Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

“ The February Revolution had therefore been logically, justly, the workers' revolution. How could the bourgeoisie of '89, of '99, of 1814 and of 1830; how could that bourgeoisie who had traversed the descending chain of governments, from Catholicism and feudalism to capital; who only wanted to produce and exchange; who only were elevated to power by labor and the economy, see in the republic of labor a threat to their interests? ”

“ It was necessary to pluck the nails and teeth from power, move the public forces of government to the citizens, not only to ensure that government could not do anything against liberty, but also to wrest from the governmental utopias their final hope. ”

“ A revolution is an explosion of the organic force, an evolution from the inside out, of society; it is legitimate only insofar as it is spontaneous, pacific and traditional. It is thereby equal tyranny to suppress it as well as to do violence to it.
The organization of labor, which solicited, after February, the Provisional Government to take the initiative, touched upon property, and, consequently, marriage and the family ”

“ Driven by governmental prejudice, the people had nothing better to do than to remake first of all a government. Power fell into their toiling hands, was immediately handed by them to a number of men of their choice, charged with founding the Republic, and resolving the political problem, the social problem, the problem of the proletariat. ”

“ It was reserved for our epoch to attempt something that had never been seen, a revolution by power, and then to have it dismissed by the nation. Socialism existed and was propagated for 18 years, under the protection of the Charter, which recognized for all the French the right to publish and print their opinions. The demagogues of February had the secret, in dragging socialism to power, of rousing against it intolerance and of having proscribed thence the ideas. ”

“ Here is the antinomic theory confirmed again by experience: those who admit in the direction of human affairs no philosophy and who relate everything to an invisible power, finally tell us how reason explains everything, error and crime, while faith alone does not explain everything?
Not only does the succession of government of the workers following that of the capitalists make sense, it was just. Capital, which had been postulated as principle and end of social institutions, could not be sustained ”

“ The organization of popular societies was the backbone of democracy, the cornerstone of the republican order. Instead of organization, the Provisional Government had offered clubs of tolerance and espionage, until due to public indifference and reaction they were extinguished. ”

“ I mean by organic that which makes the constitution intimate, timeless to society, superiorly to any political system, to any constitution of the State.
Thus, we say that marriage is something organic. It appertains to the legislative power to take the initiative of any law concerning the relations of interest and of domestic order which gives rise to conjugal society; it does not appertain to it to touch upon the essence of this society. Is marriage an institution of absolute or dubious morality, an institution ”

“ It means that government is by nature immobilist, conservative, refractory toward any initiative, we might say even counter-revolutionary, it is that a revolution is an organic thing, something creative, and that power is something mechanical or executive. ”

“ In principle, the Church does not admit that marriage, contracted regularly, can be dissolved; but by a causality of fiction, it declared, in certain cases, it does not exist, or it has ceased to exist. Cladestinity, impotence, crime importing civil death, mistaken identity, etc., are for it, as many cases of diremption of marriage. Perhaps it would be possible to equally satisfy the needs of society, the exigencies of morality and respect for families, in perfecting that theory without going as far as divorce, whereby the marriage contract is no longer in reality a cohabitation contract. ”

“ The cult was an organic thing in France when the Revolution broke out; and if, by progress of philosophy, one could then proclaim the right to abstain, if one can predict today the forthcoming extinction of Catholicism, one would not be authorized to abrogate it. ”

“ I am suspicious of superstitious feebleness and of religious prejudices of any kind: but I will say that religion is, like marriage, not a regulatory thing or of sheer discipline, but an organic thing, consequently removed from the direct action of power. ”

“ At the time of the February Revolution, commerce and industry, outstanding for several years, were in a distressing stagnation, agriculture burdened, workshops idle, stores abounding to be unblocked, the finances of the state were also mistreated as those of individuals. ”

“ The bankocrats, who in 1830 had made a revolution in the name of interest, who had promised cheap government, who feigned the title of economists, rather than of politicians, the philosophers Must and Have spent one and a half times as much as the government of legitimacy, equally as much as the imperial government, without being able to align their revenues and expenditures. ”

“ I said somewhere that society is a metaphysic in action, a kind of logic that is played out in proverbs. What the general study of history and the more thorough of political economy has revealed to me, the events accomplished in the last two years have made me touch a finger upon. ”

“ I call organic, not the laws, which are purely conventional, affecting the broader elements of administration and power, such as municipal and departmental law, the law on recruitment, the law on public instruction, etc. ”

“ Thiers later revealed, which had been said before him by President Sauzet, that being that government is not made to provide work to workers, that it was safer for them to keep the status quo of Louis Philippe and resist any innovation, as the people did not impose authority. ”