deal with several highly important specific features of the present trial.
In my opinion these specific features are, first of all, that the present trial, in a certain sense, sums up the criminal activities of the Trotskyite conspirators who for many years have systematically, and with the assistance of the most repulsive and despicable weapons, fought against the Soviet system, against the Soviet state, against the Soviet power and against our Party. This trial sums up the struggle waged against the Soviet state and the Party by these people, who started it long before the present time, started it during the life of our great teacher and organizer of the Soviet state, Lenin. While Lenin was alive these people fought against Lenin; and after his death they fought against his great disciple, that loyal guardian of Lenin’s behests and the continuator of his cause–Stalin.
Another specific feature of this trial is that it, like a searchlight, illuminates the most remote recesses, the secret byways, the disgusting hidden corners of the Trotskyite underground.
This trial has revealed and proved the stupid obstinacy, the reptile cold-bloodedness, the cool calculation of professional criminals with which the Trotskyite bandits have been waging their struggle against the U.S.S.R. They stuck at nothing–neither wrecking, nor diversions, nor espionage, nor terrorism, nor treason to their country.
When several months ago, in this very hall, in this very dock, the members of the so-called united Trotskyite-Zinovievite terrorist centre were sitting; when the Supreme Court, represented by the Military Collegium, was trying those criminals, all of us listened to the story of their crimes that unfolded itself like a nightmare scene before us, with horror and revulsion.
Every honest man in our country, every honest man in every country in the world could not then but say:
This is the abyss of degradation!
This is the limit, the last boundary of moral and political decay!
This is the diabolical infinitude of crime!
Every honest son of our country thought to himself: such hideous crimes cannot be repeated. There cannot be in our country any more people who have fallen so low and who have so despicably betrayed us.
But now we are again overcome with the sentiments that we felt not long ago! Once again across our anxious and wrathful vision pass frightful scenes of monstrous crime, of monstrous treachery, of monstrous treason. …
Many years ago our Party, the working class, our whole people, rejected the Trotskyite-Zinovievite platform as an anti-Soviet, anti-socialist platform. Our people banished Trotsky from our country; his accomplices were expelled from the ranks of the Party as traitors to the cause of the working class and socialism. Trotsky and Zinoviev were routed, but they did not subside; they did not lay down their arms.
The Trotskyites went underground, they donned the mask of repentance and pretended that they had disarmed. Obeying the instructions of Trotsky, Pyatakov and the other leaders of this gang of criminals, pursuing a policy of duplicity, camouflaging themselves, they again penetrated into the Party, again penetrated into Soviet offices, here and there they even managed to creep into responsible positions of state, concealing for a time, as has now been established beyond a shadow of doubt, their old Trotskyite, anti-Soviet wares in their secret apartments, together with arms, codes, passwords, connections and cadres.
Beginning with the formation of an anti-Party faction, passing to sharper and sharper methods of struggle against the Party, becoming, after their expulsion from the Party, the principal mouthpiece of all anti-Soviet groups and trends, they became transformed into the vanguard of the fascists operating on the direct instructions of foreign intelligence services. …
The President: Accused Radek.
Radek: Citizen Judges, after I have confessed to the crime of treason to the country there can be no question of a speech in defence. There are no arguments by which a grown man in full possession of his senses could defend treason to his country. Neither can I plead extenuating circumstances. A man who has spent 35 years in the labour movement cannot extenuate his crime by any circumstances when he confesses to a crime of treason to the country. I cannot even plead that I was led to err from the true path by Trotsky. I was already a grown man with fully formed views when I met Trotsky. And while in general Trotsky’s part in the development of these counter-revolutionary organizations is tremendous, at the time I entered this path of struggle against the Party, Trotsky’s authority for me was minimal.
I joined the Trotskyite organization not for the sake of Trotsky’s petty theories, the rottenness of which I realized at the time of my first exile, and not because I recognized his authority as a leader, but because there was no other group upon which I could rely in those political aims which I had set myself. I had been connected with this group in the past, and therefore I went with this group. I did not go because I was drawn into the struggle, but as a result of my own appraisal of the situation, as the result of a path I had voluntarily chosen. And for this I bear complete and sole responsibility–a responsibility which you will measure according to the letter of the law and according to your conscience as judges of the Soviet Socialist Republic.
And with this I might conclude my last plea, if I did not consider it necessary to object to the view of the trial–as regards a partial, not the main, point–which was given here and which I must reject, not from my own personal standpoint, but from a political standpoint. I have admitted my guilt and I have given full testimony concerning it, not from the simple necessity of repentance–repentance may be an internal state of mind which one need not necessarily share with or reveal to anybody–not from love of the truth is general–the truth is a very bitter one, and I have already said that I would prefer to have been shot thrice rather than to have had to admit it–but I must admit my guilt from motives of the general benefit that this truth must bring. …
… this trial has revealed two important facts. The intertwining of the counter-revolutionary organizations with all the counter-revolutionary forces in the country–that is one fact. But this fact is tremendous objective proof. Wrecking work can be established by technical experts; the terrorists’ activities were connected with so many people that the testimony of these people, apart from material evidence, presents an absolute picture. But the trial is bicentric, and it has another important significance. It has revealed the smithy of war, and has shown that the Trotskyite organization became an agency of the forces which are fomenting a new world war. …
And finally, we must say to the whole world, to all who are struggling for peace: Trotskyism is the instrument of the warmongers. We must say that with a firm voice, because we have learned it by our own bitter experience. It has been extremely hard for us to admit this, but it is a historical fact, for the truth of which we shall pay with our heads. …
Hitler Plans the Next European War
Colonel Friedrich Hossbach
(1937)
The Fuhrer began by stating that the subject of the present conference was of such importance that its discussion would, in other countries, certainly be a matter for a full Cabinet meeting, but he–the Fuhrer–had rejected the idea of making it a subject of discussion before the wider circle of the Reich Cabinet just because of the importance of the matter. His exposition to follow was the fruit of thorough deliberation and the experiences of his 4 1/2 years of power. He wished to explain to the gentlemen present his basic ideas concerning the opportunities for the development of our position in the field of foreign affairs and its requirements, and he asked, in the interests of a long-term German policy, that his exposition be regarded, in the event of his death, as his last will and testament.
The Fuhrer then continued:
The aim of German policy was to make secure and to preserve the racial community [Volksmasse] and to enlarge it. It was therefore a question of space. …
Germany’s problem could only be solved by means of force and this was never without attendant risk. The campaigns of Frederick the Great for Silesia and Bismarck’s wars against Austria and France had involved unheard-of risk, and the swiftness of the Prussian action in 1870 had kept Austria from entering the war. If one accepts as the basis of the following exposition the resort to force with its attendant risks, then there remain still to be answered the questions “when” and “how.” In this matter there were three cases [Falle] to be dealt with:
Case 1: Period 1943-1945
After this date only a change for the worse, from our point of view, could be expected.
The equipment of the army, navy, and Luftwaffe, as well as the formation of the officer corps, was nearly completed. Equipment and armament were modern; in further delay there lay the danger of their obsolescence. In particular, the secrecy of “special weapons” could not be preserved forever. The recruiting of reserves was limited to current age groups; further drafts from older untrained age groups were no longer available.
Our relative strength would decrease in relation to the rearmament which would by then have been carried out by the rest of the world. If we did not act by 1943-1945, any year could, in consequence of a lack of reserves, produce the food crisis, to cope with which the necessary foreign exchange was not available, and this must be regarded as a “waning point of the regime.” Besides, the world was expecting our attack and was increasing its counter-measures from year to year. It was while the rest of the world was still preparing its defenses [sich abriegele] that we were obliged to take the offensive.
Nobody knew today what the situation would be in the years 1943-1945. One thing only was certain, that we could not wait longer.
On the one hand there was the great Wehrmacht, and the necessity of maintaining it at its present level, the aging of the movement and of its leaders; and on the other, the prospect of a lowering of the standard of living and of a limitation of the birth rate, which left no choice but to act. If the Fuhrer was still living, it was his unalterable resolve to solve Germany’s problem of space at the latest by 1943-1945. The necessity for action before 1943-1945 would arise in cases 2 and 3.
Case 2
If internal strife in France should develop into such a domestic crisis as to absorb the French Army completely and render it incapable of use for war against Germany, then the time for action against the Czechs had come.
Case 3
If France is so embroiled by a war with another state that she cannot “proceed” against Germany.
For the improvement of our politico-military position our first objective, in the event of our being embroiled in war, must be to overthrow Czechoslovakia and Austria simultaneously in order to remove the threat to our flank in any possible operation against the West. In a conflict with France it was hardly to be regarded as likely that the Czechs would declare war on us on the very same day as France. The desire to join in the war would, however, increase among the Czechs in proportion to any weakening on our part and then her participation could clearly take the form of an attack toward Silesia, toward the north or toward the west.
If the Czechs were overthrown and a common German-Hungarian frontier achieved, a neutral attitude on the part of Poland could be the more certainly counted on in the event of a Franco-German conflict. Our agreements with Poland only retained their force as long as Germany’s strength remained unshaken. In the event of German setbacks a Polish action against East Prussia, and possibly against Pomerania and Silesia as well, had to be reckoned with.
On the assumption of a development of the situation leading to action on our part as planned, in the years 1943-1945, the attitude of France, Britain, Italy, Poland, and Russia could probably be estimated as follows:
Actually, the Fuhrer believed that almost certainly Britain, and probably France as well, had already tacitly written off the Czechs and were reconciled to the fact that this question would be cleared up in due course by Germany. Difficulties connected with the Empire, and the prospect of being once more entangled in a protracted European War, were decisive considerations for Britain against participation in a war against Germany. Britain’s attitude would certainly not be without influence on that of France. An attack by France without British support, and with the prospect of the offensive being brought to a standstill on our western fortifications, was hardly probable. … It would of course be necessary to maintain a strong defense [eine Abriegelung] on our western frontier during the prosecution of our attack on the Czechs and Austria. And in this connection it had to be remembered that the defense measures of the Czechs were growing in strength from year to year, and that the actual worth of the Austrian Army also was increasing in the course of time. Even though the populations concerned, especially of Czechoslovakia, were not sparse, the annexation of Czechoslovakia and Austria would mean an acquisition of footstuffs for 5 to 6 million people, on the assumption that the compulsory emigration of 2 million people from Czechoslovakia and 1 million people from Austria was practicable. The incorporation of these two States with Germany meant, from the politico-military point of view, a substantial advantage because it would mean shorter and better frontiers, the freeing of forces for other purposes, and the possibility of creating new units up to a level of about twelve divisions, that is, one new division per million inhabitants.
Italy was not expected to object to the elimination of the Czechs, but it was impossible at the moment to estimate what her attitude on the Austrian question would be; that depended essentially upon whether the Duce were still alive.
The degree of surprise and the swiftness of our action were decisive factors for Poland’s attitude. Poland–with Russia at her rear–will have little inclination to engage in war against a victorious Germany.
Military intervention by Russia must be countered by the swiftness of our operations; however, whether such an intervention was a practical contingency at all was, in view of Japan’s attitude, more than doubtful. …
Allied Appeasement Denounced: The Shame of Munich
Winston Churchill
(1938)
Mr. Churchill. … I will therefore, begin by saying the most unpopular and most unwelcome thing. I will begin by saying what everybody would like to ignore or forget but which must nevertheless be stated, namely, that we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat, and that France has suffered even more than we have.
Viscountess Astor. Nonsense!
Mr. Churchill. When the noble Lady cries “Nonsense,” she could not have heard the Chancellor of the Exchequer admit in his illuminating and comprehensive speech just now that Herr Hitler had gained in this particular leap forward in substance all he set out to gain. The utmost my right hon. Friend, the prime minister, has been able to secure by all his immense exertions, by all the great efforts and mobilization which took place in this country, and by all the anguish and strain through which we have passed in this country, the utmost he has been able to gain [Hon. Members: "Is Peace"]. I thought I might be allowed to make that point in its due place, and I propose to deal with it. The utmost he has been able to gain for Czechoslovakia and in the matters which were in dispute has been that the German dictator, instead of snatching his victuals from the table has been content to have them served to him course by course.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer said it was the first time Herr Hitler has been made to retract (I think that was the word) in any degree. We really must not waste time, after all this long debate, upon the difference between the positions reached at Berchtesgaden, at Godesberg and at Munich. They can be very simply epitomized, if the House will permit me to vary the metaphor. One pound was demanded at the pistol’s point. When it was given, two pounds were demanded at the pistol’s point. Finally, the dictator consented to take one pound, seventeen shillings and six pence, and the rest in promises of good will for the future.
Now I come to the point, which was mentioned to me just now from some quarters of the House, about the saving of peace. No one has been a more resolute and uncompromising struggler for peace than the prime minister. Everyone knows that. Never has there been such intense and undaunted determination to maintain and to secure peace. This is quite true. Nevertheless, I am not quite clear why there was so much danger of Great Britain or France being involved in a war with Germany at this juncture if, in fact, they were ready all along to sacrifice Czechoslovakia. …
There never can be any absolute certainty that there will be a fight if one side is determined that it will give way completely. …
I have always held the view that the maintenance of peace depends upon the accumulation of deterrents against the aggressor, coupled with a sincere effort to redress grievances. Herr Hitler’s victory, like so many of the famous struggles that have governed the fate of the world, was won upon the narrowest of margins. After the seizure of Austria in March, we faced this problem in our debates. I ventured to appeal to the government to go a little further than the prime minister went, and to give a pledge that in conjunction with France and other powers they will guarantee the security of Czechoslovakia, while the Sudeten Deutsch question was being examined either by a League of Nations commission, or some other impartial body, and I still believe that if that course had been followed events would not have fallen into this disastrous state. …
France and Great Britain together, especially if they had maintained a close contact with Russia, which certainly was not done, would have been able in those days in the summer, when they had the prestige, to influence many of the smaller states of Europe. … Such a combination, prepared at the time when the German dictator was not deeply and irrevocably committed to his new adventure, would, I believe, have given strength to all those forces in Germany which resisted this departure, this new design. …
All is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness. She has suffered in every respect by her association with the Western democracies and with the League of Nations, of which she has always been an obedient servant. … We in this country, as in other liberal and democratic countries, have a perfect right to exalt the principle of self-determination, but it comes ill out of the mouths of those in totalitarian states who deny even the smallest element of toleration to every section and creed within their bounds. But, however you put it, this particular block of land, this mass of human beings to be handed over, has never expressed the desire to go into the Nazi rule. I do not believe that even now–if their opinion could be asked, they would exercise such an option. …
I venture to think that in the future the Czechoslovak state cannot be maintained as an independent entity. You will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured only by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi regime. … It is the most grievous consequence which we have yet experienced of what we have done and of what we have left undone in the last five years: five years of futile good intention, five years of eager search for the line of least resistance, five years of uninterrupted retreat of British power, five years of neglect of our air defenses. …
News from the Berlin Homefront
Ursula von Kardorff
(1944)
Berlin, 31 May 1944 Pessimism is increasing. The Russian front is drawing closer. Where should my flight take me, I often ask myself, because I am prepared to flee. But for the time being we are still dancing on a stage that grows smaller and smaller and is surrounded by an abyss.
Spent the day before yesterday with Ulrich Dortenbach in the Rose Theater. [Saw] Lessing’sMiss Sara Simpson, starring Inge of Austria. This theater in the eastern section of the city, in the midst of the destroyed but, even in earlier times, desolate Frankfurter Allee, is one of the cheeriest showplaces in Berlin. Workers, craftsmen, housewives, and the businessmen who live in this section have had season tickets for decades. Here one is able to find a piece of the Berlin of old, no “class-conscious proletarians,” no KdF [Kraft durch Freude, Strength Through Joy] functions, no termites, only individual human beings. Hauptmann, Ibsen, Schiller, Shakespeare, and good old burlesque are on the program. Never trash and never hokum. In the refreshment room–a well-proportioned room with mirrors built in 1877–a small orchestra played during intermission. I could have caressed them all, musicians as well as audience; these people, with their tired faces and stooping posture, who in spite of difficult conditions, poor nourishment, and the constant threat of air raids, come here to find release from tension.
6 June 1944 It began tonight. The invasion. Excitement among the editorial staff. We have received instructions to write rejoicingly about this long-desired event. Hurrah, the time is finally here; now we will show them how we will chase them out again. Finally, we are moving toward the ultimate victory!
However, all ’round [there is] only skepticism and fear of air raids. Great doubt if the Atlantic fortifications will hold.
10 June 1944 As a substitute [for the editor] I was charged with composing the front page, and had to carry a photograph from the Times which showed the invasion. Incredible that it was cleared by the censors. It is a frightening sight–hundreds of little dots, paratroopers and tiny boats; it looks like a swarm of grasshoppers attacking the coast. The defense appears meager. In any case, they have gotten a foothold, and “Fortress Europe” is now besieged from two sides as well as by air. Maybe now things will move rapidly.
Berlin is in a curious mood. A mixture of apathy and inordinate pleasure-seeking. The janitor’s wife, who cleans at my place, warningly raises her index finger [and proclaims]: “So, soon it’ll be over with little Adolf, maybe it’ll go fast.” No one saves these days. … Witnessed ordinary soldiers leaving gratuities as high as half a month’s pay. The waiter at a small pub at the Gendarme Market bought himself a small farm–purely from the tips he received by procuring a bottle of Mosel [wine]. Money flows through hands like water.
16 June 1944 I arrive at the editor’s office, Willy looks at me, he seems disturbed. In front of him lies the blue page containing the secret news reports: the apocalypse has begun, we are shooting at London with long-distance weapons that are supposed to destroy the city. The new weapon is called V-I. By noon the reports are publicly aired. According to Goebbels, V-II, V-III, and V-IV are soon to follow. The whole world will blow up by the time V-V rolls around.
In all the pubs, places where usually no one speaks his mind, there is much talk of vengeance, Allied vengeance, that is. Asoldier who boasted that soon we would have the war won was contradicted. It is hard to fool Berliners. Goebbels has it nowhere so tough as here. Lately everyone speaks of gas warfare. That would really crown all of this horror.
During warm evenings when friends come over, we sit with them on the roof, which is flat. Several benches are up there, covered with dust. … All ’round one sees burned-out houses without roofs and lofts.
