Political Messianism – Romantic Phase

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/POLITICAL MESSIANISM 11

The Romantic Phase by

J.

L. TALMON

© A

FREDERICK A. PRAEGER, Publishers New York

BOOKS THAT MATTER Published in the United States ofAmerica in 1960 by Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., Publishers 64 University Place, New York 3, N. Y.

Copyright© by]. L. Talmon

1960

All rights reserved Library of Congress catalog card number 60-14071

Printed in Enalarid.

TO BERTEL in gratitude

Du dix-huitieme siecle et de la revolution, comme d'une source commune, etaient sortis deux fleuves: le premier conduisait les hommes aux institutions libres, tandis que le second les menait au pouvoir absolu. Tocqueville La Revolution fran'raise est beaucoup plus remarquable par la continuite qu'elle montre dans les idees, que par les destructions qu'elle a operees; le XVID-e siecle la traverse et se prolonge jusqu'en 1848. Durant la premiere moitie du XIX-e siecle on continue ctoire la bonte de l'homme, on construit des Utopies pour rendre l'humanite heureuse, on est la fois rationaliste et sensible . . . le regne de Rousseau qui avait commence vers 1762 • • . avait dure presque cent ans. Georges Sorel

a

a

a

U avait annote le Contrat Social. n se bourrait de la Revue Independante. U connaissait Mably, Morelly, Fourier, Saint-Simon, Comte, Cabet, Louis Blanc, la Iourde charretee des ecrivains socialistes, ceux qui re­ clament pour l'humanite le niveau des casernes, ceux qui voudraient la divertir dans un lupanar ou la plier sur un comptoir, et, du melange de tout cela, il s'etait fait un ideal de democratic vertueuse, ayant le double aspect d'une metairie et d'une filature, une sorte de Lacedemone americaine ou l'individu n'existerait que pour servir la Societe, plus omnipotente, absolue, infaillible et divine que les grands Lamas et les Nabuchodonosors. n n'avait pas un doute sur l'eventualite prochaine de cette con­ ception; et tout ce qu'il jugeait lui etre hostile, Senecal s'achamait dessus avec des raisonnements de geometre et une bonne foi d'inquisiteur. Gustave Flaubert

PREFACE MANY an author who after years of labour sends his book for final printing will share the sentiments which Keynes voiced in the preface to his "Treatise on Money": "I feel like someone who has been forcing his way through a confused jungle. Now that I have emerged from it, I see that I might have taken a more direct route . . . ifl were to start over again." It is some comfort to be able to take cover under so mighty an oak. It has been method rather than matter which has prompted such self-questioning in the present case. It was not an easy task to treat each trend of Political Messianism as a distinct and separate entity, whilst endeavouring to relate it to so wide-sweeping and compre­ hensive a movement ofthought. Nor could the student of thought, primarily interested in mental a12d psychological patterns as such, altogether neglect the reconstruction of events, in response to which such patterns grow and change. To these special difficulties were added the immemorial tensions of the historian-the desire to be exhaustive, which has to be disciplined by the necessity to be selective; the anxiety to go back to the original sources, which has to be moderated by the inevitability of relying on secondary works. I can only hope that the result, however imperfect, may help others to take a short cut and survey the landscape as a whole from a higher vantage point. In the eight years that have elapsed since the appearance of the first volume I have seen no reason to change my basic thesis. On the contrary, I was if anything surprised to discover how far the distinction between the two types of democracy, liberal and what we have called totalitarian, had become towards the mid-nineteenth century a commonplace with writers and publicists of all schools of opinion. In addition, I found that the devotees of what some peaple already then called "popular democracy", no less than the liberals, and of course the counter-revolutionaries, clearly recognized its origins in Rousseau and the Jacobins, while tracing the other type of democracy back to the United States and the Girondists. The question of the "r· esponsibility" of Rousseau for the deeds or vii

vm

PREFACE

misdeeds of those who invoked his name is as relevant or as irrel­ evant as say the question of the "responsibility" of the Gospel for the expulsion of the Huguenots by Louis XIV. The continuity of a tradition matters more than the authenticity of the interpretation of the canon. And the totalitarian-democratic nature, or at least potentialities, of the Rousseauist-Jacobin canon stare into one's face. If in this volume I use the term "political Messianism" in preference to "totalitarian democracy", it is to avoid a description too narrow to embrace all the rivers and rivulets into which the Revolutionary Messianic flood broke in the early nineteenth century. I remain at the same time convinced that they were all propelled by the same impulse, and however different their routes would all have come to the same end. For they all shared the totalitarian-democratic expectation of some pre-ordained, all­ embracing and exclusive scheme of things, which was presumed to represent the better selves, the true interests, the genuine will and the real freedom of men. A faith such as is the subject of this study is hardly susceytible to criteria of logical cohesion. It rather re­ quires to be brought to life, with all the flamboyant rhetoric, bizarre imagery and strange associations of ideas, so characteristic of the nineteenth century prophets. I have derived much stimulus from conversations with my friends, Professor R. H. Tawney, Sir Lewis Namier, Mr. E. H. Carr, Sir Isaiah Berlin and Mr. T. E. Utley. My colleagues at the Hebrew University, Dr. J. Arieli and Dr. Y. Garber-Talmon, and my London friends Mr. Peter Goldman, Mr. George Lichtheim, Dr. I. Neustadt and Dr. R. Miliband read parts of the manuscript and offered valuable criticism and advice. Miss Bernadette Folliot, Mr. David Holt and Dr. Renee Winegarten made their contribution in improving the English. I was assisted in different ways by Dr. H. Ben-Israel, Mr. S. Avineri, Miss M. Kozak and Miss H. Lifszyc. I could hardly find words to thank Mrs. B. Kleinhaus for all the devoted aid she has unstintingly given me through most of the period of preparation and writing, last but not least in compiling the Index. The Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

J. L. T.

CONTENTS PAGB

INTRODUCTION .

IS

{I) Political Messianism

(2) The religion of Revolution and totalitarian democracy

(3) Nineteenth-century collectivism versus eighteenth-century individualism-contrast or identity? (4) The break in historic continuity and the idolization of history (5) Security and freedom-socialism, liberalism, democracy (6) Universalism and nationalism { 7) Appearance and reality PART I SOCIALIST MESSIANISM CHAP.

