Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

“ Morality, you see, is to have only one legitimate wife, on pain of the galleys, and twenty mistresses, if you can feed them; morality, is to fight a duel, on pain of infamy, and not to fight, on pain of the assize court; morality is to provide yourself luxury and enjoyment (see the Program of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences for the Year 1846) at all costs, except to evade the cases provided in the Penal Code. My pleasure is my law, I know of no other. For that we find a positive and obligatory morality requires that society be rebuilt from the bottom up ”

“ Put yourself in the perspective of the power of July; reminisce to yourself the institutions and ideas that had previously formed the moral capital of society, which composed, if I might say so, the armor of consciences: you will find no one who merited consideration as the Chief of State, no one who was worth on the part of the citizens the suffering of a pinprick, the sacrifice of the smallest enjoyment. ”

“ I fully and without reserve adhere to the inexorable government of Louis Philippe.
In good faith, what do you want to occupy a king to whom his constituents had said: Thou shalt be the corrupter of our generation; and who, by an admirable understanding of nature and politics, seemed to have been created expressly for such an epoch? ”

“ What it means, what the bourgeoisie demand, is well-being, luxury, enjoyment, is to make money.
And the people, on all these points, are of the same view as the bourgeoisie. They also expect to have their share of well-being, enjoyment and luxury, be free, ready, to this condition, to believe what they want in religion as in politics.
Well! the mission of Louis Philippe, the mission given to him by the pact of 1830, was to make predominant the bourgeois idea, that is to say, — let us understand! — not to ensure that they work, for their profit, for all the well-being ”

“ Louis Philippe was given the mission of demonstrating that the constitutional system is the negation of negations, a supreme utopia, like the empire and legitimacy. A statesman, a practical man above all, he does not reason, he acts. He attacks the parliamentary system by influences; he kills the monarchical principle by a ridiculous exhibition, the bourgeois monarchy, the only one of the century. Same method for Catholicism. Of what use to people, who do not read, are the Encyclopédie, Voltaire, Rousseau, Dupuis, Volney, Lessing, Kant, Hegel, Strauss, Feuerbach? ”

“ Attacked at once in its origin, in its politics, in its morality, the government of Louis Philippe has squeezed out the hatred and contempt of the people. And yet, equitable history will say that never a reign was better fulfilled, by consequence more legitimate, more irreproachable than that of Louis Philippe.
And first, Louis Philippe is the true representative of July. Who was responsible for the three days? — The people, say the republicans. ”

“ They have proved finally, under many circumstances, that they cared neither for regulation, nor for corporation, nor for communism; they do not even accept free trade. Free trade, in the eyes of a conservative, is one of the thousand faces of socialism.
What do they want these wily, meddlesome, ungovernable bourgeoisie? As long as you press them to respond, they will tell you that they want business; they ignore the rest. At opinions and parties, they jeer; of religion, we know what they think ”

“ Now that religion is fully discredited, philosophy indecisive; that national sovereignty, represented by more or less true mandataries, stumbles like a drunken peasant: everything is confused in morals, everything is returned to arbitrariness and nullity of value, except one point, which is to live well and make money. ”

“ The masses were in July only the militia of the bourgeoisie: only the latter had prepared for fifteen years and organized the victory; to them alone belonged the disposition of the victory. What do we say here of the popular vote? If the people had been consulted in the choice of the prince, from the time after the principle of the Charter had, conserving the form, changed, it is clear that the people, for whom form takes precedence over substance, would have chosen Henry V. Any other candidate would have been to their eyes illegitimate. ”