Underground Resistance Activities: A Communist Primer for Resistance Fighters
Anonymous
(ca. 1942)
1. You are no longer to have a good, reliable friend or acquaintance with whom you can discuss your activity.
2. Therefore, do not tell anything to someone who might know; instead tell only him who must know.
3. It is not necessary for a friend to know more about personal and internal organizational matters than is absolutely necessary in order to do one’s work
4. If when walking you slouch and shuffle along, behave conspicuously on the street, and talk a lot with your hands, you will give police an opportunity to describe you quickly and ultimately track you down.
5. The shortest way is not always the best; that is, arrange to meet your friends with whom you are working so that on the way there you will have enough time to shake possible pursuers. Allow enough time for the next rendezvous, and set an example by being punctual.
6. It is best not to talk at all about our activities in public places, public transportation, or taverns; but if you do, do it in the form of an everyday conversation.
7. At our meetings, remember to agree beforehand what you will say if the Gestapo raids the meeting.
8. Carry potential evidence on your person only if it cannot be avoided, and then only for as brief a time as possible. Keep your apartment devoid of evidence.
9. Carefully check all apartments, operative meeting places, and addresses necessary in carrying out your work.
10. No matter what, all contacts gone awry should be broken off. Make arrangements with your associates beforehand so that you will find each other again later, even without knowing names or each other’s place of residence.
11. Organize the exchange of informational materials on short notice and between only two individuals. Therefore, consider well beforehand the distribution numbers and the locations.
12. Terminate normal relationships with each other. As a private person you should also have nothing to do with other friends, even if you know that they can be trusted. This is precisely why you should not burden them needlessly. If you should happen to meet on the street, walk past each other. No one but the Gestapo is interested in whether or not you are acquainted.
13. Do not make [an] habitual haunt out of any one tavern, cinema, or park. You do not need to be known to more people than necessary.
14. Fight hard and with conviction against rumors and general feelings of panic on certain occasions. No one is to pass on unverified messages. Everyone must immediately attempt to determine the author of such things. …
15. Remember, carelessness is not synonymous with courage. Our work requires skill, so that by applying all measures of caution and paying heed to the smallest detail we can be maximally effective in our work for the masses. Through the proper distribution of energy and application of flexible tactics we can succeed. …
It is obvious that in conspiratorial matters new situations and variations will always present themselves. Therefore, you should periodically discuss the methods of the opponent and determine your own course of action accordingly. That way you will have the advantage of always being one step ahead, because in the meantime the opponent must first adjust to our tactics. Ruthlessly, but in a comradely spirit, make the guilty party accountable if the rules are broken. Through truly solid political activity you can establish the basis of such mass support that, regardless of how bloody the terror is, it will not be capable of harming you.
Let these words of Lenin guide you in your organizational activity: “Whosoever, during this period of illegality, breaches Bolshevik discipline even ever so slightly–he aids, willingly or not, our enemy, the bourgeoisie.”
“A Very Grave Matter, the Extermination of the Jews”
Heinrich Himmler
(1943)
I also want to talk to you, quite frankly, on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30th, 1934 to do the duty we were bidden, and stand comrades who had lapsed, up against the wall and shoot them, so we have never spoken about it and will never speak of it. It was that tact which is a matter of course and which I am glad to say, is inherent in us, that made us never discuss it among ourselves, never to speak of it. It appalled everyone, and yet everyone was certain that he would do it the next time if such orders are issued and if it is necessary.
I mean the clearing out of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It’s one of those things it is easy to talk about–”The Jewish race is being exterminated,” says one party member, “that’s quite clear, it’s in our program–elimination of the Jews, and we’re doing it, exterminating them.” And then they come, 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are vermin, but this one is an A-1 Jew. Not one of all those who talk this way has witnessed it, not one of them has been through it. Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500 or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time–apart from exceptions caused by human weakness–to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written, for we know how difficult we should have made it for ourselves, if–with the bombing raids, the burdens and the deprivations of war–we still had Jews today in every town as secret saboteurs, agitators and trouble-mongers. We would now probably have reached the 1916/17 stage when the Jews were still in the German national body.
We have taken from them what wealth they had. I have issued a strict order, which SS-Lieutenant General Pohl has carried out, that this wealth should, as a matter of course, be handed over to the Reich without reserve. We have taken none of it for ourselves. Individual men who have lapsed will be punished in accordance with an order I issued at the beginning, which gave this warning: Whoever takes so much as a mark of it, is a dead man. A number of SS men–there are not very many of them–have fallen short, and they will die, without mercy. We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us. But we have not the right to enrich ourselves with so much as a fur, a watch, a mark, or a cigarette or anything else. Because we have exterminated a bacterium we do not want, in the end, to be infected by the bacterium and die of it. I will not see so much as a small area of sepsis appear here or gain a hold. Wherever it may form, we will cauterize it. Altogether, however, we can say, that we have fulfilled this most difficult duty for the love of our people. And our spirit, our soul, our character has not suffered injury from it.
The Ghettoization of the Jews: Prelude to the Final Solution
Traian Popovici
(1941)
On the morning of October 11 … I looked out the window. It was snowing and–I could not believe my eyes: on the street in front of my window long columns of people were hurrying by. Old people supported by children, women with infants in their arms, invalids dragging their maimed bodies along, all with their luggage in wagons or on their backs, with hastily packed suitcases, bedding, bundles, clothes; they all made silent pilgrimage into the city’s valley of death, the ghetto. …
Great activity in the city hall. … The “abandoned” wealth of the Jews was to be inventoried and their dwellings sealed. Romanianization departments were to be formed and with police assistants to be distributed throughout the city neighborhoods.
It first dawned on me then that the procedure had been a long time in the planning. I hurried to military headquarters where General Jonescu informed me of events. He let me see the promulgated ordinances. … I paged through the instructions in haste and read the regulations for the functioning of the ghetto. The bakeries were to be under city hall control, as were the [food] markets. Then I hurried again to the city hall in order to see to the measures necessary for the uninterrupted provisioning of bread, food, and especially milk for the children. For the time being, this was the role that providence allotted to me, thanks to the military cabinet.
Only those who know the topography of the city can measure how slight was the space for the ghetto to which the Jewish population was confined and in which, under pain of death, they had to be by six o’clock.
In this part of the city, even with the greatest crowding, ten thousand people could be housed at most. Fifty thousand had to be brought in, not counting the Christian population already living there. Then, and even today, I compare the ghetto to a cattle pen.
The accommodation possibilities were minimal. Even if the available rooms were to receive thirty or more people, a great number would have to seek shelter from the snow and rain in corridors, attics, cellars, and similar sorts of places. I would rather not speak of the demands of hygiene. Pure drinking water was lacking; the available public fountains did not suffice. I noted that the city already suffered from a water shortage since two of the three pumping stations had been destroyed. The strong odors of sweat, urine, and human waste, of mold and mildew, distinguished the quarter from the rest of the city. … It was a miracle that epidemics that would endanger the whole city did not break out. With surprising speed the ghetto was nearly hermetically sealed with barbed wire. At the main exits, wooden gates were erected and military guards posted. I do not know whether it was intentional, but the effect was clear: the despised were being intimidated. …
Although … the regulation concerning the ghetto categorically stated that no one could enter without the authorization of the governor, no one observed this rule. As early as the second day after the erection of the ghetto, there began a pilgrimage consisting of ladies of all social strata and intellectual jobbers, well known to the Czernowitz public. Persons of “influence” from all strata and professions–hyenas all–caught the scent of cadaverous souls among the unfortunates. Under the pretext that they were in the good graces of the governor, the military cabinet, or the mayor, they began the high-level pillaging of all that was left to the unfortunates. Their gold coins, jewelry, precious stones, furs, and valuable foodstuffs (tea, coffee, chocolate, cocoa) were supposedly to be used to bribe others or to compensate [the interlopers] for putting in a good word to save someone from deportation. Trading in influence was in full bloom. Another category of hyena was the so-called friend who volunteered to protect all these goods from theft or to deliver them to family members and acquaintances elsewhere in the country. Individuals never previously seen in the city of Czernowitz streamed in from all corners of the country in order to draw profit from a human tragedy. If the deportation with all its premeditation was in itself monstrous, then the exploitation of despair surpassed even this. …
A Jewish Manifesto Calls for Resistance to the Holocaust
Anonymous
(1942)
Let us not be led like sheep to the slaughter!
I.Let us defend ourselves during a deportation!
For several months now, day and night, thousands and tens of thousands have been torn away from our midst. … The illusion still lives within us that they are still alive somewhere, in an undisclosed concentration camp, in a ghetto.
In the face of the next day which arrives with the horror of deportation and murder, the hour has struck to dispel the illusion: There is no way out of the ghetto, except the way of death!
No illusion greater than that our dear ones are alive.
II.On guard over national honor and dignity
We work for Germans and Lithuanians. Everyday we come face to face with our employers, the murderers of our brothers. Great the shame and pain, observing the conduct of Jews, stripped of the awareness of human dignity.
Comrades!
Don’t give the foe the chance to ridicule you! When a German ridicules a Jew–don’t help him laugh!
Don’t play up to your murderers!
Denounce the bootlickers at work!
Denounce the girls who flirt with Gestapo men!
Work slowly, don’t speed!
Show solidarity! If misfortune befalls one of you–don’t be vile egoists–all of you help him.
Jewish agents of the Gestapo and informers of all sorts walk the streets. If you get hold of one such, sentence him–to be beaten until death!
The End of the Line: Auschwitz
Olga Lengyel
(ca. 1945)
When I learned that our barrack chief, a Polish woman named Irka, had been in the camp for four years, I felt reassured.
However, when I hinted at these thoughts to Irka, she made short work of my illusions.
“You think they are going to let you live?” she jeered. “You are burying your head in the sand. All of you will be killed, except a few rare cases, who will have, perhaps, a few months. Have you a family?”
I told her the circumstances under which I had taken my parents and my children with me, and how we had been separated from one another when we arrived at camp.
She shrugged her shoulders with an air of indifference, and told me coldly:
“Well, I can assure you that neither your mother, your father, nor your children are in this world any more. They were liquidated and burned the same day you arrived.”
I listened, petrified.
“No, no, that’s impossible,” I mumbled. This timid protest made the block chief beside herself with impatience.
“Since you don’t believe me, look for yourself!” she cried, and dragged me to the door with hysterical gestures. “You see those flames? That’s the crematory oven. It would go bad with you if you let on that you knew. Call it by the name we use: the bakery. Perhaps it is your family that is being burned this moment.”
[Olga Lengyel hears that someone has seen her husband and finds him on the other side of the barbed wire fence.]
Though I had lost my sensitivity after the first experiences in the camp, I still was painfully shocked when I saw my husband again. He, too, stared at me with unbelieving eyes. In my tattered dress, in which I was half exposed, in my stripped drawers, and with my clipped head, I must have shocked him even worse than he did me.
We stood there silently, clocking our emotions.
As briefly as I could, I told him about the deaths of our two sons and of my parents. I spoke without expression in a tone that rang strangely in my own ears.
I said: “I cannot believe that human beings, even Germans, would be capable of killing little children. Can you believe it? If it is true, then there is no longer any reason for living.”
The Truth About Soviet Russia: An Impartial Report?
Sidney and Beatrice Webb
(1942)
During the three or four years from the autumn of 1917 to 1922, the Bolshevik Government had established itself in Moscow and had succeeded in repelling the German, British, French, American and Japanese invasion, of that part of the territory of Tsarist Russia which the Bolsheviks thought themselves capable of defending. For some time after they had made a formal peace with their recent enemies they were confronted not only by local rebellions but by continuous and extensive underground sabotage in the newly established plants and factories, mines and means of communication, workers’ flats and hospitals, by the remnant of the upholders of the old Tsarist regime, all of which had to be summarily suppressed. But this obviously necessary use of force was not the only task awaiting the revolutionary government. History proves that in all violent revolutions, those who combine to destroy an old social order seldom agree as to what exactly should be the political and economic pattern of the new social organization to be built up to replace it. Even our own limited revolution of 1689 in Great Britain, whereby a Protest-ant king by Parliamentary statute was substituted for a Catholic king by Divine Right, was followed, for nearly a hundred years, by generation after generation of conspirators to whom treason and rebellion, spying and deceit, with or without the connivance of a foreign power, were only part of what they deemed to be a rightful effort to overturn an even worse state of home and foreign affairs than they had joined as rebels to destroy. Thus, when we published the second edition of Soviet Communismin 1937, the outstanding scandal, so hostile critics of the Soviet Union declared, were the Treason Trials which took place in the thirties, not only of old Bolshevik comrades of Lenin and opponents of Stalin’s subsequent policy, but also of the best known commanding officers of the Red Army, many of whom had been Tsarist generals, transferring their allegiance to the Bolshevik Government in order to defend their native land from invasion by German, British, American, French and Japanese armies; but who, it was alleged and I think proved, had begun to intrigue with the German Army against the new social order of the Soviet Union. The most important of these conspiracies was the Trotsky movement against the policy of building up socialism in one country as impracticable and insisting that the Bolshevik Party should abide by what was held to be the Marx-Lenin policy of promoting proletarian revolutions throughout the world. The success of the Soviet Government in instituting not only a political but an industrial democracy, and thereby enormously increasing the health, wealth and culture of the inhabitants, and the consequent recognition of the USSR as a Great Power, discredited the Trotsky movement, which I think was finally liquidated by the murder of Trotsky in Mexico by one of his own followers.[1] Today, and for some time, there has been no sign of conspiracies or faked conspiracies within the Soviet Union. The fear of German invasion and the consequent dominance of the Nazi system of racial oppression has made clear to all the bona fide citizens of the USSR the overwhelming desirability of keeping out of world war as long as possible, meanwhile devoting their energies to increasing their means of livelihood and their defensive power; whilst the capitalist democracies and Axis powers were engaged in mutual mass murder and the destruction of property. When the German attack plunged Russian into war it was immediately apparent that the inhabitants of the USSR, whether soldiers or civilians, men, women and young people, were so convinced of the benefits yielded to the Socialist Fatherland that they resisted not only with reckless courage, but with considerable skill and ingenuity the powerful onslaught of the highly mechanized German Army hitherto victorious conquerors of one country after another. …
Far more repugnant to our western political habits is the absolute prohibition within the USSR of any propaganda advocating the return to capitalist profit-making or even to any independent thinking on the fundamental social issues about possible new ways of organizing men in society, new forms of social activity, and new development of the socially established code of conduct. It is upon this power to think new thoughts, and to formulate even the most unexpected fresh ideas, that the future progress of mankind depends. This disease of orthodoxy in a milder form is not wholly absent in the capitalist political democracies. No one suggests that Switzerland is not a political democracy, and yet, as I have already noted, members of the Society of Jesus are not only refused citizenship but are actually banished from their native land, a penalization which has been extended of late years to the members of the Third International, assuredly a strangely discordant couple to be linked together in the dock of Swiss Courts of Justice accused of the propaganda of living philosophy incompatible with the public safety. Likewise the U.S.A., in some of the constituent States, through the device of Primaries, has excluded the Communist Party, and today even the Socialist Party, from selecting the candidates for election to the legislature of those states; while in one or two states being a member of the Communist Party is punished by penal servitude. …
Whenever a country is threatened with foreign invasion or revolutionary upheaval, the suppression of sects advocating disobedience to the law, sabotage or giving information to the enemy is a necessary use of force on the part of a government, however democratically representative of the majority of the inhabitants it may be. …
[1] In reality, Trotsky was assassinated by a Stalinist agent.
“This Was Their Finest Hour”
Winston Churchill
(1940)
The military events which have happened during the past fortnight have not come to me with any sense of surprise. Indeed, I indicated a fortnight ago as clearly as I could to the House that the worst possibilities were open, and I made it perfectly clear then that whatever happened in France would make no difference to the resolve of Britain and the British Empire to fight on, “if necessary for years, if necessary alone.” During the last few days we have successfully brought off the great majority of the troops we had on the lines of communication in France–a very large number, scores of thousands–and seven-eighths of the troops we have sent to France since the beginning of the war, that is to say, about 350,000 out of 400,000 men, are safely back in this country. Others are still fighting with the French, and fighting with considerable success in their local encounters with the enemy. We have also brought back a great mass of stores, rifles and munitions of all kinds which had been accumulated in France during the last nine months.
We have, therefore, in this island to-day a very large and powerful military force. …
This brings me, naturally, to the great question of invasion from the air and of the impending struggle between the British and German air forces. It seems quite clear that no invasion on a scale beyond the capacity of our land forces to crush speedily is likely to take place from the air until our air force has been definitely overpowered. In the meantime, there may be raids by parachute troops and attempted descents of airborne soldiers. We should be able to give those gentry a warm reception both in the air and if they reach the ground in any condition to continue the dispute. But the great question is, can we break Hitler’s air weapon? Now, of course, it is a very great pity that we have not got an air force at least equal to that of the most powerful enemy within striking distance of these shores. But we have a very powerful air force which has proved itself far superior in quality, both in men and in many types of machine, to what we have met so far in the numerous fierce air battles which have been fought. In France, where we were at a considerable disadvantage and lost many machines on the ground, we were accustomed to inflict losses of as much as two to two and a half to one. In the fighting over Dunkirk, which was a sort of no man’s land, we undoubtedly beat the German air force, and this gave us the mastery locally in the air, and we inflicted losses of three or four to one. …
There remains the danger of bombing attacks, which will certainly be made very soon upon us by the bomber forces of the enemy. It is true that the German bomber force is superior in numbers to ours, but we have a very large bomber force also which we shall use to strike at military targets in Germany without intermission. I do not at all underrate the severity of the ordeal which lies before us, but I believe our countrymen will show themselves capable of standing up to it. …
What General Weygand called the “Battle of France” is over. I expect that the battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands, but if we fail then the whole world, including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more prolonged, by the lights of a perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire lasts for a thousand years men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”
A German Soldier’s Last Letter Home
Anonymous
(1942)
Dearest, I think of you all the time. Today, standing in the chow line I thought of you again. Of the wonderful food you used to cook. My socks are in shreds, too, and I can’t get rid of my cough any more. No pills are available for it. You could send me cough syrup, but don’t use any glass bottles. Have you caught cold too? Always put on something good and warm. Do you have enough coal? Just go and see A–, he got lumber from me for his furniture. Let him give you coal for it now. I hope Uncle Paul has nailed the weather stripping to your windows; otherwise it will be too late for it this year. I did not celebrate Christmas here. I was on the road with the car, and we got stuck in the snow because we went the wrong way. But we soon got out again. I have decided that next year we will celebrate a real Christmas, and I am going to give you a beautiful present.