I. FROM TECHNOCRACY TO THEOCRACY

35

(1) TOTALITARIAN TECHNOCRACY: SAINT-SIMON

(a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

The portrait of a Messiah The quest for totality (sociology, historicism, dialectics) The coming of the industrial system Liberty and purposive integration The breakthrough (f) Property and poverty-socialism (g) The new dispensation-Nouveau Christianisme

(rr) THE DIALECTIC OF ROMANTIC TOTALITARIANISM: THE SA!JiT-SIMONIST SCHOOL (a) The Apostolic community (b) The Jewish ingredient (c) Dogma and experience ( d) From scientific proof to the intuition of the leader (e) A socialist doctrine (f) The challenge to action- 1830 (g) Mater dolorosa IX

70

CONTENTS

X

PAGE

CHAP,

II. INDIVIDUAL AND ORGANIZATION IN UTOPIA (FOURIER, CONSIDERANT) (a) Individual neurosis and social evil (b) Why civilization went wrong (c) Critique of capitalism (d) The elements of harmony (e) Dialectics of history (f) The phalange

125

Ill. THE TOTALITARIAN-DEMOCRATIC COMMUNIST REVOLUTION: PRE-1848 FRENCH COMMUNISM (a) Class war (b) Two types of democracy-bourgeois and popular (c) Historic inevitability and Revolution (d) Revolutionary dictatorship IV. FROM CONTRACTUAL INDIVIDUALISM (FICHTE) TO MESSIANIC PRE-1848 MARXISM

157

177

(1) FICHTE: FROM

ANARCHISM TO TOTALITARIAN DEMOCRACY AND ORGANICISM (a) The legislator of nature (b) The kingdom of ends ( c) The social contract (d) The totalitarian closed Handelsstaat (e) The general will (f) Rationalist and romantic (g) The One and the many (h) Organization and organism (i) From world citizenship to nationalism (u) MARX: FROM TOTALITARIAN DEMOCRACY TO MESSIANIC COMMUNISM 201 (a) Hegelian dilemmas (b) From self-alienation to self-recovery (i) The state and democracy (ii) Religion (iii) Apocalypse (iv) Property and the proletariat (c) The grand prophecy (d) Science or Utopia?

PART II MESSIANIC NATIONALISM I. FROM PAPAL TO POPULAR INFALLIBILITY (LAMENNAIS) (a) Theocracy-the solely free regime (b) The heresy of the Galilean Restoration (c) The Revolution God-willed (d) Vox Dei vox populi-direct democracy

.

229

CONTENTS

XI

CHAP. II. GESTA DEi PER FRANCOS (MICHELET)

(a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

The scheme ofuniversal history and the nation Liberty versus fatalism Liberty versus grace The people's history-France The French Revolution and revolutionary dialectics

III.

PEOPLE-MESSIAH (MAZZINI, MICKIEWICZ)

IV.

UNIVERSAL CREED AND NATIONAL UNIQUENESS

(a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

God and the People The Oracle ofHistory One creed The arrival of the peoples Roma Terza and the Christ ofthe Nations (Poland) (f) The revolutionary brotherhood ofnations (g) A personal or collective Messiah?

(a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

Utopian socialism and the nation Marx and nationalism The social accents ofthe nationalist prophets The nation as vehicle ofredemption The nationalists and socialism (j) National uniqueness and international class struggle PART

I.

II.

PAGB 242

III

CONFRONTATIONS

THE RIGHT OF THE DAY (DE MAISTRE, BoNALD, GERMAN ROMANTICS) 295

(a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

Revolution and man's impotence The dominion ofmurder and sin Moi et Nous "I will it so" The ivy and the anchor

LIBERALISM VERSUS DEMOCRATIC AND SOCIALIST MESSIANISM

(a) The value ofliberty (Humboldt) (b) Early liberal critique of totalitarian democracy (Benjamin

315

Constant)

(c) Against Revolutionary Messianism-critique by Guizot and Tocqueville

(d) Democracy and social revolution (Guizot) (e) Liberalism, democracy, socialism and conservative liberali�m (Tocqueville)

(j) Democratic liberalism (Lamartine)

III. A

(g) Democratic radicalism (Ledru-Rollin)

CONFRONTATION

. 336

xii

CONTENTS

QIAP.

PART

PACE

IV

·IDEAS AND REALITIES I. AN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION?

(1)

•

339

,

395

STRUCTURAL CRISIS AND CATASTROPIDC CHANGE?

(a) (b) (c) ( d)

Demographic changes The conditions ofan Industrial Revolution The land Industrial growth

(11) THE ANATOMY OF MISERY

(m)

·(1v)

(a) Wages (b) Pauperization

THE GROWTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS

(a) Repressively liberal legislation (b) Industrial unrest (c) The dignity oflabour

MIND AND REALITY

II. THE LATENT REVOLUTION

(1) (n)

(111)

THE RIGHT TO REVOLUTION

(a) The problem oflegitimacy ( b) Sociological factors

RIOT AND PLOT

(a) Riot and repression

(b) Conspiracy under the Restoration (c) Secret societies under the early July Monarchy

THE RADICALIZATION OF THE UNDERGROUND

(a) The social issue (b) Towards totalitarian communism (c) Split on the meaning ofthe "right to work" PART V

1848-THE TRIAL AND THE DEBACLE I. FROM RIOT TO REVOLUTION.

(a) A predetermined or accidental event? b) The unwanted Banquet entanglement !c) Revolutionary initiative and catalystic Revolutionary action d) Intention and chance (e) Violent imposition as Revolutionary legitimacy

1[, THE REVOLUTION WHICH fAILED TO COME OFF-A CARICATURE OF THE GREAT REVOLUTION

(a) Nothing fails like success b) The paralysing effect ofthe myth ofthe Revolution

lc) Totalitarian democracy and universal suffrage d) The abortive joum�es

•

423

xm

CONTENTS CHAP,

PAGB

III. THE ABORTIVE SOCIAL REVOLUTION (a) Ambiguous attitudes (b) Stark realities (c) A slave war

• 455

IV. THE FAILURE OP THE INTERNATIONAL REVOLUTION

•

472

EPILOGUE

,

487

(a) The international revolution and the lightning rod (b) 'The blood of Frenchmen belongs to France' (c) Darwinian nationalism and universal revolution •

,

,

,

(I) Bonapartist dictatorship

(a) A caricature ofpolitical Messianism ( b) Democratic suicide and dictatorial violence (2) Nationalist and Liberal reorientation (a) The dissolution ofthe universal alliances of peoples and kings (b) The recession of the spectre of Revolution and the progress of national liberalism (3) Marxist reorientation (a) The blueprint for a proletarian revolution and dictatorship (b) Global revolutionary strategy and nationalism

