Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

“ From that moment, the will of the people not encountering any obstacle, the Revolution had seemed to establish itself as sovereign. For a few years the Convention, to which power have been vested with a mission to protect the liberty won, and also, — one did not come of it! — to redo the Political Constitution, had experienced the energy that had given it the insurrection of 10 August, the menaces of the counter-revolution, and the vows of '89. ”

“ The only thing that is legitimate, now, and holy, and sacred, is the Revolution. By this article, the government was declared revolutionary; power put under the feet of the people; authority subordinated, not to its own principles, but to the judgment of opinion. ”

“ Power, if it is not god, is a brute or an automaton: the will, the reason of individuals are powerless. Elevated to power, they soon become themselves what power wants them to be. Louis XVI, representing an impossible transaction, lied to the Constitution; the Convention, created for peril, no longer understood the torment; its intelligence had retired entirely into the scaffold. The Directory, who had been asked for repose, fell into lethargy. When Bonaparte returned from Egypt, the Revolution was in peril, and, as always, by the incapacity of the government. ”

“ The monarchy of 1790 was acclaimed by the people, the Republic acclaimed by the people, the Empire acclaimed by the people; the Restoration was, in turn, acclaimed by the people. This new apostasy, which the fatal prejudice of government only renders excusable, could not remain impune. With the legitimate king it was worse still than with the usurper. The Restoration, taking itself seriously, immediately proceeded to restore all that the Revolution had abolished or thought it had abolished: feudal rights, divine right, right of primogeniture ”

“ All these revolutions, which we have had in the last sixty years the moving spectacle, this succession of dynasties, this procession of ministries, these insurrectional movements, these electoral agitations, these parliamentary coalitions, these diplomatic intrigues, so much noise and so much smoke, all this I say, did not have any other purpose than to make known to our dumbfounded nation that elementary and always paradoxical truth, that it is not by their governments that people are saved, but that they become lost. ”

“ As long as the people had feared for the achievements of the Revolution, for the independence of the territory and the unity of the Republic, they had tolerated the dictatorship of the committees. The day on which the Terror became a system, where this provisory of blood seemed to want to become definitive, where utopia penetrated into the councils, where Robespierre, the man of plebeian vengeance, was not a leader of a sect, that day a crisis became inevitable. ”

“ The governments had beautifully fallen like marionettes under the mass of the revolutionary devil, the country did not return to its ardent love of authority. However one began to suspect that some things are the instincts of power, other things the ideas of the people: but how to pass beyond government? ”

“ The excesses of the Terror, the despotism of Bonaparte, had retrograded the ideas; but as soon as the obstacles that had opposed them were destroyed, they flowed into the bed that they had to at once follow and dig. Things picked up right where they left off: that which had happened was void. The human species, put back at the commencement of the Revolution, had only lost twenty-five years of its life. Yet, what is twenty-five years in the general life of society? This gap had disappeared when the cut-off sections of Time were rejoined... ”

“ History is a gargantuan and enchanting fable, where the laws of society we are taught in the marvelous adventures of a character alternately grotesque and sublime, worthy both of love and pity, which the old Orientals called Adam, Humanity. ”

“ Thus, the events in which Providence likes to make us appear to be both actors and spectators are unreal; they are myths in action, great dramas that unfold, sometimes for centuries, on the vast stage of the world, for the refutation of our prejudices, and the nullification of our detestable practices. ”

“ Adam is accompanied by a good and a bad angel: the latter, which I call Fantasy, like Proteus, deceives us in a thousand figures, seduces us and pushes us to evil; but we are constantly returned to good by our good genie, who is Experience. ”

“ People wanted one which answered directly to the will of the nation. The Charter was not granted, but accepted by the king. The situations were reversed. Behold, said on this occasion Lafayette, in presenting Louis Philippe to the people, the best of Republics. Louis Philippe, in effect, was the bourgeoisie on the throne; and if that innovation seemed to ardent spirits quite mediocre, it was, as will be seen, profoundly revolutionary. People came to humanize the monarchy; however, of the humanism to socialism, there is only a difference in the word. ”

“ In spite of excommunication and the burning stake, philosophy prevailed against Catholicism, in spite of the lits de justice and the bastilles, popular sovereignty had prevailed against royal prerogative: it had been necessary to take advantage of all these changes and adapt new customs. But who could prevail against property? ”