It is not my fault that I can’t give it to you now. The Russians are all around us, and we won’t get out again until Hitler gets us out. But you must not tell that to anyone. It is supposed to be a surprise.
There Are No Civilians Anymore: The London Air Raids
Mrs. Robert Henrey
(1944)
The sharp raids of February 1944 broke a lull of nearly three years. The weather was bitterly cold, with occasional snow, but it was gone by morning, leaving a hard frost in the Green Park and a thin coating of ice on the sump.
Nobody was surprised to hear the sirens again, because the newspapers were filled with stories about the Allied raids on Germany. The unknown factor was the extent to which the enemy could go and the improvements he had made in his technique. This uncertainty, added to tiredness and war strain, made many people more nervous than during the battle of London [1940-1941], and when the bombs began to drop near the centre of town, one saw again the early evening trek towards the tube stations. As soon as it became dark a great hush fell over the city.
This mantle of silence was one of the strangest phenomena. One could hear it, yes, actually hear it. On several occasions when I was at home with the curtains drawn, this sudden blanketing fell upon my ears and made me aware that it was now officially night. It was most impressive on the evening following a big raid, when people were still under the domination of fear. One felt a shudder down the spine. There was something about it which was not of this world.
These raids were not at all like those of 1940-1. They were noisier but seldom lasted more than an hour, at any rate in their intensity, whereas in the old days, or rather, in the old nights, the sirens wailed regularly at dusk and did not sound the all clear until half an hour before dawn.
London itself had also changed. It was now crowded with American soldiers, many of whom, only a few months earlier, were pursuing peaceful occupations in city or farm. In addition to this great army from across the Atlantic, there had come into London a tremendous number of people of every sort and kind who had not been through any of the previous raids. The population had therefore to be welded together and tempered before attaining that hardness and stoicism with which it faced the much more terrifying raids of May 1941.
The bombs did not really hit the heart of the town until Sunday, 20th February. Before that we had only seen fires round the perimeter. But on this occasion there was quite a large conflagration in Pall Mall, and one saw other patches of deep red seemingly quite near but more difficult to locate.
Witness to the Birth of the Atomic Age
General Leslie Groves and General Thomas F. Farrell
(1945)
18 July 1945
TOP SECRET
MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF WAR.
SUBJECT: The Test.
1. This is not a concise, formal military report but an attempt to recite what I would have told you if you had been here on my return from New Mexico.
2. At 0530, 16 July 1945, in a remote section of the Alamogordo Air Base, New Mexico, the first full scale test was made of the implosion type atomic fission bomb. For the first time in history there was a nuclear explosion. And what an explosion! It resulted from the atomic fission of about 13-1/2 pounds of plutonium which was compressed by the detonation of a surrounding sphere of some 5000 pounds of high explosives. The bomb was not dropped from an airplane but was exploded on a platform on top of a 100-foot high steel tower.
3. The test was successful beyond the most optimistic expectations of anyone. … There were tremendous blast effects. For a brief period there was a lighting effect within a radius of 20 miles equal to several suns in midday; a huge ball of fire was formed which lasted for several seconds. This ball mushroomed and rose to a height of over ten thousand feet before it dimmed. The light from the explosion was seen clearly at Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Silver City, El Paso and other points generally to about 180 miles away. The sound was heard to the same distance in a few instances but generally to about 100 miles. Only a few windows were broken although one was some 125 miles away. A massive cloud was formed which surged and billowed upward with tremendous power, reaching the substratosphere at an elevation of 41,000 feet, 36,000 feet above the ground, in about five minutes. … Huge concentrations of highly radioactive materials resulted from the fission and were contained in this cloud.
4. A crater from which all vegetation had vanished, with a diameter of 1200 feet and a slight slope toward the center, was formed. In the center was a shallow bowl 130 feet in diameter and 6 feet in depth. The material within the crater was deeply pulverized dirt. The material within the outer circle is greenish and can be distinctly seen from as much as 5 miles away. The steel from the tower was evaporated. 1500 feet away there was a four-inch iron pipe 16 feet high set in concrete and strongly guyed. It disappeared completely. …
11. Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell was at the control shelter located 10,000 yards south of the point of explosion. His impressions are given below:
“The scene inside the shelter was dramatic beyond words. In and around the shelter were some twentyodd people concerned with last minute arrangements prior to firing the shot. Included were: Dr. Oppenheimer, the Director who had borne the great scientific burden of developing the weapon from the raw materials made in Tennessee and Washington, and a dozen of his key scientists. …
“For some hectic two hours preceding the blast, General Groves stayed with the Director, walking with him and steadying his tense excitement. Every time the Director would be about to explode because of some untoward happening, General Groves would take him off and walk with him in the rain, counselling with him and reassuring him that everything would be all right….
“Just after General Groves left, announcements began to be broadcast of the interval remaining before the blast. They were sent by radio to the other groups participating in and observing the test. As the time interval grew smaller and changed from minutes to seconds, the tension increased by leaps and bounds. Everyone in that room knew the awful potentialities of the thing that they thought was about to happen. The scientists felt that their figuring must be right and that the bomb had to go off but there was in everyone’s mind a strong measure of doubt. The feeling of many could be expressed by ‘Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief.’ We were reaching into the unknown and we did not know what might come of it. It can be safely said that most of those present–Christian, Jew and Atheist–were praying and praying harder than they had ever prayed before. If the shot were successful, it was a justification of the several years of intensive effort of tens of thousands of people–statesmen, scientists, subatomic universe. In the 1890s, Lord Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), a New Zealand-born English scientist, first realized the enormous power generated by splitting the atom. Following World War I, physicists all over the world struggled to unravel the secrets of the atom. In 1938, the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner engineers, manufacturers, soldiers, and many others in every walk of life.
“In that brief instant in the remote New Mexico desert the tremendous effort of the brains and brawn of all these people came suddenly and startlingly to the fullest fruition. Dr. Oppenheimer, on whom had rested a very heavy burden, grew tenser as the last seconds ticked off. He scarcely breathed. He held on to a post to steady himself. For the last few seconds, he stared directly ahead and then when the announcer shouted ‘Now!’ and there came this tremendous burst of light followed shortly thereafter by the deep growling roar of the explosion, his face relaxed into an expression of tremendous relief. Several of the observers standing back of the shelter to watch the lighting effects were knocked flat by the blast.
“The tension in the room let up and all started congratulating each other. Everyone sensed ‘This is it!’ No matter what might happen now all knew that the impossible scientific job had been done. Atomic fission would no longer be hidden in the cloisters of the theoretical physicists’ dreams. It was almost full grown at birth. It was a great new force to be used for good or for evil. There was a feeling in that shelter that those concerned with its nativity should dedicate their lives to the mission that it would always be used for good and never for evil. …
“The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately. Thirty seconds after the explosion came first, the air blast pressing hard against the people and things, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to The Almighty. Words are inadequate tools for the job of acquainting those not present with the physical, mental and psychological effects. It had to be witnessed to be realized. … ”
Conversations with Stalin: Glimpses into Paranoia
Milovan Djilas
(1944-1945)
[1. June 1944. Stalin:] … “Perhaps you think that just because we are the allies of the English that we have forgotten who they are and who Churchill is. They find nothing sweeter than to trick their allies. During the First World War they constantly tricked the Russians and the French. And Churchill? Churchill is the kind who, if you don’t watch him, will slip a kopeck out of your pocket. Yes, a kopeck out of your pocket! By God, a kopeck out of your pocket! And Roosevelt? Roosevelt is not like that. He dips in his hand only for bigger coins. But Churchill? Churchill–even for a kopeck.” …
[2. April 1945] Stalin presented his views on the distinctive nature of the war that was being waged: “This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.”
He also pointed out, without going into long explanations, the meaning of his Panslavic policy. “If the Slavs keep united and maintain solidarity, no one in the future will be able to move a finger. Not even a finger!” he repeated, emphasizing his thought by cleaving the air with his forefinger.
Someone expressed doubt that the Germans would be able to recuperate within fifty years. But Stalin was of a different opinion. “No, they will recover, and very quickly. That is a highly developed industrial country with an extremely qualified and numerous working class and technical intelligentsia. Give them twelve to fifteen years and they’ll be on their feet again. And this is why the unity of the Slavs is important. But even apart from this, if the unity of the Slavs exists, no one will dare move a finger.”
At one point he got up, hitched up his pants as though he was about to wrestle or to box, and cried out almost in a transport, “The war shall soon be over. We shall recover in fifteen or twenty years, and then we’ll have another go at it.”
There was something terrible in his words: a horrible war was still going on. Yet there was something impressive, too, about his cognizance of the paths he had to take, the inevitability that faced the world in which he lived and the movement that he headed.
The rest of what was said that evening was hardly worth remembering. There was much eating, even more drinking, and countless senseless toasts were raised. …
A Journalist Records the Mood in Liberated Paris
Alexander Werth
(1945)
Except for the row between de Gaulle and the Communists, nobody seems much interested in politics. Much more interested in food conditions. … Black market in full swing–sugar, wine, coffee, cigarettes. … Life in Paris not quite normal yet. Taxis very hard to get. In principle, they are only for pregnant women. Lots of silly jokes about it. … Lot of metro stations still closed. … They don’t seem to sweep even the parks. Walked through the Tuileries today over a rustling eight-inch carpet of red leaves. … Talk with Bidault at the Quai. Rhineland, Ruhr, Ruhr coal are his chief worries. … Furious with Molotov for failing to support France. … To my question about how the Communists fitted into the government, he made a face, and said: “Hm … enfin, ca va … a peu pres . …” Wretched “black market” dinner in a “workmen’s bistrot,” Batignolles way–300 francs for two: 30s at the present preposterous rate; they say there’s going to be devaluation–480 to the £–even that will be far too little. … Streets badly lit at night. Lots of robberies and burglaries. … GI’s responsible for some of them. France-Soir came out with big headline; ” CHICAGO-SUR-SEINE,” telling about misdeeds by the GI’s.
Some anti-American feeling almost everywhere; strong anti-Russian feeling among the nicepeople, but still some vestiges of previous admiration for the Red Army, Stalingrad, etc. Good deal of anti-Russian stuff in the popular press. … Half the people I meet claim to have been “in the Resistance.” But they also say: “Most unfair to have shot Laval. He did his best. We wouldn’t be here but for him … ” … Economic collabos (met one who made a fortune building bits of the Atlantic Wall) running around freely and living in luxury. They also talk in a starry-eyed way of Sartre and “existentialism”; very fashionable these days. Called on Jean-Richard Bloch at Ce Soir. Found him very pessimistic. “Everything going to hell; all the old (and new) reactionaries coming up on top again.” … Daily X chap (eyes popping out): “We must, must, MUST get the Communists thrown out of the Government … Fifth Column … ” and so on. Same attitude among the rest of the Anglo-American press, who eat beastly American-canned-food lunches (mostly bully-beef hash) at the Scribe. … Quite different attitude chez Duff Cooper [British politician], who thinks it’s very sensible of de Gaulle to keep them in the Government. Thinks Thorez [French Communist leader] a tremendous chap “with great charm” (has asked him to the Embassy to lunch), and thinks that several of the others are “very able and earnest fellows,” especially Croizat.
Spent a week in Normandy. The peasants, who made fortunes during the war and had no trouble to speak of, all claim to have been “in the Resistance.” Like hell they were. They continue to make fortunes, selling meat to the black market in Paris. Except for a privileged minority, Paris is hungry and down-at-heel; but in Normandy–in the countryside–I was served steaks that hung over the sides of the plate. … The peasants are for de Gaulle and against the Communists. Most of them seem to have voted MRP which they consider “de Gaulle’s Party.” But what interests them most is the attitude of the parties to the bouilleurs de cru [the private distiller of tax-free apple brandy]. … Railways running, but slowly, and very few trains. Took nearly ten hours, with a change at Le Mans, to get to Alencon. … The curator of the “museum” attached to one of the Norman chateaux–a dusty little old man, like something out of Courteline–treated me to a long discourse on la crise morale which, he said, was quite general in France. Even small children were crooks. …
Primary Sources – Unit Eighteen – Recovery and the Recent Past
An Indian Nationalist Condemns the British Empire
Sarojini Naidu
(1920)
I speak to you today as standing arraigned because of the blood-guiltiness of those who have committed murder in my country. I need not go into the details. But I am going to speak to you as a woman about the wrongs committed against my sisters. Englishmen, you who pride yourselves upon your chivalry, you who hold more precious than your imperial treasures the honour and chastity of your women, will you sit still and leave unavenged the dishonour, and the insult and agony inflicted upon the veiled women of the Punjab?
The minions of Lord Chelmsford, the Viceroy, and his martial authorities rent the veil from the faces of the women of the Punjab. Not only were men mown down as if they were grass that is born to wither; but they tore asunder the cherished Purdah,[1] that innermost privacy of the chaste womanhood of India. My sisters were stripped naked, they were flogged, they were outraged. These policies left your British democracy betrayed, dishonored, for no dishonor clings to the martyrs who suffered, but to the tyrants who inflicted the tyranny and pain. Should they hold their Empire by dishonoring the women of another nation or lose it out of chivalry for their honor and chastity? The Bible asked, “What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” You deserve no Empire. You have lost your soul; you have the stain of blood-guiltiness upon you; no nation that rules by tyranny is free; it is the slave of its own despotism.
[1] A practice in which Indian women screen themselves from view through special clothing such as veils and special enclosures in buildings
A Nazi Confession: The Commandant at Auschwitz Pleads His Case
Rudolf Hoess
(1946)
Tis mass extermination, with all its attendant circumstances, did not, as I know, fail to affect those who took part in it. …
Many of the men involved approached me as I went my rounds through the extermination buildings, and poured out their anxieties and impressions to me, in the hope that I could allay them.
Again and again during these confidential conversations I was asked: is it necessary that we do all this? Is it necessary that hundreds of thousands of women and children be destroyed? And I, who in my innermost being had on countless occasions asked myself exactly this question, could only fob them off and attempt to console them by repeating that it was done on Hitler’s order. I had to tell them that this extermination of Jewry had to be, so that Germany and our posterity might be freed forever from their relentless adversaries.
There was no doubt in the mind of any of us that Hitler’s order had to be obeyed regardless, and that it was the duty of the SS to carry it out. Nevertheless we were all tormented by secret doubts.
I myself dared not admit to such doubts. In order to make my subordinates carry on with their task, it was psychologically essential that I myself appear convinced of the necessity for this gruesomely harsh order. …
On one occasion two small children were so absorbed in some game that they quite refused to let their mother tear them away from it. Even the Jews of the Special Detachment were reluctant to pick the children up. The imploring look in the eyes of the mother, who certainly knew what was happening, is something I shall never forget. The people were already in the gas chamber and becoming restive, and I had to act. Everyone was looking at me. I nodded to the junior noncommissioned officer on duty and he picked up the screaming, struggling children in his arms and carried them into the gas chamber, accompanied by their mother who was weeping in the most heart-rending fashion. My pity was so great that I longed to vanish from the scene; yet I might not show the slightest trace of emotion.
I had to see everything. I had to watch hour after hour, by day and by night, the removal and burning of the bodies, the extraction of the teeth, the cutting of the hair, the whole grisly, interminable business. I had to stand for hours on end in the ghastly stench, while the mass graves were being opened and the bodies dragged out and burned.
I had to look through the peephole of the gas chambers and watch the process of death itself, because the doctors wanted me to see it.
I had to do all this because I was the one to whom everyone looked, because I had to show them all that I did not merely issue the orders and make the regulations but was also prepared myself to be present at whatever task I had assigned to my subordinates.
Even Mildner and [Adolf] Eichmann, who were certainly tough enough, had no wish to change places with me. This was one job which nobody envied me.
I had many detailed discussions with Eichmann concerning all matters connected with the “final solution of the Jewish question,” but without ever disclosing my inner anxieties. I tried in every way to discover Eichmann’s innermost and real convictions about this “solution.”
Yes, every way. Yet even when we were quite alone together and the drink had been flowing freely so that he was in his most expansive mood, he showed that he was completely obsessed with the idea of destroying every single Jew that he could lay his hands on. Without pity and in cold blood we must complete this extermination as rapidly as possible. Any compromise, even the slightest, would have to be paid for bitterly at a later date.
In the face of such grim determination I was forced to bury all my human considerations as deeply as possible. …
My family, to be sure, were well provided for in Auschwitz. Every wish that my wife or children expressed was granted them. The children could live a free and untrammeled life. My wife’s garden was a paradise of flowers. The prisoners never missed an opportunity for doing some little act of kindness to my wife or children and thus attracting their attention.
No former prisoner can ever say that he was in any way or at any time badly treated in our house. My wife’s greatest pleasure would have been to give a present to every prisoner who was in any way connected with our household. …
The children always kept animals in the garden, creatures the prisoners were forever bringing them. Tortoises, martens, cats, lizards: there was always something new and interesting to be seen there. In summer they splashed in the wading pool in the garden, or in the Sola. But their greatest joy was when Daddy bathed with them. He had, however, so little time for all these childish pleasures. Today I deeply regret that I did not devote more time to my family. I always felt that I had to be on duty the whole time. This exaggerated sense of duty has always made life more difficult for me than it actually need have been. Again and again my wife reproached me and said: “You must think not only of the service always, but of your family too.”
The Atomic Beast Harnessed: The Peaceful Use of Nuclear Power
British Parliament
(1955)
1. An important stage has been reached in the development of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. Hitherto the work in this country has consisted of a military programme, a broadly based research and development programme, and the production and use of radioisotopes. The military programme continues to be of great importance but the peaceful applications of nuclear energy now demand attention. Nuclear energy is the energy of the future. Although we are still only at the edge of knowledge of its peaceful uses, we know enough to assess some of its possibilities.