CONCLUSIONS

• 505

NOTES

,

519

INDEX

,

583

INTRODUCTION (1) POLITICAL MESSIANISM

THE present enquiry is concerned with the expectation of universal regeneration which animated men and movements in the first half of the nineteenth century. No period before or after has experienced so luxurious a flower­ ing of Utopian schemes purporting to offer a coherent, complete and final solution to the problem of social evil. Never have more daring attempts been undertaken to prove a pattern of logic and ultimate aim in history. Seldom has a more sustained effort been made to reconcile historic inevitability with human freedom, and base the challenge to revolutionary innovation on deterministic laws of evolution. The dilemma of mass and individual, collective organization and man's spontaneity, as well as the contradictions between class struggle and national unity, the uniqueness of a national tradition and the brotherhood of peoples, were all to be resolved in the imminent hour of fulfilment. Nor were these expectations confined to theorizing and preach­ ing. Large groups of men, containing some of the most generous spirits of the age, were strenuously preparing for the Day, while others, governments and ruling classes, were mobilizing all their forces to ward it off. The disillusionment of the hopeful and the relief which the test of 1848 brought to the fearful had a decisive effect on European thought, and moulded much of political prac­ tice in the second part of the century. Already eighteenth-century rationalism had engendered the hope that reason was about to take the place of tradition and drift as the determining factor in history. The coalescence of the two revolu­ tions, the French and the Industrial, both marking a sharp break in historic continuity and seeming to inaugurate wholly new prin­ ciples and new realities, spread a sense of an all-embracing structural, almost apocalyptic crisis. It evoked the belief in the necessity, indeed inevitability, . of an early and final denouement. At the same time, the romantic temper, itself the companion or infant of IS

16

INTRODUCTION

the great upheavals, heightened man's vision and made possible those dramatic sweeps and wonderful combinations across the maze of untidy detail and recalcitrant inertia. This study sets out to investigate a few of the more representa­ tive trends of Messianism in the first half of the nineteenth century, by confronting them-as far as possible-with the social realities of the day, on the one hand, and the rival political tendencies of the age, on the other. That confrontation, which is continued also in the analysis of the I 848 eruption of the Messianic ideology-will, it is hoped, bring into relief the full significance of political Messianism as a historic force. The present quest is intended to proceed upon three planes. Men grounded in time and place reflected and acted. Passion­ ately addicted to relating their age to a design of universal history, and intensely future-minded though they were, the devotees of the total revolution were nonetheless part of a present historical reality, and subject to its determinations and limitations. The second plane is that of historical perspective. The high tide of political Messianism is seen in this study as Act Two in the wider drama of the unrolling of the story of Messianic totalitarian democracy from the eighteenth century till our own day. While the climate and ideology of the period were an aftermath of the French Revolution, strongly coloured by the impressions of the Industrial Revolution, they were also the womb out of which in due course emerged the frame of mind and the body of ideas which shaped the Bolshevik revolution and were made dominant by it. Thirdly there is the search for morphology which the reflective historian finds impossible to ignore, conscious though he is that anything said under that heading can be hardly more than tentative suggestion. Whence the perennial hope for millennium? Why does it grow so intense in one age, while dormant in another? What made political Messianism so vital and continuous a factor in modern times, the rival indeed of empirical liberal democracy on one side and the authoritarian systems of the Right on the other? Why does it somehow always turn from a vision of release into a snare and a yoke? We seek to confront ideas with realities. What can this investi­ gation teach us of the relationship between the two? Which is the parent, and which is the offspring? Revolution is the key

I N T R O D UC T I ON

17

conc:ept for our quest. Which pi:oves more potent: the force of habit or the craving for innovation ; the power of tradition or the urge for change ; the dominion of matter or the conscious resolve of man; drift or planning ? This book is not a history of ideas. • Its subject is a climate of ideas, a frame of mind, we may say faith. It is undertaken in the conviction that faith is an identifiable factor in shaping human urges, attitudes and actions. However much influenced by circum­ stances, a faith is more than the sum total of response to actual situations, and more than a compound of rationalizations of immedi­ ate interests. It was there when these emerged, and may outlive them, although probably somewhat altered by them. The Wars of Investiture in the Middle Ages, the Reformation in the sixteenth century, Anglo-Saxon puritanism were of course the outcome of concrete circumstances. But would these circum­ stances have resulted in what they did, without that all-embracing faith, the first principles of which were laid down in a book many centuries before ? (2) THE RELIGION OF REVOLUTION AND TOTALITARIAN DEMOCRACY

The accent may differ: some may be primarily conscious of the continuance of the French Revolution; others may ascribe exclusive importance to the problems posed by the Industrial Revolution ; to many the rights of man and the vindications of workers may have come to mean the same thing, and social harmony to signify social ownership of the means of production in a classless society. All of them were inspired by the intense consciousness of living in a REVOLUTION on the march. Whether they believed in revolutionary violence as a means of a sudden break-through, and therefore formed secret societies and initiated coups and uprisings ; whether they eschewed these methods as futile and put all their trust in mutual help and in gradual under­ mining of the existing system; or whether they expected the laws of history and economics to drop the ripe pear into the lap of the forces of the future-all the various groups may be classified as belonging together to the camp of the REVOLUTION. There was-as will be shown-a constant coming and going, joining and seceding, rapprochement and alienation, debate and

18

INTRODUCTION

confrontation between the innumerable groups, societies, schools and coteries. It has in this respect been too restrictive a procedure to limit the general term "Revolutionary movement" to those ele­ ments which directly and defiantly preached the theory of Revolu­ tionary violence and practised conspiracy and coup. The groaning and gnashing of teeth was by no means the most important thing. The vital, and general common denominator, was-to say it once more-the expectation of and preparation for some inevitable, pre-ordained total change in the social order. Paradoxical as it may sound, some of the spokesmen of conspiracy and violent revolt were in one sense more moderate than the socialist theorists who repudiated violence and even rejected political action. The former were in the tradition of the right to resist oppression and of tyrannicide. They thought of little beyond the justification of rebellion against tyrannical restrictions on freedom-such as the Holy Alliance system, restricted franchise, censorship and the ban on political activity. As against the vague ideas of the purely political conspirators of what should happen after the overthrow of des­ potism, the more pacific socialist schools had a very coherent vision of a total transformation. As a matter of fact, the two trends tended to meet somewhere in the middle. Few of the political Revolutionary groups remained untouched by the social gospel of reform ; while the Utopians, once the violent and bloody break-through had been effected, far from repudiating it, hastened to join hands to welcome the hour of destiny as a challenge and a long-awaited opportunity to start the great work of total reconstruction. The religion of Revolution embraced an enormous variety of interests, hopes, tendencies and expectations from nationalism to communism, from evangelical poverty to industrial technocracy. They were all aware that they were an international confraternity. The fundamental reason why such wide differences could persist among them-till the fateful confrontation during the test of I 848 -was that, in the first place, there was the common enemy of "old Europe", and secondly because, unlike the state' of affairs a century later, that international confraternity was never guided by, and never professed allegiance to a single G.H.Q. in the seat of the government of a great Power. Old Europe believed, or pre­ tended to believe, that there was an international underground conspiracy, with a centre and branches everywhere. There was

