Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

“ As for the very cause which was intended to be served, on 15 May, by a war of propaganda, the truth is that this cause would have been more promptly, more surely lost by intervention than by peace. The July government could have, with infinitely more advantages than the February Republic, helped Poland; its armies would not have dragged behind them this formidable social question, by which the republican government was so miserably embarrassed. A State has no power abroad but that which it draws from within: if the domestic life is lacking, it is in vain that it will endeavor to act abroad ”

“ Perish democracy, perish humanity rather than the pope! The will of the pontiff bent the will of the people; the married priests were marked with infamy, their spouses treated like concubines, their children declared bastards. ”

“ Make these men an army of propaganda, until you can make them an industrial army; ensure by war the government of democracy in Europe, until you can remake the economy of societies. You are politicians, you say; you do not want to be socialists: take a political initiative if you do not dare to take a social initiative.
War, in a word, as a means to escape temporarily from the question of labor: such was, on 15 May, the policy of the advanced faction of the republican party. ”

“ All the errors, all the mistakes of democracy arise from the fact that the people, or rather the leaders of insurrectional bands, after having broken the throne and driven off the dynasty, believed that they revolutionized society because they had revolutionized the monarchic personnel, and in conserving the all-organized kingdom, they brought it back, no longer of divine right, but of the sovereignty of the people. ”

“ A unique phenomenon in history, the Hebrew people present the spectacle of a nation constantly unfaithful to its national god, let us speak more justly, to its legal god, for Jehovah is Jewish only of adoption, — and to which it only commences to attach itself, when having lost its territory, having not a rock where it could raise an altar, it arrived at the metaphysical idea of God by the destruction of the idol. ”

“ The emancipation of Poland was the pretext for the third day. A question of nationality for a friendly people, formerly the bulwark of Christianity against the Ottomans, and not so long ago again of France against the hordes of the North; a question of democratic propaganda, and therefore of governmental initiative for socialism, the emancipation of Poland, supported by the suffrage of the people, was to raise the sympathies of the representatives, and promise the success of all ideas of reform. ”

“ After the February Revolution, the domestic question was everything: the republican party did not understand it, nor did it understand the gravity of its own position. The government was without money, without horses, without soldiers; the discussions of the Constituent Assembly revealed that the army available after February was not 60,000 men. Commerce cried for mercy, the workman was without work ”

“ That which makes the kingdom is not the king, is not heredity: it is, as we shall see below, in speaking of the Constitution, the accumulation of powers; it is the hierarchical concentration of all political and social faculties in a sole and indivisible function, which is government, whether this government is represented by a hereditary prince, or by one or more removable and elective mandataries. ”

“ Governmentalism, note it well, is not the result of a philosophical doctrine, it is born of a theory of Providence. Among the moderns, as in antiquity, the priesthood is the father of government. We must first go back to Gregory VII, and then to Moses and the Egyptians, in order to retrieve the filiation of governmental ideals, and the origin of this disastrous theory of the competence of the State in matters of perfectibility and progress. ”

“ On the one hand, the logic of events has constantly proven that in conserving for society its monarchical constitution, it was necessary sooner or later to return to the sincerity of monarchy; and it is absolutely true to say that democracy, for not having been able to define its own principle, has hitherto only been a defection towards the kingdom. We are not republicans ”

“ At the same time the social question had been posed in Italy and throughout the Germanic Confederation. And this question was not understood and resolved anywhere, the conservative reaction began immediately, and after a European February, we would have had a European 17 March, 16 April, 15 May, and June Days. Do we believe that Hungary, which, at the end of 1848, by a very culpable egoism of nationality, offered itself to Austria to march on Italy, do we believe, I say, that Hungary, once satisfied, would have supported the democratic movement? ”

“ On the other hand, the politiques of divine right, arguing from the very constitution of the pretended democratic power, have demonstrated to their opponents that this power necessarily rested on a principle other than the sovereignty of the people, that it is dependent upon theocracy, of which, as I have said, monarchy is only a dismemberment. ”

“ Léon Faucher, on that day, had unwittingly and unintentionally made himself the advocate of Jacobinism, the orator of the insurrection. Such examples should open the eyes of men who call themselves politicians, and make them comprehend how odious and stupid is the revenge of reactions. ”

“ Already, on the very foundation of the Polish question, the republicans of power and their friends had been singularly cooled. Intervention in favor of Poland, or what amounted to the same as war with Europe, seemed to them to be, in effect, universal socialism, the Revolution of Humanity by the initiative of governments. Like all newcomers to things, they had felt their chivalrous sentiments vanish before the sad reality of the facts. At the same sitting on 15 May, one of the most honorable men of the party, Mr. ”

“ The reaction had only struck, it is true, in the most ostensible manner, the most energetic democrats, having been seized pell-mell and confused in the same razzia: Barbès, Albert, Sobrier, Blanqui, Flotte, Raspail, General Courtais, and soon Louis Blanc and Caussidière. But if Ledru-Rollin and Flocon were not affected in their persons, their influence perished on 15 May, as Louis Blanc's had perished on 16 April. In political reactions, insurrection and the power under which it happens, are always solidary. ”