2. Our future as an industrial country depends both on the ability of our scientists to discover the secrets of nature and on our speed in applying the new techniques that science places within our grasp. The exact lines of future development in nuclear energy are uncertain, but this must not deter us from pressing on with its practical application wherever it appears promising. It is only by coming to grips with the problems of the design and building of nuclear plant that British industry will acquire the experience necessary for the full exploitation of this new technology.
3. The application that now appears practicable on a commercial scale is the use of nuclear fission as a source of heat to drive electric generating plant. This comes moreover at a time when the country’s great and growing demand for energy, and especially electric power, is placing an increasing strain on our supplies of coal and makes the search for supplementary sources of energy a matter of urgency. Technical developments in nuclear energy are taking place so fast that no firm long-term programme can yet be drawn up. But if progress is to be made some indication must be given of the probable lines of development so that the necessary preparations can be made in good time. A large power station may take five or more years to complete, including finding the site, designing the station and building it. …
15. It is expected that it will be possible to extract as much as 3,000 megawatt-days of heat from every ton of fuel. This is the equivalent of the heat from 10,000 tons of coal. There is as yet no practical experience of this level of irradiation at high temperatures and the metallurgical behaviour of the fuel elements is uncertain. But there are many lines of development which should overcome such metallurgical defects as may appear. …
19. … Taking what appears to be a reasonable value for the plutonium, the cost of electricity from the first commercial nuclear station comes to about 0-6d a unit. This is about the same as the probable future cost of electricity generated by new coal-fired power stations. … If no credit were allowed for the plutonium the cost of nuclear power would be substantially more than 0-6d a unit. Later stations should show a great improvement in efficiency, but the value of plutonium would probably fall considerably during their lifetime. Even so their higher efficiency should enable them to remain competitive with other power stations.
20. These estimates assume that all the plutonium is used for civil purposes, as would be most desirable. No allowance has been made for any military credits. …
A Philosopher Explains His Anti-Nuclear Position
Bertrand Russell
(1959)
Opponents of my recent activities in the campaign against H-bomb warfare have brought up what they consider to be an inconsistency on my part and have used statements that I made ten years ago to impair the force of the statements that I have made more recently. I should like to clear up this matter once for all.
At a time when America alone possessed the atom bomb and when the American Government was advocating what was known as the Baruch Proposal, the aim of which was to internationalize all the uses of atomic energy, I thought the American proposal both wise and generous. It seemed to me that the Baruch scheme, if adopted, would prevent an atomic arms race, the appalling dangers of which were evident to all informed opinion in the Western World. For a time it seemed possible that the USSR would agree to this scheme, since Russia had everything to gain by agreeing and nothing to lose. Unfortunately, Stalin’s suspicious nature made him think that there was some trap, and Russia decided to produce her own atomic weapons. I thought, at that time, that it would be worth while to bring pressure to bear upon Russia and even, if necessary, to go so far as to threaten war on the sole issue of the internationalizing of atomic weapons. My aim, then as now, was to prevent a war in which both sides possessed the power of producing worldwide disaster. Western statesmen, however, confident of the supposed technical superiority of the West, believed that there was no danger of Russia achieving equality with the non-Communist world in the field of nuclear warfare. Their confidence in this respect has turned out to have been mistaken. It follows that, if nuclear war is now to be prevented, it must be by new methods and not by those which could have been employed ten years ago.
My critics seem to think that, if you have once advocated a certain policy, you should continue to advocate it after all the circumstances have changed. This is quite absurd. If a man gets into a train with a view to reaching a certain destination and on the way the train breaks down, you will not consider the man guilty of an inconsistency if he gets out of the train and employs other means of reaching his destination. In like manner, a person who advocates a certain policy in certain circumstances will advocate a quite different policy in different circumstances.
I have never been a complete pacifist and have at no time maintained that all who wage war are to be condemned. I have held the view, which I should have thought was that of common sense, that some wars have been justified and others not. What makes the peculiarity of the present situation is that, if a great war should break out, the belligerents on either side and the neutrals would be all, equally, defeated. This is a new situation and means that war cannot still be used as an instrument of policy. It is true that the threat of war can still be used, but only by a lunatic. Unfortunately, some people are lunatics, and, not long ago, there were such lunatics in command of a powerful State. We cannot be sure this will not happen again and, if it does, it will produce a disaster compared with which the horrors achieved by Hitler were a flea-bite. The world at present is balanced in unstable equilibrium upon a sharp edge. To achieve stability, new methods are required, and it is these new methods that those who think as I do are attempting to urge upon the East and upon the West.
I do not deny that the policy that I have advocated has changed from time to time. It has changed as circumstances have changed. To achieve a single purpose, sane men adapt their policies to the circumstances. Those who do not are insane.
Though I do not admit inconsistency, I should not be wholly sincere if I did not admit that my mood and feelings have undergone a change somewhat deeper than that resulting from strategic considerations alone. The awful prospect of the extermination of the human race, if not in the next war, then in the next but one or the next but two, is so sobering to any imagination which has seriously contemplated it as to demand very fundamental fresh thought on the whole subject not only of international relations but of human life and its capabilities. If you were quarrelling with a man about some issue that both you and he had thought important just at the moment when a sudden hurricane threatened to destroy you both and the whole neighbourhood, you would probably forget the quarrel. I think what is important at present is to make mankind aware of the hurricane and forgetful of the issue which had been producing strife. I know it is difficult after spending many years and much eloquence on the evils of Communism or Capitalism, as the case may be, to see this issue as one of relative unimportance. But, although this is difficult, it is what both the Communist Rulers and the men who shape the policy of the West will have to achieve if mankind is to survive. To make sure a realization is possible is the purpose of the policy which I now advocate.
A “Long Telegram” Recommends a Western Policy of Containment
George F. Kennan
(1946)
It was perhaps inevitable that the Grand Alliance of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, which had so successfully waged war together against Nazi Germany, would collapse as the post-war settlement was considered. The ideological differences alone were enough to cause such a rupture. Almost immediately, the Grand Alliance unity turned into a long and bitter Cold War between East and West. Some historians maintain that the origins of the Cold War lay in the West’s inability to understand the legitimate security concerns that prompted Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) to impose a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. Others argue that the Soviet Union’s attempt to expand its worldwide influence and foster revolution could have evoked no other response than Western resistance. Some have argued that both sides share blame for approaching the post-war issues with ideological blinders, making rational compromise impossible. Despite this divergenc At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted rather Russian rulers than Russian people; for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form, fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries. For this reason they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between Western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth about world without or if foreigners learned truth about world within. And they had learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.
It was no coincidence that Marxism, which had smouldered ineffectively for half a century in Western Europe, caught hold and blazed for first time in Russia. Only in this land which had never known a friendly neighbor or indeed any tolerant equilibrium of separate powers, either internal or international, could a doctrine thrive which viewed economic conflicts of society as insoluble by peaceful means. After establishment of Bolshevist regime, Marxist dogma, rendered even more truculent and intolerant by Lenin’s interpretation, became a perfect vehicle for sense of insecurity with which Bolsheviks, even more than previous Russian rulers, were afflicted. In this dogma, with its basic altruism of purpose, they found justification for their instinctive fear of outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifices they felt bound to demand. In the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value in their methods and tactics. Today they cannot dispense with it. It is fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability. Without it they would stand before history, at best, as only the last of that long succession of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee external security of their internally weak regimes. This is why Soviet purposes must always be solemnly clothed in trappings of Marxism, and why no one should underrate importance of dogma in Soviet affairs. Thus Soviet leaders are driven [by?] necessities of their own past and present position to put forward a dogma which [apparent omission] outside world as evil, hostile and menacing, but as bearing within itself germs of creeping disease and destined to be wracked with growing internal convulsions until it is given final coup de grace by rising power of socialism and yields to new and better world. This thesis provides justification for the increase of military and police power of Russian state, for that isolation of Russian population from outside world, and for that fluid and constant pressure to extend limits of Russian police power which are together the natural and instinctive urges of Russian rulers. Basically this is only the steady advance of uneasy Russian nationalism, a centuries old movement in which conceptions of offense and defense are inextricably confused. But in new guise of international Marxism, with its honeyed promises to a desperate and war torn outside world, it is more dangerous and insidious than ever before. …
In summary, we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure. This political force has complete power of disposition over energies of one of world’s greatest peoples and resources of world’s richest national territory, and is borne along by deep and powerful currents of Russian nationalism. In addition, it has an elaborate and far flung apparatus for exertion of its influence in other countries, an apparatus of amazing flexibility and versatility, managed by people whose experience and skill in underground methods are presumably without parallel in history. Finally, it is seemingly inaccessible to considerations of reality in its basic reactions. For it, the vast fund of objective fact about human society is not, as with us, the measure against which outlook is constantly being tested and re-formed, but a grab bag from which individual items are selected arbitrarily and tendenciously to bolster an outlook already preconceived. This is admittedly not a pleasant picture. … But I would like to record my conviction that problem is within our power to solve–and that without recourse to any general military conflict. And in support of this conviction there are certain observations of a more encouraging nature I should like to make:
1. Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventuristic. It does not work by fixed plans. It does not take unnecessary risks. Impervious to logic of reason, and it is highly sensitive to logic of force. For this reason it can easily withdraw–and usually does–when strong resistance is encountered at any point. Thus, if the adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to use it, he rarely has to do so. If situations are properly handled there need be no prestige-engaging showdowns.
2. Gauged against Western World as a whole, Soviets are still by far the weaker force. Thus, their success will really depend on degree of cohesion, firmness and vigor which Western World can muster. And this is factor which it is within our power to influence.
3. Success of Soviet system, as form of internal power, is not yet finally proven. It has yet to be demonstrated that it can survive supreme test of successive transfer of power from one individual or group to another. Lenin’s death was first such transfer, and its effects wracked Soviet state for 15 years. After Stalin’s death or retirement will be second. But even this will not be final test. Soviet internal system will now be subjected, by virtue of recent territorial expansions, to series of additional strains which once proved severe tax on Tsardom. We here are convinced that never since termination of civil war have mass of Russian people been emotionally farther removed from doctrines of Communist Party than they are today. In Russia, party has now become a great and–for the moment–highly successful apparatus of dictatorial administration, but it has ceased to be a source of emotional inspiration. Thus, internal soundness and permanence of movement need not yet be regarded as assured.
4. All Soviet propaganda beyond Soviet security sphere is basically negative and destructive. It should therefore be relatively easy to combat it by any intelligent and really constructive program.
“An Iron Curtain Has Descended Across the Continent”
Winston Churchill
(1946)
The United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power. It is a solemn moment for the American democracy. With primacy in power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future. As you look around you, you feel not only the sense of duty done but also feel anxiety lest you fall below the level of achievement. Opportunity is here now, clear and shining, for both our countries. To reject it or ignore it or fritter it away will bring upon us all the long reproaches of the after-time. It is necessary that constancy of mind, persistency of purpose, and the grand simplicity of decision shall guide and rule the conduct of the English speaking peoples in peace as they did in war. …
A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory. Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organization intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytizing tendencies. I have a strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin. There is sympathy and good will in Britain–and I doubt not here also–toward the peoples of all the Russias and a resolve to persevere through many differences and rebuffs in establishing lasting friendships.
We understand the Russian need to be secure on her western frontiers from all renewal of German aggression. We welcome her to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world. Above all, we welcome constant, frequent, and growing contacts between Russian people and our own people on both sides of the Atlantic. It is my duty, however, to place before you certain facts about the present position in Europe.
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in the Soviet sphere and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone, with its immortal glories, is free to decide its future at an election under British, American, and French observation. …
If now the Soviet government tries, by separate action, to build up a pro-Communist Germany in their areas, this will cause new serious difficulties in the British and American zones, and will give the defeated Germans the power of putting themselves up to auction between the Soviets and the Western democracies. Whatever conclusions may be drawn from these facts–and facts they are–this is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build up. Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace.
In front of the iron curtain which lies across Europe are other causes for anxiety. In Italy the Communist party is seriously hampered by having to support the Communist-trained Marshall Tito’s claims to former Italian territory at the head of the Adriatic. Nevertheless, the future of Italy hangs in the balance. Again, one cannot imagine a regenerated Europe without a strong France. …
However, in a great number of countries, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout the world, Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist center. Except in the British Commonwealth, and in the United States, where communism is in its infancy, the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization. These are somber facts for anyone to have to recite on the morrow of a victory gained by so much splendid comradeship in arms and in the cause of freedom and democracy, and we should be most unwise not to face them squarely while time remains. …
Our difficulties and dangers will not be removed by closing our eyes to them; they will not be removed by mere waiting to see what happens; nor will they be relieved by a policy of appeasement. What is needed is a settlement, and the longer this is delayed, the more difficult it will be and the greater our dangers will become. From what I have seen of our Russian friends and allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for military weakness. For that reason the old doctrine of a balance of power is unsound. We cannot afford, if we can help it, to work on narrow margins, offering temptations to a trial of strength. If the Western democracies stand together in strict adherence to the principles of the United Nations Charter, their influence for furthering these principles will be immense and no one is likely to molest them. If, however, they become divided or falter in their duty, and if these all-important years are allowed to slip away, then indeed catastrophe may overwhelm us all.
A Soviet Assessment of American Post-war Intentions
Nikolai Novikov
(1946)
The foreign policy of the United States, which reflects the imperialist tendencies of American monopolistic capital, is characterized in the postwar period by a striving for world supremacy. This is the real meaning of the many statements by President Truman and other representatives of American ruling circles: that the United States has the right to lead the world. All the forces of American diplomacy–the army, the air force, the navy, industry and science–are enlisted in the service of this foreign policy. For this purpose broad plans for expansion have been developed and are being implemented through diplomacy and the establishment of a system of naval and air bases stretching far beyond the boundaries of the United States, through the arms race, and through the creation of ever newer types of weapons. …
Europe has come out of the war with a completely dislocated economy, and the economic devastation that occurred in the course of the war cannot be overcome in a short time. All of the countries of Europe and Asia are experiencing a colossal need for consumer goods, industrial and transportation equipment, etc. Such a situation provides American monopolistic capital with prospects for enormous shipments of goods and the importation of capital into these countries–a circumstance that would permit it to infiltrate their national economies.
Such a development would mean serious strengthening of the economic position of the United States in the whole world and would be a stage on the road to world domination by the United States.
On the other hand, we have seen a failure of calculations on the part of U.S. circles which assumed that the Soviet Union would be destroyed in the war or would come out of it so weakened that it would be forced to go begging to the United States for economic assistance. Had that happened, they would have been able to dictate conditions permitting the United States to carry out its expansion in Europe and Asia without hindrance from the USSR. …
President Truman’s Plan to Contain the Soviet Union
Harry S Truman (1947)
The United States has received from the Greek Government an urgent appeal for financial and economic assistance. Preliminary reports from the American Economic Mission now in Greece and reports from the American Ambassador in Greece corroborate the statement of the Greek Government that assistance is imperative if Greece is to survive as a free nation. …
The British Government has informed us that, owing to its own difficulties, it can no longer extend financial or economic aid to Turkey.
As in the case of Greece, if Turkey is to have the assistance it needs, the United States must supply it. We are the only country able to provide that help.
I am fully aware of the broad implications involved if the United States extends assistance to Greece and Turkey, and I shall discuss these implications with you at this time.
One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion. This was a fundamental issue in the war with Germany and Japan. Our victory was won over countries which sought to impose their will, and their way of life, upon other nations.
To ensure the peaceful development of nations, free from coercion, the United States has taken a leading part in establishing the United Nations. The United Nations is designed to make possible lasting freedom and independence for all its members. We shall not realize our objectives, however, unless we are willing to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes. This is no more than a frank recognition that totalitarian regimes imposed upon free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States.
The peoples of a number of countries of the world have recently had totalitarian regimes forced upon them against their will. The Government of the United States has made frequent protests against coercion and intimidation, in violation of the Yalta agreement, in Poland, Rumania, and Bulgaria. I must also state that in a number of other countries there have been similar developments.
At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.
One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.
The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.
I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.
I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.
I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.
The world is not static, and the status quo is not sacred. But we cannot allow changes in thestatus quo in violation of the Charter of the United Nations by such methods as coercion, or by such subterfuges as political infiltration. In helping free and independent nations to maintain their freedom, the United States will be giving effect to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
It is necessary only to glance at a map to realize that the survival and integrity of the Greek nation are of grave importance in a much wider situation. If Greece should fall under the control of an armed minority, the effect upon its neighbor, Turkey, would be immediate and serious. Confusion and disorder might well spread throughout the entire Middle East.
Moreover, the disappearance of Greece as an independent state would have a profound effect upon those countries in Europe whose peoples are struggling against great difficulties to maintain their freedoms and their independence while they repair the damages of war. …
Should we fail to aid Greece and Turkey in this fateful hour, the effect will be far reaching to the West as well as to the East.
We must take immediate and resolute action.
I therefore ask the Congress to provide authority for assistance to Greece and Turkey is the amount of $400,000,000 for the period ending June 30, 1948. In requesting these funds, I have taken into consideration the maximum amount of relief assistance which would be furnished to Greece out of the $350,000,000 which I recently requested that the Congress authorize for the prevention of starvation and suffering in countries devastated by the war.
In addition to funds, I ask the Congress to authorize the detail of American civilian and military personnel to Greece and Turkey, at the request of those countries, to assist in the tasks of reconstruction, and for the purpose of supervising the use of such financial and material assistance as may be furnished. I recommend that authority also be provided for the instruction and training of selected Greek and Turkish personnel. …
This is a serious course upon which we embark.
I would not recommend it except that the alternative is much more serious. The United States contributed $341,000,000,000 toward winning World War II. This is an investment in world freedom and world peace.
The assistance that I am recommending for Greece and Turkey amounts to little more than 1/10 of 1 percent of this investment. It is only common sense that we should safeguard this investment and make sure that it was not in vain.
The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died.
We must keep that hope alive.
The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms.
If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world–and we shall surely endanger the welfare of this Nation.
Great responsibilities have been placed upon us by the swift movement of events.
I am confident that the Congress will face these responsibilities squarely.
Presidential Defiance: “Ich bin ein Berliner”
John F. Kennedy
(1961)
There are some people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world.