INT RODUCTION

19

however only an internationaL-confraternity, with some, mostly ineffective, attempts at creating international networks. The religion of Revolution was inspired by belief in the perm­ anent Revolution. It was, as already hinted, on a different plane from the very ancient doctrines about the right to resist oppression or to rise in revolt against tyrants and kill them. The permanent Revolution was opened by the French Revolution. To use Marxist terminology, it was not a revolt against evils, but an uprising against evil itself, and it would not come to an end, till the evil of evils had been uprooted, and harmonious justice established in its place. The right and duty to maintain the state of revolt, and with it civil war, was not in an explicit authorization, but in the very nature of things, in the existence of evil. In this respect, the priests of the religion of Revolution owed no allegiance to the existing framework of laws and institutions, or at least did not feel they were part of them. As trustees of posterity and executors of the real-though not explicitly stated-will of the people or History, they owed obedience to another dispensation, that of History. The pattern to be enthroned by the revolution was never and by no one envisaged as something empirically arrived at by the process of trial and error. It was considered to be an a priori conception implicit in the hearts of men, and the inexorable result of the iron laws of history. The crisis brought about by the Industrial Revolu­ tion, the immediate companion of the French Revolution, was not experienced as a temporary loss of balance by a society which was suddenly overwhelmed by a series of grave and unprecedented problems, and so needed time and experience to adjust itsel£ The Industrial Revolution was proclaimed to be an apocalyptic crisis, a force driving relentlessly towards an inevitable denouement. The denouement was equated in many minds with a violent revolutionary spasm . It was to effect a general catharsis, after which men would be brought to offer their spontaneous and loving consent to the final scheme of things.

(3 )

NINETEENTH-CENTURY COLLECTIVISM VERSUS EIGHTEENTH­ CENTURY INDIVIDUALISM-CONTRAST OR IDENTITY ?

On what grounds can the thesis be upheld that the movements thrown out by the high tide of political Messianism in the first half of the nineteenth century not only form an entity in spite of

20

IN T R O D U C T I O N

the wide differences among them, but are a s it were aspects of the one, continuous and identical trend towards totalitarian democracy, which emerged in the second part of the eighteenth century and seems still today to be gathering momentum? Some elements which go to swell the tide appear at first sight to constitute a total denial and repudiation of many of the fundamental tenets of the Rationalist and Jacobin-Babouvist period. We defmed the nature of the totalitarian democratic school in volume I of this series as "based upon the assumption of a sole and exclusive truth in politics", postulating "a preordained, har­ monious and perfect scheme of things, to which men are irresistibly driven, and at which they are bound to arrive". The paradox of totalitarian democracy was seen in its insistence that human freedom is compatible with an exclusive pattern of social existence, since "the purpose it proclaims is never presented as an absolute idea, external and prior to man", but it is "thought to be immanent in man's reason and will, to constitute the fullest satisfaction of his true interest, and to be the guarantee of his freedom". The diffi­ culty of reconciling freedom with the idea of an absolute purpose was "resolved by thinking not in terms of men as they are, but as they were meant to be, and would be, given the proper conditions". Those conditions would be brought about by the vanguard of the enlightened, who know the real will of the people and their ultimate wish, which the people themselves are as yet unprepared to formu­ late. The vanguard, acting as the trustee of posterity, is fully justified in using force and intimidation, in ignoring the apparent wishes of the p eople, "without any real violation of the democratic principle being involved", it being certain that in the proper conditions "the conflict between spontaneity and duty would dis­ appear, and with it the need for coercion". We concluded that "totalitarian democracy early evolved into a pattern of coercion and centralization not because it rejected the values of eighteenth-century liberal individualism, but because it had originally a too perfectionist attitude towards them", having made man the absolute point of reference. Man was not merely to be freed from restraints : all existing traditions, established institutions and social arrangements were to be overthrown and remade with the sole purpose of securing to man the totality of his rights and freedoms, and liberating him from all dependence and effects of inequality. Extreme individualism came full circle

INTRODUCTION

21

in a collectivist pattern of coerc.fon before the eighteenth century was out, in the idea of provisional revolutionary dictatorship, whose task was the elimination of all influences tending to per­ petuate social diversities and inequalities. Proper reforms and an educational effort were to bring about perfect unanimity and spontaneous adjustment of everyone to the collective pattern. Political Messianism of the Romantic phase upholds fully the postulates of the Jacobin-Babouvist forerunners concerning the idea of an irresistible advance to some preordained denouement, the decisive role of the enlightened vanguard in the task of realization, and the expectation of the spontaneous self-identification of man with the ultimate scheme of things-to the cessation of all conflict. There were however very important differences between the two phases. The question arises whether these divergences compel us to look upon some at least of the schools of thought of the first half of the nineteenth century as independent phenomena, or whether they permit us to regard the differences as being essentially variations on one theme-the religion of Revolution. All the seeming divergences turn on the question of individual­ ism. The various Messianic trends of the first half of the nineteenth century were united in upholding the ideal of association and in condemning the individualism of the previous century. Is there a genuine contradiction between those two concepts ? Rationalists and Jacobins held an atomistic view of man and society. The only true difference between men was that between the enlightened and the unenlightened. Enlightenment could and would one day become the possession of everyone. Man had eternal and inalienable rights. In order to safeguard them men concluded a social contract. Logically men could as it were assemble as well as dismantle society and state, and each man could join or secede from the body politic. This was a scheme valid for all time. The real Revolution signified the overthrow of the old order imposed by extraneous interests and erroneous views, and the conclusion of a social contract based on the eternal principles of reason, justice and the rights of man. Society thus appeared as a contrivance of men, and man was not seen as the product of society. Man of course could be and was perverted by evil institutions and bad education. But these unfortunate effects could as it were be washed away, once and for all, by sound ideas and good social arrangements.