Let them come to Berlin!
There are some who say that Communism is the wave of the future.
Let them come to Berlin!
And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists.
Let them come to Berlin!
And there are even a few who say that it is true that Communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress.
Lass sie nach Berlin kommen! Let them come to Berlin!
I know of no town, no city, that has been besieged for eighteen years, that still lives with the vitality and the force and the determination of the city of West Berlin.
When all are free the people of West Berlin can take sober satisfaction in the fact that they were in the front lines for almost two decades.
All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin. And, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words: “Ich bin ein Berliner.”
Post-war Soviet Literature Is Brought to Heel by Stalin’s Cultural Hatchetman
Andrei Zhdanov
(1947)
It is clear from the Central Committee’s decision that Zvezda’s worst mistake has been that of allowing the writings of [Nikolai] Zoshchenko and [Anna] Akhmatova to appear in its pages. It is, I think, hardly necessary for me to instance Zoshchenko’s “work” The Adventures of a Monkey. You have certainly all read it and know it better than I do. The point of this “work” of Zoshchenko’s is that in it he portrays Soviet people as lazy, unattractive, stupid and crude. He is in no way concerned with their labour, their efforts, their heroism, their high social and moral qualities. He never so much as mentions these. He chooses, like the cheap philistine he is, to scratch about in life’s basenesses and pettinesses. This is no accident. It is intrinsic in all cheap philistine writers, of whom Zoshchenko is one. …
Is it possible to fall morally and politically lower than this? How can the people of Leningrad tolerate such rubbish and vulgarity in the pages of their journals?
The Leningraders in charge of Zvezda must indeed be lacking in vigilance if a “work” of this sort is offered to the journal’s Soviet readers, if it is found possible to publish works steeped in the venom of bestial enmity towards the Soviet order. Only the scum of the literary world could write such “works,” and only the blind, the apolitical could allow them to appear….
Zoshchenko’s thoroughly rotten and corrupt social, political and literary attitude does not result from any recent transformation. There is nothing accidental about his latest “works.” They are simply the continuation of his literary “legacy” dating from the twenties. …
What is the cause of these errors and failings [by the Leningrad literary journals]?
It is that the editors of the said journals, our Soviet men of letters, and the leaders of our ideological front in Leningrad, have forgotten some of the principal tenets of Leninism as regards literature. Many writers, and many of those working as responsible editors, or holding important posts in the Writers’ Union, consider politics to be the business of the Government or of the Central Committee. When it comes to men of letters, engaging in politics is no business of theirs. If a man has done a good, artistic, fine piece of writing, his work should be published even though it contains vicious elements liable to confuse and poison the minds of our young people.
We demand that our comrades, both practising writers and those in positions of literary leadership, should be guided by that without which the Soviet order cannot live, that is to say, by politics, so that our young people may be brought up not in the spirit of do-nothing and don’t care, but in an optimistic revolutionary spirit. …
Lenin was the first to state clearly what attitude towards art and literature advanced social thought should take. Let me remind you of the well-known article, Party Organisation and Party Literature, which he wrote at the end of 1905, and in which he demonstrated with characteristic forcefulness that literature cannot but have a partisan adherence and that it must form an important part of the general proletarian cause. All the principles on which the development of our Soviet literature is based are to be found in this article. …
The lack of ideological principles shown by leading workers on Zvezda and Leningrad has led to a second serious mistake. Certain of our leading workers have, in their relations with various authors, set personal interests, the interests of friendship, above those of the political education of the Soviet people or these authors’ political tendencies. It is said that many ideologically harmful and from a literary point of view weak productions are allowed to be published because the editor does not like to hurt the author’s feelings. In the eyes of such workers it is better to sacrifice the interests of the people and of the state than to hurt some author’s feelings. This is an entirely wrong and politically dangerous principle. It is like swapping a million roubles for a kopeck. …
However fine may be the external appearance of the work of the fashionable modern bourgeois writers in America and Western Europe, and of their film directors and theatrical producers, they can neither save nor better their bourgeois culture, for its moral basis is rotten and decaying. It has been placed at the service of capitalist private ownership, of the selfish and egocentric interests of the top layer of bourgeois society. A swarm of bourgeois writers, film directors and theatrical producers are trying to draw the attention of the progressive strata of society away from the acute problems of social and political struggle and to divert it into a groove of cheap meaningless art and literature, treating of gangsters and show-girls and glorifying the adulterer and the adventures of crooks and gamblers.
Is it fitting for us Soviet patriots, the representatives of advanced Soviet culture, to play the part of admirers or disciples of bourgeois culture? Our literature, reflecting an order on a higher level than any bourgeois-democratic order and a culture manifoldly superior to bourgeois culture, has, it goes without saying, the right to teach the new universal morals to others. …
The New Class: The Marxist Dialectic at Work in the Soviet Union
Milovan Djilas (1954)
The greatest illusion [of Communism] was that industrialization and collectivization in the U.S.S.R., and destruction of capitalist ownership, would result in a classless society. In 1936, when the new Constitution was promulgated, Stalin announced that the “exploiting class” had ceased to exist. The capitalist and other classes of ancient origin had in fact been destroyed, but a new class, previously unknown to history, had been formed.
It is understandable that this class, like those before it, should believe that the establishment of its power would result in happiness and freedom for all men. The only difference between this and other classes was that it treated the delay in the realization of its illusions more crudely. It thus affirmed that its power was more complete than the power of any other class before in history, and its class illusions and prejudices were proportionally greater.
This new class, the bureaucracy, or more accurately the political bureaucracy, has all the characteristics of earlier ones as well as some new characteristics of its own.
The “Secret Speech” Launches De-Stalinization
Nikita Khrushchev
(1956)
At the present we are concerned with a question which has immense importance for the party now and for the future–[we are concerned] with how the cult of the person of Stalin has been gradually growing, the cult which became at a certain specific stage the source of a whole series of exceedingly serious and grave perversions of party principles, of party democracy, of revolutionary legality. …
When we analyze the practice of Stalin in regard to the direction of the party and of the country, when we pause to consider everything which Stalin perpetrated, we must be convinced that Lenin’s fears were justified. The negative characteristics of Stalin, which, in Lenin’s time, were only incipient, transformed themselves during the last years into a grave abuse of power by Stalin, which caused untold harm to our Party. …
Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation, and patient co-operation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed this concept or tried to prove his viewpoint, and the correctness of his position, was doomed to removal from the leading collective and to subsequent moral and physical annihilation. This was especially true during the period following the XVIIth Party Congress [1934], when many prominent party leaders and rank-and-file party workers, honest and dedicated to the cause of Communism, fell victim to Stalin’s despotism.
We must affirm that the party had fought a serious fight against the Trotskyites, rightists and bourgeois nationalists, and that it disarmed ideologically all the enemies of Leninism. This ideological fight was carried on successfully, as a result of which the Party became strengthened and tempered. Here Stalin played a positive role. …
It was precisely during this period (1935-1937-1938) that the practice of mass repression through the government apparatus was born, first against the enemies of Leninism–Trotskyites, Zinovievites, Bukharinites, long since politically defeated by the party–and subsequently also against many honest Communists, against those party cadres who had borne the heavy load of the Civil War and the first and most difficult years of industrialization and collectivization, who actively fought against the Trotskyites and the rightists for the Leninist Party line. …
This led to glaring violations of revolutionary legality, and to the fact that many entirely innocent persons, who in the past had defended the party line, became victims.
We must assert that in regard to those persons who in their time had opposed the party line, there were often no sufficiently serious reasons for their physical annihilation. The formula, “enemy of the people,” was specifically introduced for the purpose of physically annihilating such individuals. …
… Many party, soviet and economic activists who were branded in 1937-1938 as “enemies” were actually never enemies, spies, wreckers, etc., but were always honest Communists; they were only so stigmatized, and often, no longer able to bear barbaric tortures, they charged themselves (at the order of the investigative judges–falsifiers) with all kinds of grave and unlikely crimes. The commission [for investigation of the purge] has presented to the Central Committee Presidium lengthy and documented materials pertaining to mass repressions against the delegates to the XVIIth Party Congress and against members of the Central Committee elected at that Congress. These materials have been studied by the Presidium of the Central Committee.
It was determined that of the 139 members and candidates of the Party’s Central Committee who were elected at the XVIIth Congress, 98 persons, i.e., 70 percent, were arrested and shot (mostly in 1937-1938). (Indignation in the hall) …
Facts prove that many abuses were made on Stalin’s orders without reckoning with any norms of party and Soviet legality. Stalin was a very distrustful man, sickly suspicious; we knew this from our work with him. He could look at a man and say: “Why are your eyes so shifty today?” or “Why are you turning so much today and avoiding to look me directly in the eyes?” The sickly suspicion created in him a general distrust even toward eminent party workers whom he had known for years. Everywhere and in everything he saw “enemies,” “two-facers” and “spies.”
Possessing unlimited power he indulged in great willfulness and choked a person morally and physically. A situation was created where one could not express one’s own will.
When Stalin said that one or another should be arrested, it was necessary to accept on faith that he was an “enemy of the people.” Meanwhile, Beria’s gang, which ran the organs of state security, outdid itself in proving the guilt of the arrested and the truth of materials which it falsified. And what proofs were offered? The confessions of the arrested, and the investigative judges accepted these “confessions.” And how is it possible that a person confesses to crimes which he has not committed? Only in one way–because of application of physical methods of pressuring him, tortures, bringing him to a state of unconsciousness, deprivation of his judgment, taking away of his human dignity. In this manner were “confessions” acquired. …
I recall the first days when the conflict between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia began artificially to be blown up. Once, when I came from Kiev to Moscow, I was invited to visit Stalin who, pointing to the copy of a letter lately sent to Tito, asked me, “Have you read this?” Not waiting for my reply he answered, “I will shake my little finger–and there will be no more Tito. He will fall.” …
But this did not happen to Tito. No matter how much or how little Stalin shook, not only his little finger but everything else that he could shake, Tito did not fall. Why? The reason was that, in this case of disagreement with the Yugoslav comrades, Tito had behind him a state and a people who had gone through a severe school of fighting for liberty and independence, a people which gave support to its leaders.
You see to what Stalin’s mania for greatness led. He had completely lost consciousness of reality; he demonstrated his suspicion and haughtiness not only in relation to individuals in the USSR, but in relation to whole parties and nations. …
Some comrades may ask us: Where were the members of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee? Why did they not assert themselves against the cult of the individual in time? And why is this being done only now?
First of all we have to consider the fact that the members of the Political Bureau viewed these matters in a different way at different times. Initially, many of them backed Stalin actively because Stalin was one of the strongest Marxists and his logic, his strength and his will greatly influenced the cadres and party work. …
Later, however, Stalin, abusing his power more and more, began to fight eminent party and government leaders and to use terroristic methods against honest Soviet people. …
In the situation which then prevailed I have talked often with Nikolai Alexandrovich Bulganin; once when we two were traveling in a car, he said, “It has happened sometimes that a man goes to Stalin on his invitation as a friend. And when he sits with Stalin, he does not know where he will be sent next, home or to jail.”
It is clear that such conditions put every member of the Political Bureau in a very difficult situation. And when we also consider the fact that in the last years the Central Committee plenary sessions were not convened and that the sessions of the Political Bureau occurred only occasionally, from time to time, then we will understand how difficult it was for any member of the Political Bureau to take a stand against one or another injust or improper procedure, against serious errors and shortcomings in the practices of leadership. …
Comrades: We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all; we must draw the proper conclusions concerning both ideological-theoretical and practical work.
It is necessary for this purpose: … to return to and actually practice in all our ideological work the most important theses of Marxist-Leninist science about the people as the creator of history and as the creator of all material and spiritual good of humanity, about the decisive role of the Marxist Party in the revolutionary fight for the transformation of society, about the victory of Communism. …
We are absolutely certain that our party, armed with the historical resolutions of the XXth Congress, will lead the Soviet people along the Leninist path to new successes, to new victories. (Tumultuous, prolonged applause)
Long live the victorious banner of our party–Leninism! (Tumultuous, prolonged applause ending in ovation. All rise.)
A British Journalist Witnesses the Hungarian Revolution
Anthony Rhodes (1956)
In the Stalin square the next morning [late October, 1956], the people of Budapest had not only pulled down the dictator’s statue, they were feverishly chopping it up into little bits, so that not a trace should remain. Outside the Communist Party headquarters was a mountain of cinders, consisting of burnt communist books and pamphlets. A ceaseless hail of these came hurtling out of the windows, together with paintings and photographs of Stalin, Lenin and Rakosi [the Hungarian Communist leader], to keep the fires alight. Even gramophone records of the leaders’ speeches added to the blaze.
When these busy people realized who we were, they clustered around, beseeching us to let our countrymen know the truth, suggesting that we should take photographs of a big oil painting of Stalin which had just been hideously defaced. They slapped us on the back and shook our hands a dozen times, until we felt that we, not they, had liberated their city. An old woman in tears kissed my hand as if I were a Monsignore; and one of the Austrians suddenly found himself clasping two babies.
Meanwhile inside the building, a grim AVO [Allamvedelmi Osztaly, State Security Department] hunt was in progress. A number of AVO men had just been caught in the sewers and hanged, I was told. Would I care to step inside and take some photographs of them, for the benefit of the West? But the sight of the hanged men the night before had been enough, and I refused this invitation. The AVO men had evidently imagined that their Russian masters would quickly dominate the situation, and they had been waiting underground (literally) for this to happen. But when the lull came and they appeared in public again, they found to their dismay not the Russians, but the population of Budapest, in control. Their cruelties of the past were now expiated. After execution, their bodies were left hanging for an hour or so, for all to see; then the dustcarts came and took them away, and more were displayed. The Hungarians never seemed to tire of looking at the corpses of their late masters. To see the hate combined with glee on the faces of some of these people as they gazed on them was to realize what communism had done in ten years to the Hungarian mind. …
[On November 2] I was standing near the Chain bridge watching [the Soviets'] families leave, when an English journalist I had met the day before ran up to me and said, “If you want the story of your life, come to the Parliament buildings now! Nagy is about to make an important declaration about the Warsaw Pact.”
I followed him to this building where, by showing his journalist’s pass, he was able to take me upstairs, through salons and corridors full of the Biedermeyer furnishings, marble-mounted and ormolu mirrors from the last century, to the door of the cabinet room. Here, he said, the government had been in session for two hours, arguing about the weighty decision they are about to take.
On the first landing we were told to wait in a reception room, in which other journalists were walking up and down with notebooks. Suddenly the big doors opposite opened and we saw, for a moment, Kadar the new first secretary of the Communist Party, seated at a table, and at his shoulder the Prime Minister, Imre Nagy. Near the wall was the President, Tildy, whose voice seemed raised in argument. On the other side of the table, out of view, sat (we did not know it at the time), the Russian ambassador [Yuri] Andropov.[1]
A quarter of an hour later, an official from the Hungarian Foreign Office, whom my friend evidently knew, came out of the cabinet room quickly. Taking him by the arm he said in English, “Have you a motorcar? Well, leave Budapest immediately! Don’t waste time here asking for more news. When it comes, you won’t be able to leave.”
He said that the government had decided to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact, and had appealed for help to the United Nations. Whatever Nagy might feel personally about the wisdom of this step, he felt it was the will of the Hungarian people. Some of the cabinet, and of course the Soviet ambassador, were trying to dissuade him; “And the pro-Russian forces in the cabinet will finally win,” he said. “Nagy is now going to the radio building to make the announcement. But you see what will happen afterwards.”
Five minutes later we saw the Russian ambassador leave hurriedly; and a half an hour later, Nagy went to make the courageous statement about withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact, which meant that Hungary was no longer a satellite–which was responsible virtually, too, for the second Russian intervention. But in the streets that evening the Hungarians were elated. “Nagy has cleaned his slate,” they said. “We can support him, he’s our man now.” …
[The British Legation soon ordered all British journalists and non-essential personnel to leave the country, sensing what was about to happen. Rhodes and others in his party drove westward, toward the Austrian frontier.]
A wintry gale from the south-east was now blowing, stripping off the leaves and sweeping them along in slanting squalls of snow and sleet. Not far from Gyor, we ran into a heavy snow-storm and then, through the falling flakes, we saw ahead a large tank going in our direction. “A 50-ton Stalin,” said one of the British officials in our party learnedly. “What splendid tanks the Russians have left the insurgents!”
It was difficult to pass this tank because it was moving west too: I blew the horn impatiently, to get it to withdraw to the side of the road. At length we managed to squeeze past, only to find ahead of it another Stalin tank of the same size. Again I blew the horn in irritation–and again at last we managed to pass. But there was yet another tank in front of this and then, as we rounded a corner, a whole line of them running out ahead, about fifteen, trundling along, wagging their guns and antennae.
“Really! These insurgent tanks ought to get off the roads to let us pass,” said the British official again. But then as we passed one of them, a face appeared at the turret and looked down–a Mongolian face. ” … they are Russians!” he finished lamely.
Our car was in fact sandwiched in a long column of Russian tanks. More Mongoloid faces peered down at us as we passed, blank, expressionless, slit-eyed, beneath bell-shaped helmets. The Russians were bringing up their eastern troops. With these not particularly reassuring road companions we remained for nearly threequarters of an hour, trying to pass. It is understandable that to men in such machines the ordinary, standard motor-horn means little or nothing.
After Gyor, we saw more Russians in a maize field at the side of the road–armoured cars with tents around them, soldiers eating their midday meal out of messtins in the snow. Young for the most part, the term “simple soldier” applied to these men admirably. Of the thirty or so I saw, twenty at least were Mongoloid, almost Chinese, in appearance; several had taken off their helmets and were scratching their shaven heads. These were the troops who were gathering around Budapest for the assault due to take place in two days’ time. Although dirty and slovenly in appearance, there was a businesslike air about their equipment and vehicles. They could clearly move, fire and communicate with one another by wireless. And what more can you ask of the modern soldier?
We later learned that we were one of the last Western convoys these Russian troops allowed through. A few hours later, their tanks fanned out along the Austrian frontier, closing it completely, in preparation for the assault. To travellers from Budapest, Red Cross personnel, or journalists wishing to “file” their cables in Vienna, they repeated the two words,” Niet Wien!”stubbornly, and forced them to return to Gyor, Magyarovar, or Budapest itself. In this way we came to Nickelsdorf again, and left the people, who, by liberating themselves, were soon to liberate Eastern Europe from the excesses of communism.