22

INTROD UCTION

The age of reason failed to grasp the organic character of a society and an age, with the various aspects intertwined and merging into each other. Sharply defined individuals, fundamentally equal, of their own free will and in full awareness of what they are doing, enter into contractual arrangements. This type of individualism was natural to a pre-industrial society, and to an age that was so thrilled with the discovery of Reason that it became totally oblivious of history. Remove the obstacles, landlord and priest, abolish the evil laws; and the social harmony of the natural order would follow at once in a society of simple, contractual relationships. The Jacobin vision knew only individuals, all equal and econ­ omically independent-artisans, small-holders, shopkeepers, petty officials, all virtuously willing the same general will. Communist Babouvism already saw the essence of freedom in equal distribution of goods and services and in the use of public force to ensure spiritual conformity as a condition of material equality. But even the citizen of the Republic of Equals was still thought of as an independent producer bringing his produce to the national store, from where equal shares were to be distributed by state officials to all. The Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, and still more the Industrial Revolution, brought home to men the significance of collective forces, and the reality of highly complex relationships. A far reaching restatement of the Messianic ideology was inevitable. Formerly man appeared to be fighting to wrest his independence from historical forces and tradition, and gain his liberty from rigidly predetermined collective institutions such as Church, class and corporation; in brief he was battling against history and corporate bodies. The effect of the new experience was not the renunciation of the supreme end of securing means of self-expression to the individual, but the emergence of the idea that genuine self-realization of the individual was possible only through his integration into a cohesive collective force. This implied condemnation of individualism in so far as it was isolationism, an urge to break away from the team, and thus to waste one's energy and become unhappy and unful­ filled. On the other hand, it became imperative for the sake of the individual to secure the fullest cohesion of the collective pattern. Appreciation of collective forces naturally led to a greater aware­ ness of historical factors. The collective effort is not a matter of

INTRODUCTION

23

here and now only, but a slfstained endeavour, one generation carrying on from where the last had left off. And so reason was reinterpreted from a force repudiating history into a force which unfolds itself gradually across history. History became an ally instead of an enemy, something to be fulfilled rather than overcome. The progress of time was conceived as steady advance towards higher integration. Since individual self-realization was now anchored in social cohesion and harmony, history appeared as a liberating force. Liberated from the malaise which is engendered by the feeling of conflict with his environment, and taught to experience external reality as his own enlarged being, man would become truly re­ deemed and how powerful ! Freedom is relief from constraint. Heightened experience of it is power. In fact the main preoccupation of the period of the high tide of political Messianism is precisely this problem of human freedom and spontaneity versus mass organization, organic entities and the complexity of industrial relationships; a theme expressed at a much deeper level and on a much wider scale than in earlier periods. The assumption that the more cohesive the collective pattern, the freer and fuller will be the individual's self-expression, was derived from the concept of man not as he is, but as he should be, as he was bound to become, and as he should be made to become. The non-adjustment of the rebel or recalcitrant was calculated to be taken not as argument against the claims of the system to embody harmony, but as proofs of the perverse nature of the unadjusted individual. In a highly complex society this would prove a graver matter than in a relatively simple pre-industrial age. Like the eighteenth-century rationalists, the Messianic creeds build on the rock of the essential goodness of man. Whether they put all their hopes in improved methods of production and distribu­ tion, in psychological and technical contrivances or in the liberating and purifying impact of the Revolutionary spasm, in themselves these devices can prove effective only on condition that in proper circumstances man will prove to be a co-operative and social being, instead of unruly and recalcitrant. This is the one vital point which brings the Messianic collectivists, in spite of their historicist associations, nearer to the original individualistic trend of totalitarian democracy than to those pessimistically deterministic schools of the Right with which they share the high appreciation of impersonal

24

INTR O DUCT I O N

forces. Their attempt to square human spontaneity with a salva­ tionist pattern leads them like their predecessors to totalitarian con­ clusions, not because of any absence of faith in man, but because of an excess of it, accompanied by the fear of the old Adam reassert­ ing itself again.

(4)

THE BREAK IN HISTORIC C ONTINUITY AND THE IDOLIZATION OF HISTORY

Totalitarian potentialities loomed large from another side. There was the unprecedented break in historic continuity and the whirl of kaleidoscopic changes since 1789. The instinctive certainties, unreflecting habit, the naive acceptance of things because they are there and were believed to have always been there-these forces of social cohesion and props of individual self-assurance were gone. The collapse of stable relationships and traditional realities, breeding a sense of irretrievable drift, evoked yearnings for foolproof schemes of existence. At the same time the rapid succession of different and contradictory regimes engendered the belief in the possibility of creating totally new worlds by conscious design. What was, in the face of that frightful instability, to give assurance that the Utopian pattern contrived by this prophet or the salvationist message espoused by that movement was the truly definitive scheme of things ? HISTORY, in other words the canon of historic inevitability. It is no mean paradox that the idolization of HISTORY should have been the outcome of and sequel to the collapse of concrete historic continuity embodied in organized religion, national tradition, local custom and social hierarchies of long standing. HISTORY of the new dispensation was a history above and beyond the actual, tangible and none too logical histories of the particular countries and ages. It was an all embracing and coherent One, notwithstanding the bewildering multiplicity and apparent pointlessness at every particular tum. HISTORY one and indivisible was a structure of ideas, a framework of necessary and meaningful connections; an entity moving towards a pre-ordained goal. Within that scheme of universal history nations and classes do not just spin out their lives, hardly knowing whence and whereto. They represent ideas and embody forces. Concrete events do not

INTRODUCT I O N

25

spring upon men. They betoken the working of long processes. Men do not simply count their days. They are samples of races, classes, ages. Leaders are not prompted by ambition and grope for purposes. They are instruments of destiny. Victory or defeat become verdicts of History: the assertion of a higher right or the proof of exhaustion. Despotic coercion may be made to appear as all-out mobilization of forces, while the sufferings inflicted are extolled as the necessary price and travail of a change of worlds. In the face of this conception of History politics is no longer a matter of pragmatic decisions and practical arrangements for here and now, made by men who happen to have been invested with the required authority. Leaders are not merely called to take some such steps as they in their wisdom or unwisdom see fit. They are summoned to take their cue from the Book of Time, to decipher the dictates of HISTORY, to gauge the significance of this or that event, problem or decision within the context of the strategy of progress. This type of pantheistic History is anchored to the idea of the oneness of Life. As an objective process the passage from phase to phase is realized when the new, conquering principle of existence wins dominance over and comes to permeate all spheres of life. Seen as a vast human effort that passage requires for its success the harmonious harnessing of all assets and all faculties. It is the task of those who are most vividly conscious of the workings of History and the needs of its progress to secure such a total mobili­ zation of assets and effective harmonization of human and social forces-in brief a homogeneous pattern. The essence of the religion of History underlying political Messianism is the profound faith that the march of Time is tanta­ mount to an ever-growing integration and cohesion of human and social contents, which in turn make possible an ever higher measure of individual self-expression through the activization of all the forces of man within a harmonious whole. In this respect all Messianic trends considered Christianity, at times religion as such, always the historic form of Christianity, as the arch-enemy. Indeed they triumphantly proclaimed themselves substitutes for it. Their own message of salvation was utterly incompatible with the basic Christian doctrine, that of original sin, with its vision of history as the story of the fall, and its denial of man's power to attain salvation by his own exertions. The dichotomies of theory and

INTRO DUCTI ON

practice, soul and body, spirit and matter, heaven and earth, Church and State, all derived from that fundamental tenet, stood condemned before the majesty of the oneness of Life and oneness of History, and the vision of a just and harmonious society at the end of the days.

(5)

SECURITY AND FREEDOM-S OCIALISM, LIBERALISM, DEMOCRACY

Eighteenth-century Messianism started as an ethical-political revolt of the bourgeoisie against tradition, which was identified with feudalism, the Church and royal absolutism. By degrees it evolved into a social uprising of the have-nots against the haves of all kinds. On the morrow of the French Revolution the claim to human dignity and happiness was frankly reinterpreted in social and economic terms. It may be suggested that the social problems and evils created by the Industrial Revolution suffice to explain the intensification of social protest and revolt. This is a shallow view. Of social injustice and oppression there had been plenty before. Nor were social anger and revolt all on one side, and social fear absent on the other. The difference in intensity which marked the early decades of the nineteenth century was very important, but not in itself decisive for the new character which the social struggle then assumed. In the past, downtrodden peasants and maddened labourers would rise in despair, massacring, burning and ravaging whatever they could. Such a jacquerie would sooner or later be put down by equally ferocious suppression. The rebels would sink exhausted and powerless into torpor and the victors would add another screw to the machinery of oppression and exploitation. There would be peace for a long while. The element of revolution was absent from the old type of social struggle. The oppressed may have nourished a vague sense of grievance, and murmured not a little, but they had no programme, no vision of an alternative scheme of things. Their uprisings were thus elemental outbursts. They were not inspired by a definite idea, nor guided by a plan. Official society dreaded riot and massacre, but it hardly feared a revolution. Many of the various arrangements, including laws to protect

INTRODUCTION

27

the poor as well as the harshly illiberal institutions of the ancien regime, may be explained by the endemic fear of jacquerie and popular excesses. They were certainly not parts of a plan designed to prevent revolution. The haves could not even conceive the possibility of a real and total transformation of society. The French Revolution marked a turning point in this respect. An alternative programme was born. The dumb savage resent­ ment changed into a realization of rights and into a Messianic expectation, the dread of riot into a never receding fear of some total upheaval. Every riot seemed a token of the approaching Day of Judgment. It was not the Industrial Revolution alone or even primarily which engendered the religion of Revolution. Had it not been for the vital change caused by the French Revolution, the resent­ ment and the protest of the victims of the Industrial Revolution might have continued to express themselves in the old ways, and would not have become woven into those patterns of revolutionary social doctrine and alternative programme. It may on the other hand be relevant to recall here the comment made in the earlier volume about the extent to which the Messianic prophets and leaders of totalitarian democracy on the eve and during the French Revolu­ tion were innocent of any premonition of the coming of the Industrial Revolution. The idea was thus born first. The addi­ tional, not to say objectively decisive, argument came after. There emerged in the French Revolution the momentous ques­ tion which was to create a chasm between two camps : is liberty possible without equality, and happiness real without security ? Those whom we roughly call Liberals, swore by liberty ; the others-whatever the differences dividing them-who may together be called socialists demanded that the state should provide security for the poor. The liberals, with their eyes fixed on Royal despotism and on the Jacobin tyranny of 1793, dreaded the extension of state power and were fascinated by the theory of checks and balances. The socialists decried formal liberty, without social security, as sham and humbug. The liberals, aided and fortified by the belief in the iron laws of economics-we need not decide here whether it was genuine conviction or rationalization of interest-saw in the uprising of the masses from below the onslaught of barbarism. The ignorant, uncouth and savage would swarm the ramparts of civilization and destroy its beautifully poised fabric based on the natural property

28

INTR O D U CT I ON

relationships and the sense of responsibility accompanying them. The State, the provider, which they would then make all-powerful, would kill all individual spontaneity. The answer of the socialists was that bourgeois liberalism not only monopolized all wealth, but quite openly and cynically claimed the right to employ state power for the defence of existing property relationships and for keeping down the masses by restric­ tive laws and sheer force. The poor were therefore absolved from the duty to obey the laws, for those laws were not the result of a social contract. They were the weapons of a conspiracy. Being held in subjection by force, and allowed no voice in the affairs of the country, the proletariat had the right to resist force by force. The problem of property was revealed in all its nakedness, as never before. It was a decisive moment in European history. All inequalities had disappeared, except that of property. To the propertyless this privilege alone was more significant than all the privileges of birth which had been abolished. For it was the most effective. With it, all the powers secured by the old privileges were more than restored. Without it, all the formal rights and liberties, as well as marks of equality, were of no use. To the haves property became the mark of man's freedom and indepen­ dence, the guarantee of social stability, the rock of civilization, the stimulus to effort, the title to a share in the exercise of sovereignty. In the bourgeois society, wbich had done away with the priv­ ileges of nobility and of the Church, property became all-important and all-pervading. In the past, it was only one of numerous privileges and inequalities, and officially not the decisive one. Now it stood alone, as Tocqueville pointed out, in a society which took pride in having come into being by the destruction of all privilege and inequality. Furthermore, it became more vulnerable, and in its defence, the liberal regime saw itself compelled to resort to very illiberal measures, such as the restriction of the franchise and of freedom of association and expression, while some more advanced liberal democrats would at first employ almost socialist language and then shoot down workers on the barricades. "Incendiaire qui s' est fait pompier" it was said about Lamartine. The abolition or at least far-going reform of the institution of private property was to most Messianic schools the condition, indeed realization, of that just and harmonious scheme of things which

INT R O D UCT I O N

29

History was about to enthrone: They were unshakably convinced th2,t the objective forces released by the scientific and Industrial revolutions were irresistibly leading to social ownership of the means of production. Objective necessity and the postulates of justice were thus about to converge, and bring HISTORY to fruition.

(6)

UNIVERSALISM AND NATIONALISM

Like eighteenth-century rationalism nineteenth-century Messian­ ism claimed to be a universal gospel, based on a vision of the oneness of history and the unity of mankind. The Messianic theories prophesied the imminent fulfilment of history in the realization of universal unity. The nationalist ideologies of the first half of the nineteenth century were far from preaching that every nation was a law unto itself, and rivalry among nations inescapable. They were, on the contrary, most anxious to find justification of national particularity in the service of a universal ideal, that is in the part to be played by the given nation in the scheme of universal history. The glorious fulfilment of each nation's mission was to be found in soldiering for the brotherhood of all nations confessing the same faith. This goes to show-a thing repeatedly stated by the authors themselves­ that the nationalist prophets were motivated, like the Socialist theoreticians, primarily by the urge to found a new creed in place of discarded Christianity. In both cases the vehicle of regeneration, the proletarian society or nation, appears to be charged with contents, reaching far beyond either social-economic organization or legal-political framework. Quite explicitly the new medium of human self-realization was to combine Church and State, fuse material and spiritual aspects into one indivisible unity, unlike the old original sin-ridden view. In a sense the deification of the nation necessitated the apotheosis of universal history and the oneness of mankind. Otherwise the uniqueness of the single nation was a freak, and could claim no absolute significance. The risen nations, Italians or Poles, Frenchmen or Germans, would undergo a process of purification and rebirth. Freed from the yoke of foreign invaders or royal despots, their natural good impulses would · assert themselves, and stifle selfishness and class oppression, the evil breed of tyranny. The free peoples would