[1] In 1982-1983 Andropov would serve as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Describes the Stalinist Gulag
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
(1962)
At that very moment the door bolt rattled to break the calm that now reigned in the barracks. From the corridor ran two of the prisoners …
“Second count,” they shouted.
On their heels came a guard.
“All out to the other half.” …
“Damn them,” said Shukhov. Mildly, because he hadn’t gone to sleep yet.
Tsezar raised a hand and gave him two biscuits, two lumps of sugar, and a slice of sausage.
“Thank you, Tsezar Markovich,” said Shukhov, leaning over the edge of his bunk. …
Then he waited a little till more men had been sent out–he wouldn’t have to stand barefoot so long in the corridor. But the guard scowled at him and shouted: “Come on, you there in the corner.” …
“Do you want to be carried out, you shits?” the barracks commander shouted.
They shoved them all into the other half of the barracks … Shukhov stood against the wall near the bucket. The floor was moist underfoot. An icy draft crept in from the porch.
They had them all out now, and once again the guard and the orderly did their round, looking for any who might be dozing in dark corners. There’d be trouble if they counted short. …
Shukhov managed to squeeze in eighteenth. He ran back to his bunk …
All right. Feet back into the sleeve of his jacket. Blanket on top. Then the coat. …
Now for that slice of sausage. Into the mouth. Getting your teeth into it. Your teeth. The meaty taste. And the meaty juice, the real stuff. Down it goes, into your belly.
Gone. …
Shukhov went to sleep fully content. He’d had many strokes of luck that day: they hadn’t put him in the cells; they hadn’t sent his squad to the settlement; he’d swiped a bowl of kasha at dinner. …
Maternal and Infant Health Care Statistics for the New Socialist Society
Czechoslovakian Government
(1948-1978)
1948 1957 1967 1976 1978
Resources
Prenatal clinics 434 1,625 1,812 1,840 1,840
Obstetrical/gynecological beds 6,531 12,624 14,856 15,932 15,935
Specialized obstetricians 326 1,030 1,865 2,341 2,407
Midwives 2,643 4,648 5,570 6,387 6,510
Activities
Deliveries in maternity homes (%) 41 86 99.2 99.8 99.8
Average number of visits to
prenatal clinics per woman 0.6 3.9 7.1 9.2 9.4
Outcome
Maternal mortality rate per
100,000 deliveries 137 63 28 15 13
Cases of eclampsia per
100,000 deliveries 122 68 35 34
Perinatal mortality rate per
1,000 live births 51 26.3 20.9 20.3 18.5
Stillbirth rate per 1,000 live
births 19 11.6 7.1 6.8 6.0
Early neonatal mortality rate
per 1,000 live births 32 14.7 13.8 13.5 12.5
An American Plan to Rebuild a Shattered Europe
George C. Marshall
(1947)
I need not tell you, gentlemen, that the world situation is very serious. That must be apparent to all intelligent people. I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. Furthermore, the people of this country are distant from the troubled areas of the earth and it is hard for them to comprehend the plight and consequent reactions of the long-suffering peoples, and the effect of those reactions on their governments in connection with our efforts to promote peace in the world.
In considering the requirements for the rehabilitation of Europe the physical loss of life, the visible destruction of cities, factories, mines and railroads was correctly estimated, but it has become obvious during recent months that this visible destruction was probably less serious than the dislocation of the entire fabric of European economy. For the past ten years conditions have been highly abnormal.
The feverish preparation for war and the more feverish maintenance of the war effort engulfed all aspects of national economies. Machinery has fallen into disrepair or is entirely obsolete. Under the arbitrary and destructive Nazi rule, virtually every possible enterprise was geared into the German war machine. Long-standing commercial ties, private institutions, banks, insurance companies and shipping companies disappeared, through loss of capital, absorption through nationalization or by simple destruction.
In many countries, confidence in the local currency has been severely shaken. The breakdown of the business structure of Europe during the war was complete. Recovery has been seriously retarded by the fact that two years after the close of hostilities a peace settlement with Germany and Austria has not been agreed upon. But even given a more prompt solution of these difficult problems, the rehabilitation of the economic structure of Europe quite evidently will require a much longer time and greater effort than had been foreseen.
There is a phase of this matter which is both interesting and serious. The farmer has always produced the foodstuffs to exchange with the city dweller for the other necessities of life. This division of labor is the basis of modern civilization. At the present time it is threatened with breakdown. The town and city industries are not producing adequate goods to exchange with the food-producing farmer. Raw materials and fuel are in short supply. Machinery is lacking or worn out.
The farmer or the peasant cannot find the goods for sale which he desires to purchase. So the sale of his farm produce for money which he cannot use seems to him an unprofitable transaction. He, therefore, has withdrawn many fields from crop cultivation and is using them for grazing. He feeds more grain to stock and finds for himself and his family an ample supply of food, however short he may be on clothing and the other ordinary gadgets of civilization. Meanwhile, people in the cities are short of food and fuel. So the governments are forced to use their foreign money and credits to procure these necessities abroad. This process exhausts funds which are urgently needed for reconstruction. Thus a very serious situation is rapidly developing which bodes no good for the world. The modern system of the division of labor upon which the exchange of products is based is in danger of breaking down.
The truth of the matter is that Europe’s requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products–principally from America–are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help, or face economic, social and political deterioration of a very grave character.
The remedy lies in breaking the vicious circle and restoring the confidence of the European people in the economic future of their own countries and of Europe as a whole. The manufacturer and the farmer throughout wide areas must be able and willing to exchange their products for currencies, the continuing value of which is not open to question.
Aside from the demoralizing effect on the world at large and the possibilities of disturbances arising as a result of the desperation of the people concerned, the consequences to the economy of the United States should be apparent to all. It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.
Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist. Such assistance, I am convinced, must not be on a piecemeal basis as various crises develop. Any assistance that this Government may render in the future should provide a cure rather than a mere palliative.
Any government that is willing to assist in the task of recovery will find full cooperation, I am sure, on the part of the United States Government. Any government which maneuvers to block the recovery of other countries cannot expect help from us. Furthermore, governments, political parties or groups which seek to perpetuate human misery in order to profit therefrom politically or otherwise will encounter the opposition of the United States.
It is already evident that, before the United States Government can proceed much further in its efforts to alleviate the situation and help start the European world on its way to recovery, there must be some agreement among the countries of Europe as to the requirements of the situation and the part those countries themselves will take in order to give proper effect to whatever action might be undertaken by this Government. It would be neither fitting nor efficacious for this Government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a program designed to place Europe on its feet economically. This is the business of the Europeans. The initiative, I think, must come from Europe. The role of this country should consist of friendly aid in the drafting of a European program and of later support of such a program so far as it may be practical for us to do so. The program should be a joint one, agreed to by a number of, if not all, European nations.
An essential part of any successful action on the part of the United States is an understanding on the part of the people of America of the character of the problem and the remedies to be applied. Political passion and prejudice should have no part. With foresight, and a willingness on the part of our people to face up to the vast responsibility which history has clearly placed upon our country, the difficulties I have outlined can and will be overcome.
Post-war Germany: Conditions in the British Zone of Occupation
British Army
(1947)
The situation in Germany has been affected by certain outstanding events. First, there was the Agreement, signed in New York in December, 1946, for the fusion of the British and American Zones. The principal objects of the Agreement were the improved administration of the economy of the two Zones and the provision of money for their economic rehabilitation. This entailed the setting up of a bipartite administration and the hastening of the transfer of power to the Germans in the British Zone, which was not so advanced in this matter as the American Zone. The second event was the transfer of considerable powers of local government to the German Governments at Land [state] level and below. Among the powers transferred were responsibility for education, public health and the police. Thirdly, in chronological order, was the severity of last winter. Its effects are still being felt. Great hardships were suffered, industry almost came to a standstill and the fusion agreement had a bad start. Fourthly, there was the failure of the Foreign Ministers’ Conference in Moscow, which had serious effects for Germany, and made quadripartite agreement even more difficult. A direct result of this failure was the fifth major event, the strengthening of the fusion agreement and the setting up of a central bizonal economic organization at Frankfurt. Lastly, there was the breakdown in the food supply in the spring, which led to a severe shortage from the latter part of March until well into June. The basic ration which was nominally fixed at 1,550 calories fell to below 1,000. As a result, coal production, on which the prosperity of the Zone depends, dropped disastrously at a time when it had just reached a new high level of 233,000 tons a day. In addition, this shortage had a great effect on the morale of the Germans, whose feelings hardened towards those whom they were bound to hold responsible for their conditions.
7. The situation at present may be summarised briefly as follows:–
(1) Disarmament is virtually complete, but demilitarisation by the removal of industrial plant as reparations has hardly begun. …
(2) Denazification has almost finished. At the beginning of October responsibility for it was handed over to the Germans, with instruction that it was to be completed by the end of the year.
(3) In the political sphere, some progress has been made in the democratisation of the German system, such as the introduction of an electoral system by which an elector votes for a candidate and not a party list; but the German Civil Service is still far from being nonpolitical.
(4) The labour problem is acute. Out of a total population in the Zone of about 22 1/4 million, only some 9 million are in employment. To put it in another way, before the war over 47 per cent. of the population was employed. In order to reach this percentage to-day, it would be necessary to increase the labour force by 2 million. The explanation is largely to be found in the present lack of balance in the age groups. Apart from the absence of prisoners of war, the additions to the population of refugees from eastern Germany have aggravated the position. At least 75 per cent of the 1 1/2 million refugees accepted into the Zone have been old and infirm or children. One result is that there is practically no unemployment of fit men, although there is undoubtedly some under-employment.
(5) The food situation remains extremely serious. The basic ration for the normal consumer is now 1,550 calories, but it is not by any means always honoured. The stocks of bread-grains and meat are better than they were at this time last year, but the drought during the summer has reduced the supply of fats and has caused a poor potato harvest. The immediate aim is to increase the ration to at least 1,800 calories, but the prospects for such an increase during the next year are not promising.
(6) The level of coal production, vital to German recovery, follows the level of the food ration. By last March production had risen to 233,000 tons a day, but the shortage of food in the spring caused it to fall to little over 210,000. By September, the figure had reached 240,000 tons.
(7) The volume of industrial production in the British Zone has only increased from 33 per cent. to 34 per cent. of the 1936 figure.[1] The factors which are preventing industrial recovery are lack of food, lack of coal, and lack of incentive, especially the lack of any real purchasing power in the Reichsmark.
(8) Transport is in a very bad state, owing to the lack of steel and timber for the repair of locomotives, rolling stock. … Road transport and the inland waterways are in little better condition. In fact it is difficult to see how it is going to be possible to move any extra coal which the miners may produce. The position is aggravated by the fact that repairs scarcely keep pace with wastage and no new construction is being carried out; and by the delay in the return of a large number of wagons which have travelled outside the Zone, carrying exported coal.
(9) The export trade reflects the general low level of the economy of the combined Zone….
[1] The figure for the combined Zones is 37 per cent.
In Darkest Germany: The Nihilistic Younger Generation
Victor Gollancz
(1947)
The worst thing in Germany–worse than the malnutrition, the overcrowding, the gaping footwear in the schools–is the spiritual condition of the youth. I thought I had touched bottom in Julich, where in cellar after cellar I found 5, 6, 9 people–fathers, mothers, children, adult daughters and sons–all jumbled together without light or air, and lacking even the pretence of any decent privacy. But a conference with young people at Dusseldorf a day later, and then another, were still more horrible; and what I learned then confirmed similar experiences with university students at Kiel and Hamburg.
The attitude of the youth varies from one of a puzzled bewilderment, still friendly to the British–these are in a minority–to bitterness, cynicism and a growing hostility to us and all our works. The mood is not (yet) pro-Nazi: it shows rather a nihilistic contempt for government and governments of every kind. They contrast our promises with our deeds: the B.B.C. told us, they say, that you were coming to liberate us, but what has it all amounted to? I mention democracy; and they ask whether democracy means starvation rations and lack of the barest necessities, or turning people out of their homes and seizing their furniture, or blowing up shipyards, closing down factories, and throwing tens of thousands of men out of employment. I risk a question about Nuremberg; and they say–at the very best–yes, they were guilty, but so are the Allies: look at the expellees, sick, starving and robbed, not thousands of them but millions. Many jeer openly at Nuremberg. I met no single young person who denied the Nazi guilt; but I met very few who thought it in any way special, or different in kind from that of all politicians everywhere. They talk a good deal about justice; and they want to know whether it is just to hale a man off to internment without trial and release him as innocent a year later. They talk, too, about their ostracism by the British on the one hand, and the behaviour of our troops to German girls on the other.
At the root is despair about the future. Time after time I was told “We don’t mind how hard life is if only we can have something to hope for”. But they see their factories being dismantled; they know that hundreds of other factories are on the list; and the majority are convinced that we are determined to ruin them, partly by way of punishment but mainly as commercial rivals. The minority wonders.
And yet–I am convinced of it after contact with them–they had, and perhaps still have, the makings in them of good democrats. After Belsen, the worst of all my experiences was when a university student at Hamburg said in an agonized voice “For God’s sake don’t make us Nazis.” If we are to save them we must (1) stop doing the things they justly criticise, and give instead a living example of the liberal tradition; (2) put a little psychological understanding into our propaganda, which, on such subjects as war guilt or the world food situation, has been contemptible when it has not been non-existent; (3) increase the establishment of the education and youth section of the C.C.G., which is doing devoted work, but is as grotesquely understaffed as Trade and Industry is overstaffed, and is frustrated at every turn into the bargain; (4) remove the nightmare of uncertainty from the German future–which is to say, abandon Potsdam.
Existentialism Defined
Jean Paul Sarte
(1946)
[Existentialism] has been reproached as an invitation to people to dwell in quietism of despair. For if every way to a solution is barred, one would have to regard any action in this world as entirely ineffective, and one would arrive finally at a contemplative philosophy. Moreover, since contemplation is a luxury, this would be only another bourgeois philosophy. This is, especially, the reproach made by the Communists.
From another quarter we are reproached for having underlined all that is ignominious in the human situation …
From the Christian side, we are reproached as people who deny the reality and seriousness of human affairs. For since we ignore the commandments of God and all values prescribed as eternal, nothing remains but what is strictly voluntary. Everyone can do what he likes, and will be incapable, from such a point of view, of condemning either the point of view or the action of anyone else.
It is to these various reproaches that I shall endeavor to reply … [W]e can begin by saying that existentialism, in our sense of the word, is a doctrine that does render human life possible; a doctrine, also, which affirms that every truth and every action imply both an environment and a human subjectivity. …
Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man … What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world–and defines himself afterwards … [T]here is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. …
The Second Sex: Existential Feminism
Simone de Beauvoir
(1949)
According to French law, obedience is no longer included among the duties of a wife, and each woman citizen has the right to vote; but these civil liberties remain theoretical as long as they are unaccompanied by economic freedom. A woman supported by a man–wife or courtesan–is not emancipated from the male because she has a ballot in her hand; if custom imposes less constraint upon her than formerly, the negative freedom implied has not profoundly modified her situation; she remains bound in her condition of vassalage. It is through gainful employment that woman has traversed most of the distance that separated her from the male; and nothing else can guarantee her liberty in practice. Once she ceases to be a parasite, the system based on her dependence crumbles; between her and the universe there is no longer any need for a masculine mediator.
The curse that is upon woman as vassal consists, as we have seen, in the fact that she is not permitted to do anything; so she persists in the vain pursuit of her true being through narcissism, love, or religion. …
It is quite understandable, also, that the milliner’s apprentice, the shopgirl, the secretary, will not care to renounce the advantages of masculine support. I have already pointed out that the existence of a privileged caste, which she can join by merely surrendering her body, is an almost irresistible temptation to the young woman; she is fated for gallantry by the fact that her wages are minimal while the standard of living expected of her by society is very high. If she is content to get along on her wages, she is only a pariah: ill lodged, ill dressed, she will be denied all amusement and even love. Virtuous people preach asceticism to her, and, indeed, her dietary regime is often as austere as that of a Carmelite [nun]. Unfortunately, not everyone can take God as a lover; she has to please men if she is to succeed in her life as a woman. She will therefore accept assistance, and this is what her employer cynically counts on in giving her starvation wages. This aid will sometimes allow her to improve her situation and achieve a real independence; in other cases, however, she will give up her work and become a kept woman. She often retains both sources of income and each serves more or less as an escape from the other; but she is really in double servitude: to job and to protector. For the married woman her wages represent only pin money as a rule; for the girl who “makes something on the side” it is the masculine contribution that seems extra; but neither of them gains complete independence through her own efforts.
There are, however, a fairly large number of privileged women who find in their professions a means of economic and social autonomy. These come to mind when one considers woman’s possibilities and her future. This is the reason why it is especially interesting to make a close study of their situation, even though they constitute as yet only a minority; they continue to be a subject of debate between feminists and antifeminists. The latter assert that the emancipated women of today succeed in doing nothing of importance in the world and that furthermore they have difficulty in achieving their own inner equilibrium. The former exaggerate the results obtained by professional women and are blind to their inner confusion. …
There is one feminine function that is actually almost impossible to perform in complete liberty. It is maternity. In England and America and some other countries a woman can at least decline maternity at will, thanks to contraceptive techniques. We have seen that in France she is often driven to painful and costly abortion or she frequently finds herself responsible for an unwanted child that can ruin her professional life. If this is a heavy charge, it is because inversely, custom does not allow a woman to procreate when she pleases. The unwed mother is a scandal to the community, and [an] illegitimate birth is a stain on the child; only rarely is it possible to become a mother without accepting the chains of marriage or losing caste. If the idea of artificial insemination interests many women, it is not because they wish to avoid intercourse with a male, it is because they hope that freedom of maternity is going to be accepted by society at last. It must be said in addition that in spite of convenient day nurseries and kindergartens, having a child is enough to paralyze a woman’s activity entirely; she can go on working only if she abandons it to relatives, friends, or servants. She is forced to choose between sterility, which is often felt as a painful frustration, and burdens hardly compatible with a career.