30

INTRODUCTION

realize the ideal of a nation a s a family of brethren. Furthermore, this sense of solidarity within one nation would be extended to members of other nations. For, after all, wars and rivalries between nations had been fostered by the greed and perversion of the powers of the past, while the natural state between peoples is that of concord and mutual sympathy. Liberated nation-churches would combine into the Church universal. Messianic nationalists often used the same arguments and vocabu­ lary as the socialists, only employing the word people in place of proletariat. The two schools would engage in friendly debate. Yet they considered themselves as allies against one common enemy and in the struggle for the achievement of a similar goal. The nationalists believed in social justice and the socialists could not but sympathize with oppressed nations fighting to be free and united. They could not conceive of the possibility of a conflict between a universal revolutionary creed and national particularity. 1848 was to reveal for the first time the essential contradiction between the two.

( 7)

APPEARANCE AND REALITY

The Messianic ideologies of the first half of the nineteenth century may be dismissed by the historian who has no interest in and consequently still less patience for ideas as a chapter of cranky megalomaniacs and lunatic fringe groups, longwinded and utterly unreadable treatises or obscure ephemeral journals, bizarre experi­ ments in communal living and Utopian communes, conspiratorial plotting and occasional riot. As against this utter futility in immediate tangible results it is strange to behold the intense solemnity and grandiose airs of the prophets on the one hand, and the dumb fear with which these theories and prophecies inspired the contented classes on the other. In one sense this is a study of a spectre, to use the felicitous expression in the Communist Manifesto. Attention should also be drawn to the contrast between rela­ tively little industrialized France, essentially a country of small property owners, seething with revolutionary ferment, and highly capitalistic England so easily overcoming the only real proletarian mass movement of the nineteenth century, Chartism. It is a com­ parison as relevant to the question as what causes revolutions­ economic hardships or ideologies.

INTRODUCTION

What was "more real" in pre-1848 France : the pays legal of a quarter of a million of voters, the proceedings of the Chamber, the activities of French diplomacy, or the Utopian-revolutionary ferment, the undergronnd plottings and the attentats, or finally the inchoate mass of inarticulate peasants, the vast majority of the nation, who "speak not but are France"? Which is reality and which appearance? That which is actual, or that which is only becoming and is waiting in the wings ? A Tocqueville and Carlyle were aghast at the way in which the "official" conntry in both Kingdoms studiously ignored what to them seemed the "real reality" of the age-the rumblings of social discontent and revolu­ tion. The "official" doings and goings seemed to them highly "unreal". The tests of Chartism in England, and of I 848 on the Continent revealed how weak after all the forces of Messianic Revolution were, in comparison with those of historic continuity. It was the "official" country recast, enlarged, more flexible, and wiser because taught by some rude shocks, and at the same time more self­ confident and therefore more generous, that retained the centre of stage, and strengthened its control. Should we then say that the nineteenth century was not, as it has often been thought, a century of Revolution, but a lesson in the taming of the Revolution by the forces of conservatism, which after a passing loss of grip, recovered their powers of self-adjustment ? On this reasoning, 1848 was a demonstration of the utter futility of the Messianic spectre and of all the eschatological hopes and apocalyptic fears which it inspired­ or at most an incidental catalyst forcing the pace of social reform, which would have come without it. Yet, looked upon from the vantage point of the twentieth century, the high tide of political Messianism ceases to be a phantom and delusion, and again begins to appear a vital reality, a significant act in a vast and immensely real drama.

, ..,,.

P A RT I S OCIALIS T MES SIANISM

P.A. - B

Tout sera dit. Le mal expirera ; les larmes Tariront ; plus de fers, plus de deuils, plus d'alarmes ; L'affreux gou:ffre inclement Cessera d'etre sourd et begaiera: qu'entends-je? Les douleurs finiront dans toute l'ombre; un ange Criera : commencement ! Victor Hugo D'autres siecles avaient deja vu des esprits puissants et indociles, secouant le joug des opinions res;ues et des doctrines autorisees, poursuivre isolement la verite. Mais un pareil spectacle n'avait ete donne que par quelques hommes OU a propos de quelques­ unes de connaissances humaines. Ce qui singularise le dix­ huitieme siecle dans l'histoire, c' est que cette curiosite audacieuse et reformatrice ait ete ressentie a la fois par une generation entiere, et se soit exercee, en meme temps, sur l'objet de presque toutes sescroyances, de telle sorte que, dans le meme moment, les principes sur lesquels avaient repose jusque-la les sciences, les arts, la philosophie, la politique, atteints ensemble par une sorte d'ebranlement universe!, ont tous ete remues OU detruits. Tocqueville Blickt man iiber den ganzen Umfang der socialistischen und communistischen Literatur und iiber die Masse der Arbeit, die sich daran anschliesst, und vergleicht man die unendlich geringen Resultate der letzten Zeit mit denen der friiheren, so lasst sich kaum verkennen, dass Socialismus and Communismus ihre theoretische Laufbahn erfullt haben, und dass wir schwerlich etwas wahrhaft Neues in dieser Beziehung erwarten diirfen . Lorenz von Steiu (September 1 847) Democratie-c'est le mot souverain, universel. Tous les partis l'invoquent et veulent se l'approprier comme un talisman . . . monarchie democratique . . . les republicains; . . . les socialistes, les communistes, les montagnards veulent que la Republique soit une democratie pure, absolue. C'est pour eux la condition de sa legitimite. Tel est l' empire du mot democratie que nul gouvernement, nul parti n' ose vivre, et ne croit le pouvoir, sans inscrire ce mot sur son drapeau, et que ceux-la se croient les plus forts qui portent ce drapeau plus haut et plus loin . . • Guizot

Chapter One

FR OM TECH N OCRACY T O T HE OCRACY (I) T OTALITARIAN TECHN O C RACY: S AINT- S IM O N

(a)