Thus the independent woman of today is torn between her professional interests and the problems of her sexual life; it is difficult for her to strike a balance between the two; if she does, it is at the price of concessions, sacrifices, acrobatics, which require her to be in a constant state of tension. …
The free woman is just being born; when she has won possession of herself perhaps Rimbaud’s prophecy will be fulfilled: “There shall be poets! When women’s unmeasured bondage shall be broken, when she shall live for and through herself, man–hitherto detestable–having let her go, she, too, will be poet! Woman will find the unknown! Will her ideational worlds be different from ours? She will come upon strange, unfathomable, repellent, delightful things; we shall take them, we shall comprehend them.” It is not sure that her “ideational worlds” will be different from those of men, since it will be through attaining the same situation as theirs that she will find emancipation; to say in what degree she will remain different, in what degree these differences will retain their importance–this would be to hazard bold predictions indeed. What is certain is that hitherto woman’s possibilities have been suppressed and lost to humanity, and that it is high time she be permitted to take her chances in her own interest and in the interest of all.
Third World Advocate Decries Colonized Peoples’ Loss of Identity
Frantz Fanon
(1952)
I propose nothing short of the liberation of the man of color from himself….
The black schoolboy in the Antilles, who in his lessons is forever talking about “our ancestors, the [French],” identifies himself with the explorer, the bringer of civilization, the white man who carries truth to savages–an all-white truth. There is identification–that is, the young Negro subjectively adopts a white man’s attitude….
Little by little, one can observe in the young Antillean the formation and crystallization of an attitude and a way of thinking and seeing that are essentially white. When in school he has to read stories of savages told by white men, he always thinks of the [African]. … The Negro lives in Africa. Subjectively, intellectually, the Antillean conducts himself like a white man. But he is a Negro. That he will learn once he goes to Europe; and when he hears Negroes mentioned he will recognize that the word includes himself.
The Troubles in Ireland: An IRA Leader Reveals Its Ultimate Aims
Gerry Adams
(1979)
The task that we, as republicans, have set ourselves, and the ills affecting our people and our country are too complex to be satisfied merely by a British withdrawal or by the establishment of a 32 county neo-colonial Free State.[1] We are not, and never have been, merely a ‘Brits Out’ movement. … We stand opposed to all forms and all manifestations of imperialism and capitalism. We stand for an Ireland free, united, socialist and Gaelic. … Our movement needs constructive and thoughtful self-criticism. We also require links with those oppressed by economic and social pressures. Today’s circumstances and our objectives dictate the need for building an agitational struggle in the 26 Counties, an economic resistance movement, linking up republicans with other sections of the working class. It needs to be done now because to date our most glaring weakness lies in our failure to develop revolutionary politics and to build an alternative to so-called constitutional politics.
[1] Historically, Ireland is divided into thirty-two counties; of these, twenty-six today constitute the Republic of Ireland and six remain part of the United Kingdom.
Vatican II: The Catholic Church Engages the Modern World
Pope John XXIII
(1961)
Painful Considerations
Today the Church is witnessing a crisis under way within society. While humanity is on the edge of a new era, tasks of immense gravity and amplitude await the Church, as in the most tragic periods of its history. It is a question in fact of bringing the modern world into contact with the vivifying and perennial energies of the gospel, a world which exalts itself with its conquests in the technical and scientific fields, but which brings also the consequences of a temporal order which some have wished to reorganize excluding God. This is why modern society is earmarked by a great material progress to which there is not a corresponding advance in the moral field.
Hence there is a weakening in the aspiration toward the values of the spirit. Hence an urge for the almost exclusive search for earthly pleasures, which progressive technology places with such ease within the reach of all. And hence there is a completely new and disconcerting fact: the existence of a militant atheism which is active on a world level.
Reasons for Confidence
These painful considerations are a reminder of the duty to be vigilant and to keep the sense of responsibility awake. Distrustful souls see only darkness burdening the face of the earth. We, instead, like to reaffirm all our confidence in our Savior, who has not left the world which He redeemed.
Indeed, we make ours the recommendation of Jesus that one should know how to distinguish the “signs of the times” (Mt. 16:4), and we seem to see now, in the midst of so much darkness, a few indications which auger well for the fate of the Church and of humanity.
The bloody wars that have followed one on the other in our times, the spiritual ruins caused by many ideologies, and the fruits of so many bitter experiences have not been without useful teachings. Scientific progress itself, which gave man the possibility of creating catastrophic instruments for his destruction, has raised questions. It has obliged human beings to become thoughtful, more conscious of their own limitations, desirous of peace, and attentive to the importance of spiritual values. And it has accelerated that progress of closer collaboration and of mutual integration toward which, even though in the midst of a thousand uncertainties, the human family seems to be moving. And this facilitates, no doubt, the apostolate of the Church, since many people who did not realize the importance of its mission in the past are, taught by experience, today more disposed to welcome its warnings.
Present Vitality of the Church
Then, if we turn our attention to the Church, we see that it has not remained a lifeless spectator in the face of these events, but has followed step by step the evolution of peoples, scientific progress, and social revolution. It has opposed decisively the materialistic ideologies which deny faith. Lastly, it has witnessed the rise and growth of the immense energies of the apostolate of prayer, of action in all fields. It has seen the emergence of a clergy constantly better equipped in learning and virtue for its mission; and of a laity which has become ever more conscious of its responsibilities within the bosom of the Church, and, in a special way, of its duty to collaborate with the Church hierarchy.
To this should be added the immense suffering of entire Christian communities, through which a multitude of admirable bishops, priests, and laymen seal their adherence to the faith, bearing persecutions of all kinds and revealing forms of heroism which certainly equal those of the most glorious periods of the Church. …
… [W]elcoming as from above the intimate voice of our spirit, we considered that the times now were right to offer to the Catholic Church and to the world the gift of a new Ecumenical Council, as an addition to, and continuation of, the series of the twenty great councils, which have been through the centuries a truly heavenly providence for the increase of grace and Christian progress. …
The forthcoming Council will meet therefore and at a moment in which the Church finds very alive the desire to fortify its faith, and to contemplate itself in its own awe-inspiring unity. In the same way, it feels more urgent the duty to give greater efficiency to its sound vitality and to promote the sanctification of its members, the diffusion of revealed truth, the consolidation of its agencies. …
And, finally, to a world, which is lost, confused, and anxious under the constant threat of new frightful conflicts, the forthcoming Council must offer a possibility for all men of good will to turn their thoughts and their intentions toward peace, a peace which can and must, above all, come from spiritual and supernatural realities, from human intelligence and conscience, enlightened and guided by God the Creator and Redeemer of humanity.
Working Program of the Council
These fruits that we expect so much from the Council, and on which we like so often to dwell, entail a vast program of work which is now being prepared. This concerns the doctrinal and practical problems which correspond more to the requirements of perfect conformity with Christian teaching, for the edification and in the service of the Mystical Body and of its supernatural mission, and, therefore, the sacred books, venerable tradition, the sacraments, prayer, ecclesiastical discipline, charitable and relief activities, the lay apostolate, and mission horizons.
This supernatural order must, however, reflect its efficiency in the other order, the temporal one, which on so many occasions is unfortunately ultimately the only one that occupies and worries man. In this field, the Church also has shown that it wishes to be Mater et Magistra –Mother and Teacher–according to the words of our distant and glorious predecessor, Innocent III, spoken on the occasion of the Fourth Lateran Council [in 1215]. …
The Helsinki Final Act: Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms Enunciated
Helsinki Conference on European Security
(1975)
VII. Respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief
The participating States will respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.
They will promote and encourage the effective exercise of civil, political, economic, social, cultural and other rights and freedoms all of which derive from the inherent dignity of the human person and are essential for his free and full development.
Within this framework the participating States will recognize and respect the freedom of the individual to profess and practice, alone or in community with others, religion or belief acting in accordance with the dictates of his own conscience.
The participating States on whose territory national minorities exist will respect the right of persons belonging to such minorities to equality before the law, will afford them the full opportunity for the actual enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms and will, in this manner, protect their legitimate interests in this sphere.
The participating States recognize the universal significance of human rights and fundamental freedoms, respect for which is an essential factor for the peace, justice and well-being necessary to ensure the development of friendly relations and co-operation among themselves as among all States.
They will constantly respect these rights and freedoms in their mutual relations and will endeavour jointly and separately, including in cooperation with the United Nations, to promote universal and effective respect for them.
They confirm the right of the individual to know and act upon his rights and duties in this field.
In the field of human rights and fundamental freedoms, the participating States will act in conformity with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They will also fulfill their obligations as set forth in the international declarations and agreements in this field, including, inter alia, the International Covenants on Human Rights, by which they may be bound.
VIII. Equal rights and self-determination of peoples
The participating States will respect the equal rights of peoples and their right to self-determination, acting at all times in conformity with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and with the relevant norms of international law, including those relating to territorial integrity of States.
By virtue of the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, all peoples always have the right, in full freedom, to determine, when and as they wish, their internal and external political status, without external interference, and to pursue as they wish their political, economic, social and cultural development.
The participating States reaffirm the universal significance of respect for and effective exercise of equal rights and self-determination of peoples for the development of friendly relations among themselves as among all States; they also recall the importance of the elimination of any form of violation of this principle.
Ostpolitik Begins to Breach the Divide Between East and West
Willy Brandt
(1969)
I was not happy about the concept of Ostpolitik as it was first ascribed to me and then identified with me. But how can you capture a term which has acquired a life of its own and been swiftly adopted into foreign languages? Why did I dislike the label? Because I was afraid it suggested that I regarded foreign policy as a chest from which you might pull out now one drawer, now another. Together with my colleagues, and not least my Foreign Minister and Deputy Chancellor, I assumed that we needed two things at the same time, and co-ordinated with each other: reliable partnership with the West, and the understanding with the East that was laboriously taking shape and must then be extended. I was aware that our national interests simply would not allow us to oscillate between West and East.
Reduced to basics, this meant that our efforts in Ostpolitik must be attuned to our Western partners and rooted in the political structure of the Atlantic Alliance. Even more simply: ourOstpolitik had to begin in the West. But developments since the Western treaties of 1955 meant that relations as normal and productive as possible were also called for with the Soviet Union and the other Warsaw Pact countries. Normalizing those relations was necessary for the Federal Republic to be able to protect its own interests in European cooperation on anything like an equal footing. We were therefore determined to do what we could to encourage peace on a basis of the utmost possible security–’in awareness of our special responsibility in Europe and to the best of our ability, which we do not, however, overestimate.’
At the time, in the autumn of 1969, a West European summit conference of the six Common Market countries was imminent. It took place in The Hague at the beginning of December. We said that this conference could and perhaps would decide whether Western Europe took a brave step forward or plunged into a dangerous crisis. My government assumed that the European Economic Community would have to be made deeper and broader, and needed both the United Kingdom and the other countries that were willing to join. It must also find appropriate forms of co-operation with those European states which could not or would not join. We determined that German and French unanimity could be the deciding factor in this process. We would try to give our close contractual ties with France a steadiness which would be a model for the nature of relations between European partners. We declared our readiness to encourage closer co-operation in foreign policy, with the aim of helping the Western European states, step by step, to adopt a common stance on international political questions.
Another important point of departure was our assumption that the North Atlantic Alliance would continue to guarantee our security. Its firm coherence was the prerequisite for the kind of solidarity of conduct which could lead to detente in Europe. Safeguarding peace was the first essential, whether we were concerned with a serious and tenacious effort to bring about proportional arms limitation, or with the guaranteeing of our own security policy. As part of the Western Alliance, we wanted to help bring equilibrium between West and East. We saw our contribution as defensive, which was how the Western Alliance soon came to see itself. The Bundeswehr, we said, was not suitable for offensive strategy, by virtue either of its training and structure or of its arms and equipment. At no price would I be moved from the defensive principle that lay at the heart of our defence policy.
It has sometimes been suggested, not always kindly, that my policies may have been motivated by doubts about the intentions of the United States. They were not. However, it is true that I took an evaluation of the interests and special problems of the United States into consideration, and assumed that American commitment to Europe would be reduced rather than increased over the years. But I stated with the utmost clarity that our close ties with the United States excluded any doubt about the binding nature of the duties they had undertaken towards Europe, the Federal Republic and West Berlin. Our common interest required neither additional assurances nor repeated declarations. They supported a more independent German policy in a more active partnership. …
And what about keeping the Western powers informed? What about consulting them, in so far as their rights in connection with ‘Germany as a whole’ were affected? It is true that we wanted to represent ourselves–that goes for the East as well–and to that extent we wanted to be ‘more equal’ than before. We did observe the principle of regularly furnishing accurate information. However, Henry Kissinger was correct in saying that Brandt had not asked for permission, but for American co-operation in a political course whose direction was already determined.
You do not need to have read Kissinger’s memoirs to know that there was ill-concealed suspicion in the Western capitals–as far as I could see, it was least felt in London; in Paris, there were marked swings between friendly understanding and wild speculation; the Washington attitude was quite simple–Nixon’s security adviser told my eminent colleague Paul Frank in 1970 that any detente with the Soviet Union would be America’s doing.
Before our meeting in April 1970 Nixon invited me to spend a few days of relaxation at Camp David. … Henry Kissinger turned up at the President’s retreat, and did not trouble to hide his suspicions. In later years, however, he set the record straight by several times ‘congratulating’ me on the achievements of German Ostpolitik. He was once heard to say that all we got in return for accepting the division of Germany was ‘improvements in the political atmosphere.’ Kissinger, powerful as a security adviser, and later Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford, thought in terms of the Concert of Powers and the classic secret diplomacy of the nineteenth century. He saw Europeans as pawns in the great game of the superpowers.
A Real Politiker Dissects the Bismarckian Balance of Power
Henry Kissinger
(ca. 1980)
[Walter] Laqueur: There are interesting lessons to be learned about the relationship between legitimacy, equilibrium, and peace. But I am sure you will agree that the modern period in the history of diplomacy starts with Bismarck.
Kissinger: Of course. Without going into the specifics of his diplomacy, Bismarck essentially believed that an international system can be based entirely on the balance of power. The restraints that had been imposed by the common adherence to legitimate principles, along with the convictions that had developed since the eighteenth century, were so much baggage for him. Every state should be free to conduct its own policy based on its own conception of national interest. If it calculated correctly it would understand that there are inherent limits to its strength, and it would produce a rather moderate foreign policy. But at the same time it placed all its energies on the balance of power. Through extraordinarily skillful and extremely moderate foreign policy, Bismarck managed to create a united Germany and maintain the peace for about forty years, even after upsetting the previous system.
Contrary to popular belief, a policy based on pure balance of power is the most difficult foreign policy to conduct. It requires, first of all, a constantly correct assessment of the elements of power. Secondly, it demands a total ruthlessness and means that statesmen must be able to ignore friendship, loyalty, and anything other than the national interest. Third, it requires a domestic structure that will tolerate if not support this strategy. Fourth, it requires the absence of both permanent friends and permanent enemies, because as soon as a permanent enemy exists, freedom of maneuver is immediately reduced.
After Germany defeated France in 1871, the German generals insisted on the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, which caused Bismarck to say, “I have achieved much more than I thought desirable in this war.” He was correct: France became a permanent German enemy, and Germany’s freedom of maneuver was greatly reduced. Indeed, the paradox of the German victory was that it, along with the German unification which followed, produced the very structural dangers that Bismarck sought to avoid. A united Germany was a threat to each of its neighbors; its very existence forced them into an alliance. Subsequent German leaders tried to be “reliable” and consistent in foreign affairs, but this only compounded their problems, for the more rigid their policy, the more united their neighbors became.
All of this is crucial in understanding the great tragedy in Western history: the outbreak of the First World War. …
The Dangers of Unregulated Growth and Technological Innovations
The Club of Rome
(1977)
The population of the developed world makes up about 30 percent of the world population, and may shrink to no more than 10 percent in the next century, unless war, famine, and disease slow down the growth of human numbers in developing countries. Less than one-third of the world population controls more than two-thirds of its wealth, possesses 95 percent of existing scientific and technological research and development facilities, consumes some 40 percent of the world’s nonrenewable resources, and contributes the lion’s share of its pollution.
These conditions impose special responsibilities on the people of the developed world. They must take the initiative in specifying and pursuing global security, food, energy, and resource goals. They must work together with the poor nations to create a more just and sustainable international order. And they must also take care that their own lives are not locked into pathways of alienation, meaninglessness, and stress. There is, we believe, a set of feasible policy alternatives available to developed countries which responds to all these needs. They can improve the national quality of life and at the same time bring about more equity and justice in the world.
The already discussed goals related to security, food, energy, and resources need to be vigorously pursued in the developed world. Combined with them are goals to overcome the worst side effects of technological civilization without demanding unrealistic sacrifices from individuals and leaders.
Present conditions in the developed world arose from historical processes that resulted in significant achievements in the spheres of industry, agriculture, and social organization. These achievements are closely associated with efficient applications of science and technology and the creation of great national and corporate wealth. Discoveries in science led to rapid advances in technology, and these permitted the creation of large-scale production systems with decreasing unit costs. Higher productivity gave rise to increases in real income which, in turn, created a demand for more and more production in an ongoing spiral. The resultant economic process was self-reinforcing, product-proliferating, and energy- and materials-hungry. This pattern continued almost without interruption from the end of World War II to the early 1970s, despite fluctuations of the business cycle. …
During the 1970s many governmental and business leaders began to wonder whether the exponential growth of industries had begun to deplete stocks of nonrenewable natural resources. Since industry depends for continued growth on large stocks of reasonably priced natural resources as well as on cheap and abundant energies, more and more people began to question whether the industrial system would undermine itself by depleting its essential stocks.
The growth-no growth debates, triggered by Limits to Growth, the famous first report to the Club of Rome, are now history. Without rehashing well-worn arguments, it is enough to say that the issue for the economy is not whether to grow or not to grow; it is how to grow, and for what purpose. Growth for its own sake often proves to be contrary to human interests–it can depress, rather than enhance, the quality of life. Economic growth should serve human ends–and should occur only when it can fulfill this function. Further growth in pollution, traffic jams, urban conglomerations, mindless automation, and impersonal bureaucracy is contrary to human interests, although it might register as a contribution to economic growth when measured by such overall quantitative indicators as gross national product, national income, and international trade. But growth can occur in many areas where human needs are truly served–where the quality of life within developed countries is enhanced, and where world development and justice are promoted. Such growth is not undifferentiated but selective, and responds to social and cultural needs. The fact is that notwithstanding pockets of poverty, the basic material needs of people in affluent countries can already be fully met; the problem is better distribution, not more material growth. Further material growth would merely create increasing gaps between rich and poor. Hence rather than emphasizing overall growth, problems of distribution and injustice need to be addressed, and ways and means found to reduce, and eventually eliminate, the alienation, isolation, and impersonal tenor of life in affluent urban environments. …
To improve the quality of life in developed countries, policies must be geared to reducing the undesirable side effects of economic growth–such as unemployment and inflation–and promoting the satisfaction of material, social, and cultural needs. Major goals must be to place less emphasis on material- and energy-wasteful modes of production and more on conservation and recycling; less emphasis on automated machines and more on human services. Industrialized societies can progress by improving education, health and social services, cultural activities, and recreational opportunities.
There is a great need to improve educational systems. …
Communication in the political sphere needs to be expanded. …
In most of the free market economies, health and social services are insufficiently funded. …
While there is much room for progress in such services areas, a linear increase in materials- and energy-wasteful production systems would worsen rather than improve the overall quality of life. The artificial inculcation of demand for certain types of products is a disservice to the public, as illustrated by advertising designed to sell gas-guzzling private automobiles. Continued increase in the number of such automobiles would produce serious health hazards, create transportation breakdowns, and increase energy and raw material costs.
A trend toward the standard concept of a “post-industrial” society, however, is not without its grave dangers. Technologies should not be put in use simply because they are available–not even automated production systems or electronic communication technologies. Employment could be much reduced, and there could be a decline in face-to-face communication. Privacy could be invaded, and extensive data files used to control behavior. People could be exposed to information overload. Indeed, wide use of electronic communication systems could be a bane as well as a blessing. On the one hand people could be freed from many manual chores, could have much leisure time, and could have the cultural and environmental facilities to fill such time with enjoyment; on the other hand such societies could become impersonal technocracies, subject to a high degree of surveillance, saturated with services, and plagued by unsolved problems of unemployment and alienation. …
The “Fundamental Codes of a Culture” Deconstruct the Order of Things
Michel Foucault
(1961)
The fundamental codes of a culture–those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices–establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home. At the other extremity of thought, there are the scientific theories or the philosophical interpretations which explain why order exists in general, what universal law it obeys, what principle can account for it, and why this particular order has been established and not some other. But between these two regions, so distant from one another, lies a domain which, even though its role is mainly an intermediary one, is nonetheless fundamental: it is more confused, more obscure, and probably less easy to analyse. It is here that a culture, imperceptibly deviating from the empirical orders prescribed for it by its primary codes, instituting an initial separation from them, causes them to lose their original transparency, relinquishes its immediate and invisible powers, frees itself sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not the only possible ones or the best ones; this culture then finds itself faced with the stark fact that there exist, below the level of its spontaneous orders, things that are in themselves capable of being ordered, that belong to a certain unspoken order; the fact, in short, that order exists. As though emancipating itself to some extent from its linguistic, perceptual, and practical grids, the culture superimposed on them another kind of grid which neutralized them, which by this superimposition both revealed and excluded them at the same time, so that the culture, by this very process, came face to face with order in its primary state. It is on the basis of this newly perceived order that the codes of language, perception, and practice are criticized and rendered partially invalid. It is on the basis of this order, taken as a firm foundation, that general theories as to the ordering of things, and the interpretation that such an ordering involves, will be constructed. Thus, between the already “encoded” eye and reflexive knowledge there is a middle region which liberates order itself: it is here that it appears, according to the culture and the age in question, continuous and graduated or discontinuous and piecemeal, linked to space or constituted anew at each instant by the driving force of time, related to a series of variables or defined by separate systems of coherences, composed of resemblances which are either successive or corresponding, organized around increasing differences, etc. This middle region, then, in so far as it makes manifest the modes of being of order, can be posited as the most fundamental of all: anterior to words, perceptions, and gestures, which are then taken to be more or less exact, more or less happy, expressions of it (which is why this experience of order in its pure primary state always plays a critical role); more solid, more archaic, less dubious, always more “true” than the theories that attempt to give those expressions explicit form, exhaustive application, or philosophical foundation. Thus, in every culture, between the use of what one might call the ordering codes and reflections upon order itself, there is the pure experience of order and its modes of being.
French Students “Come to Everything Too Late”
Anonymous Pamphlet
(1966-1967)
In their ideological existence French students come to everything too late. All the values and illusions that are the pride of their cloistered world are already doomed as untenable illusions which history has long ago made ridiculous.
Because they share a little of the University’s crumbling prestige, students are still pleased to be students. Too late. The mechanical, specialized teaching they receive has fallen as abysmally low (in comparison with the former level of bourgeois general culture)[1] as their own intellectual level at the time they enter it, due to the single fact that the reality that dominates it all, the economic system, calls for mass production of untutored students incapable of thinking. Being unaware that the University has become institutionalized organization of ignorance, that “higher education” itself is disintegrating at the same tempo that mass production of professors progresses, and that all of these professors are morons, most of whom would set any high school student body into an uproar, students continue, therefore, to listen respectfully to their teachers, with the conscious determination to rid themselves of all spirit of criticism, the better to commune in the mystic illusion of having become “students,” i.e., persons who are seriously occupied with acquiring serious knowledge in the hope that they will be entrusted with ultimate truths. This is a menopause of the mind. Everything that is taking place today in school and faculty amphitheatres will be condemned in the future revolutionary society as just so much socially harmful noise. From now on, students make people laugh.
Students don’t even realize that history is also changing their absurd, “cloistered” world. The famous “crisis of the University,” which is a detail of the more general crisis of modern capitalism, remains the subject of a deaf men’s dialogue between different specialists. It expresses quite simply the difficulties of belated adjustment by this special production sector to overall transformation of the production apparatus. The leftovers of the old ideology of the liberal bourgeois University become commonplaces as its social basis disappears. The University could consider that it was an autonomous power at the time of free-trade capitalism and liberal government, which left it a certain marginal freedom.
It was in fact closely dependent on the needs of this type of society which were: to give a privileged minority who were pursuing studies an adequate general culture before they joined the ranks of the ruling class, which they had hardly left. Hence the ridiculous position of certain nostalgic[2] professors, embittered at having lost their former function of watchdogs of future leaders for the much less honorable one of sheep dogs leading flocks of “white collar” workers, according to the planified needs of the economic system, along the path to their respective factories and offices. They are the ones who oppose their archaic ideas to technocratization of the University and continue imperturbedly to impact scraps of the culture called “general” to future specialists who won’t know what to do with it.
More serious, and therefore more dangerous, are the modernists on the left and those in the UNEF led by the “ultras” of the FGEL, who demand “structural reform of the University,” “re-introduction of the University into social and economic life,” that is to say, its adaptation to the needs of modern capitalism. From having been the dispensers of “general culture” for the use of the ruling classes, the various facultes and schools, still draped in anachronistic prestige, have been turned into quick-breeding factories for lower and medium cadres. So far from protesting against this historical process that directly subordinates one of the last relatively autonomous sectors of social life to the demands of the mercantile system, our progressives protest against the delays and lapses that beset its realization. They are the champions of the future cybernetically run University, which is already apparent here and there. The mercantile system and its modern hirelings are the real enemy.
[1] We do not mean the culture of the Ecole normale superieureor of the “Sorboniqueurs,” but that of the Encyclopaedists, or of Hegel.
[2] Not daring to claim kinship with philistine liberalism, they invent references for themselves to the academic freedoms of the Middle Ages, which was the time of “non-freedom democracy.”
Jean-Paul Sartre Interviews Daniel Cohn-Bendit
Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Jean-Paul Sartre
(1968)
J.-P.S.: You have said that the student movement is now on the crest of a wave. But the vacation is coming, and with it a deceleration, probably a retreat. The government will take the opportunity to put through reforms. It will invite students to participate and many will accept, saying either ‘Reformism is all we want,’ or ‘It is only reformism, but it is better than nothing, and we have obtained it by force.’ So you will have a transformed university, but the changes may be merely superficial ones, dealing particularly with the development of material facilities, lodgings, university restaurants. These things would make no basic changes in the system. They are demands that the authorities could satisfy without bringing the regime into question. Do you think that you could obtain any ‘adjustments’ that would really introduce revolutionary elements into the bourgeois university–for example, that would make the education given at the university contradictory to the basic function of the university in the present regime: the training of cadres who are well integrated into the system?
D.C.-B.: First, purely material demands may have a revolutionary content. On university restaurants we have a demand which is basic. We demand their abolition as university restaurants. They must become youth restaurants in which all young people, whether students or not, can eat for one franc forty. No one can reject this demand: if young workers are working during the day, there seems no reason why they should not dine for one franc forty in the evening. Similarly with the Cites Universitaires [campuses]. There are many young workers and apprentices who would rather live away from their parents but who cannot take a room because that would cost them 30,000 francs per month; let us welcome them to the Cites,where the rent is from 9,000 to 10,000 francs per month. And let the well-to-do students in law and sciences-po [political science] go elsewhere.
Basically, I don’t think that any reforms the government might make would be enough to demobilize the students. There obviously will be a retreat during the vacation, but they will not ‘break’ the movement. Some will say, ‘We have lost our chance’, without any attempt to explain what has happened. Others will say, ‘The situation is not yet ripe.’ But many militants will realize that we must capitalize on what has just taken place, analyse it theoretically and prepare to resume our action next term. For there will be an explosion then, whatever the government’s reforms. And the experience of disorderly, unintentional, authority-provoked action we have just been through will enable us to make any action launched in the autumn more effective. The vacation will enable students to come to terms with the disarray they showed during the fortnight’s crisis, and to think about what they want to do and can do.
As to the possibility of making the education given at the university a ‘counter-education’ manufacturing not well-integrated cadres but revolutionaries, I am afraid that that seems to me a somewhat idealistic hope. Even a reformed bourgeois education will still manufacture bourgeois cadres. People will be caught in the wheels of the system. At best they will become members of a bien-pensant ["right-thinking"] left, but objectively they will remain cogs ensuring the functioning of society.
Our aim is to pursue successfully a ‘parallel education’ which will be technical and ideological. We must launch a university ourselves, on a completely new basis, even if it only lasts a few weeks. We shall call on left-wing and extreme left-wing teachers who are prepared to work with us in seminars and assist us with their knowledge–renouncing their ‘professional’ status–in the investigations which we shall undertake.
In all faculties we shall open seminars–not lectures courses, obviously–on the problems of the workers’ movement, on the use of technology in the interests of man, on the possibilities opened up by automation. And all this not from a theoretical viewpoint (every sociological study today opens with the words ‘Technology must be made to serve man’s interests’), but by posing concrete problems. Obviously this education will go in the opposite direction to the education provided by the system and the experiment could not last long; the system would quickly react and the movement give way. But what matters is not working out a reform of capitalist society, but launching an experiment that completely breaks with that society, an experiment that will not last, but which allows a glimpse of a possibility: something which is revealed for a moment and then vanishes. But that is enough to prove that the something could exist.
We do not hope to make some kind of socialist university in our society, for we know that the function of the university will stay the same so long as the system is unchanged as a whole. But we believe that there can be moments of rupture in the system’s cohesion and that it is possible to profit by them to open breaches in it.
A Breath of Springtime in Prague: Intellectuals Issue the “2000 Words” Manifesto
Czechoslovak Intellectuals
(1968)
First, the life of our nation was threatened by the war. Then came blacker days, which threatened our spiritual and national character. Most of the nation accepted and had faith in the new program of socialism, which was taken over by the wrong people. It would not have mattered so much that they lacked the experience of statesmen, the knowledge of scholars or the training of philosophers, if they had allowed themselves to be replaced by more capable persons.
The communist party betrayed the great trust the people put in it after the war. It preferred the glories of office, until it had those and nothing more. The disappointment was great among communists as well as noncommunists. The leadership of the party changed it from a political and ideological group into a power-hungry organization, attracting egotists, cowards, and crooks.
They influenced the party’s operations to such an extent that honest people could not gain a foothold without debasement, much less make it a modern political instrument. There were many communists who fought this deterioration but they could not prevent what happened.
The situation in the party led to a similar situation in the state, resulting in the linkage of party and state. There was no criticism of the state and economic organizations. Parliament forgot how to deliberate, the government forgot how to rule and managers how to manage. Elections had no significance and the laws lost their value. We could not trust any of our representatives, and when we could it was impossible to ask them for anything because they were powerless. What made things even worse was that we could not trust each other.
The Decline of Honesty
Personal and collective honor deteriorated. Honesty led nowhere, and it was useless to speak of rewards according to ability. As a result, most citizens lost interest in public affairs. They were concerned only with themselves and with accumulating money. The situation got so bad that now one cannot even rely on money. Relations among people were undermined and joy in work was lost. To sum up, the nation was in a morass that threatened its spiritual health and character. …
In all justice, we can say that some of them did realize what was happening. We know that now because they are redressing wrongs, correcting mistakes, bringing decisions to the membership and the citizens, and limiting the authority and the size of the official apparatus. They no longer support the conservative viewpoint in the party. But there are still many officials opposed to change who exercise the instruments of power, particularly in the districts and in the communities.
Since the beginning of the year we have been in the process of reviving democratization. It began in the communist party. We must say this. And those noncommunists among us who, until recently, expected no good to come from the communists also know it. We must add, however, that this process could not have begun elsewhere. After twenty years, only the communists had an actual political life; only communist criticism was in a position to assess things as they were; only the opposition in the communist party had the privilege of being in contact with the enemy.
The Basis of Democratization
The present effort of the democratic communists is only an installment in the repayment of the debt the entire party owes the people outside the party, who had no political rights. No gratitude is due to the communist party, although it should probably be acknowledged that it is honestly striving to use this last opportunity to save its own honor and the nation’s. …
Therefore, let us not overestimate the significance of the criticism from the ranks of writers and students. The source of social change is in the economy. The right word is significant only if it is spoken under conditions which have been duly prepared. “Duly prepared conditions in our country”–unfortunately, this cliche means our general level of poverty and the complete disintegration of the old system of rule, under which certain types of politicians calmly and peacefully compromised themselves at our expense.
Truth does not prevail. It only remains when everything else fails. …
Yet, we have not spoken up. All we have to do is complete what we started out to do–humanize this regime. Otherwise the revenge of the old forces will be cruel. We turn to those who have been waiting. The days immediately ahead of us will determine our future course for many years to come. …
The Ultimate Sacrifice: A Czech Student Immolates Himself
Jan Palach
(1969)
Seeing that our nations [Czechs and Slovaks] are on the brink of despair we have decided to make our protest and arouse the people of this country in the following way.
Our group consists of volunteers who have resolved to let themselves be burned alive for our cause.
I have the honor to draw the first lot and thus obtain the right to draft this first letter and become the first torch.
Our demands are: (1) The immediate abolition of censorship. (2) Aban on the distribution ofZpravy.[1]
Unless our demands are met within five days, i.e. by 21 January, and unless the public demonstrates adequate support (i.e. by an indefinite strike), further torches will burst into flames.
Signed: Torch Number 1
P.S. Remember August! Czechoslovakia has obtained room for manoeuvre in international affairs: let us exploit the fact.
[1] Zpravy was a Soviet-controlled occupation newspaper with scurrilous attacks on reformers.
The “Twenty-One Demands”: A Call for Workers’Rights and Freedom in a Socialist State
Solidarity Union
(1980)
1. Acceptance of Free Trade Unions independent of both the Party and employers, in accordance with the International Labor Organization’s Convention number 87 on the freedom to form unions, which was ratified by the Polish government.
2. A guarantee of the right to strike and guarantees of security for strikers and their supporters.
3. Compliance with the freedoms of press and publishing guaranteed in the Polish constitution. A halt to repression of independent publications and access to the mass media for representatives of all faiths.
4. (a) Reinstatement to their former positions for: people fired for defending workers’ rights, in particular those participating in the strikes of 1970 and 1976; students dismissed from school for their convictions. (b)The release of all political prisoners … (c) A halt to repression for one’s convictions.
5. The broadcasting on the mass media of information about the establishment of the Interfactory Strike Committee (MKS) and publication of the list of demands.
6. The undertaking of real measures to get the country out of its present crisis by:
(a) providing comprehensive, public information about the socio-economic situation;
(b) making it possible for people from every social class and stratum of society to participate in open discussions concerning the reform program.
7. Compensation of all workers taking part in the strike for its duration with holiday pay from the Central Council of Trade Unions.
8. Raise the base pay of every worker 2,000 zlotys per month to compensate for price rises to date.
9. Guaranteed automatic pay raises indexed to price inflation and to decline in real income.
10. Meeting the requirements of the domestic market for food products: only surplus goods to be exported.
11. The rationing of meat and meat products through food coupons (until the market is stabilized).
12. Abolition of “commercial prices” and hard currency sales in so-called “internal export” shops.
13. A system of merit selection for management positions on the basis of qualifications rather than Party membership. Abolition of the privileged status of MO [police], SB [Internal Security Police], and the party apparatus through: equalizing all family subsidies; eliminating special stores, etc.
14. Reduction of retirement age for women to 50 and for men to 55. Anyone who has worked in the PRL [Polish People's Republic] for 30 years, for women, or 35 years for men, without regard to age, should be entitled to retirement benefits.
15. Bringing pensions and retirement benefits of the “old portfolio” to the level of those paid currently.
16. Improvement in the working conditions of the Health Service, which would assure full medical care to working people.
17. Provision for sufficient openings in daycare nurseries and preschools for the children of working people.
18. Establishment of three-year paid maternity leaves for the raising of children.
19. Reduce the waiting time for apartments.
20. Raise per diem [for work-related travel] from 40 zlotys to 100 zlotys and provide cost-of-living increases.
21. Saturdays to be days off from work. Those who work on round-the-clock jobs or three-shift systems should have the lack of free Saturdays compensated by increased holiday leaves or through other paid holidays off from work.