THE PORTRAIT O F A MESSIAH

COUNT CLAUDE DE SAINT-SIMON was perhaps the most fascinating of all the nineteenth-century Messiahs and prophets. Though all of them were animated by an apocalyptic experience, no one felt it more intensely. "We say this to them at once: the day of half­ measures is over; it is necessary to march directly towards the general good; it is the truth in its fullness which must be presented in the actual circumstances: the hour of crisis has arrived. That crisis which has been predicted by many of the holy writings which compose the Old Testament. That crisis, for which for many years the biblical societies have been preparing with great activity. That crisis is the one, the existence of which is now demonstrated by the institution of the Holy Alliance, the union of which is founded on the most generous principles of morality and religion. This is the crisis which the Jews have been awaiting since, exiled from their country, they have been wanderers and victims of persecution, · without ever renouncing the hope of seeing the day arrive, when all men will treat each other as brethren. That crisis, finally, tends directly to establish a truly universal religion, and to make all peoples adopt an essentially pacific organization of society." Although these glowing sentences seem to echo the sentiments of Babeuf, Saint-Simon does not trace the crisis exclusively to the French Revolution. He was no apologist of the great Revolution. "Cette crise effroyable", which all nations are destined to go through -the French Revolution was only a symptom of it, or rather a violent paroxysm, the great significance of which was to "deter­ mine the tendency towards improvement (perfectionnement) which is today being manifested throughout all Europe" . . . towards "revolution regeneratrice". 35

36

S O CIAL I S T MES S IANI S M

The sense of crisis i s accompanied by the vivid anticipation of an imminent denouement, a preordained solution, "which no force on earth can prevent". The world is in the throes of a Revolution, but also is about to see the termination of the revolution. Re­ organization, reconstruction, restoration are the words which recur with obstinate insistence. "Gentlemen, I have only one passion, to pacify Europe; only one idea-to reorganize European society. Lift your hearts to the height of this sentiment. Lift your souls to the level of this high idea." The man who felt no embarrassment in voicing such sentiments, whose life-span covered the extraordinary events of the American and French Revolutions, the era of Napoleon, and the larger part of the Restoration period, never had, and hardly ever seriously sought an opportunity to carry out his regenerating ideas in practice. Furthermore, he made no impact at all on his generation during his lifetime, even as a thinker. He remained till practically the end of his days an obscure scribe, pouring out hastily concocted and badly written prospectuses of larger books to come on the ills of society, an almost certifiable crank. The same man was called by Michelet in later years the most daring thinker of the nineteenth century. The great Carnot too thought that no one had so many and such new and bold ideas as that "singular man". There are indeed few ideas in that rich century which had not some beginning in the flashes that came forth from the intuition of Saint-Simon. On the morrow of his death he became the prophet, the mystically revered Founder of a social-religious movement, which in idealistic and intellectual daring had no equal in the nineteenth century, and which attracted and in various ways influenced many of the best brains and finest imaginations of Europe. What was the secret of that "last gentil­ homme and first socialist" ? He was a scion of one of the most ancient houses of France claiming the ancestry of Charlemagne himsel£ It is reported that as a child he would be awakened every morning by the footman with the call: "rise, master, you have great things to accomplish today". The enemy of every privilege of birth and the relentless upholder of the rights of talent, who in 1790 gave up his aristocratic title and assumed the name of citoyen Bonhomme, was never quite free of the impulses of a grand seigneur. He felt his claim to be a

FR6M TECHNOCRACY TO THEOCRACY

37

Napoleon of science and industry fortified by the pledge given to him by Charlemagne in a dream in the prison of Luxembourg in I 794 that his success as philosopher would equal that of the illus­ trious ancestor in the arts of war and statesmanship. No family since the beginning of time could boast of such a double achieve­ ment. In defiance rather than apology Saint-Simon says in refer­ ence to his terrible defects as a writer: "I write, because I have new things to say; I shall present my ideas as they were forged in my mind; I write like a gentleman, a descendant of the comtes de Vermandois, as heir to the pen of the Due de Saint-Simon.'' What­ ever of value has been said, done or written in this world, has been the work of gentlemen. If self-sufficiency and independence of external sanction, public recognition and worldly success, accepted morality and fashion are a sign of greatness, then Saint-Simon was a very great man indeed. Following his inner call, without shame or affectation, a stranger to guile, scheming and the desire to please, he appears as an ele­ mental force, a sleep-walker, monumentally obtuse, and yet so widely, so romantically awake, open and receptive. Early he mapped out for himself the kind of life he would lead : "I. in vigorous age lead the most original and the most active life; 2. make the acquaintance of all theories and all practices; 3 . run through all classes of society, place himself personally in the most diverse social situations and even create relation­ ships which have not been known (including descent to vice, perversion, and even folly . . . "vie fort agitee . . . exaltee"-a virtuous effort in the case of those who wish to gather experience so as to be able to fathom the nature and source of good and evil, and are not merely out to pander to their insatiable instincts); 4. finally, employ his old age for summing up the results for the benefit of mankind. Hardly out of adolescence, Saint-Simon is already a colonel in the American revolutionary army. He feels no attraction for the arts of war or military career, but he sees clearly that the American Revolution is going to have an enormous influence on the shape of things in Europe. It was an important stage in the course of civilization and one on the way to "perfectionnement de la

38

S O CIAL I S T MES S IANI S M

civilisation . . . 1'ordre social", thus within the orbit of Saint-Simon's vocation. Plans and schemes for reform and improvement flow out of his head like rabbits: a blue-print for a Panama canal, a project of a canal from Madrid to the sea, a scheme for public works in Holland. During the French Revolution he remains strangely inactive. The 9th of Thermidor finds him, like the other fathers of socialism, Babeuf and Fourier, in prison. Saint-Simon devoted the years of Revolution, and especially the post-Thermidorian period, to feverish speculation on the revolutionary government land sales and to amassing a fortune. He falls out with his partner, and there follow bankruptcy and years of dire poverty and starvation. The life of Saint-Simon presents a strange mixture of obsessive single-mindedness and opportunism. In a sense his erratic oscilla­ tions serve to underline his singleness and integrity of purpose. He wanted to have money, not because he was greedy for wealth, but because he wished to further his idealistic schemes and to enter­ tain scientists and philosophers and learn from them and by observ­ ing them-"1'effet que la culture de la science produit . . . sur leurs passions, sur leur esprit, sur l'ensemble de leur moral". The :ittempt was not very successful. The savants ate much and spoke but little, and what they said was not worth remembering. He bids farewell to his mistress, because she has not the makings of a hostess for his guests. He marries a would-be hostess, but after a year of experiment the marriage ends in separation. From what is known of Saint-Simon there is nothing intrinsically improbable in the story of his marriage proposal to Mme de Stael on the grounds that a marriage of the greatest man and the most remarkable woman of the age was bound to produce an unprecedented prodigy. Bankrupt, starving and abandoned by all, the saviour of mankind would feel no shame in begging subscriptions for his brochures, which no one wanted to read, in pawning his clothes or living for years on a former servant. When all resources had come to an end, he tried suicide. "For the last fifteen days I have eaten nothing but bread and drunk nothing but water; I am working with no fire and I have sold my clothes in order to get money to pay for copying my work. It is the passion for science and the public good; it is the desire to find a means of putting an end, in a gentle manner, to this frightful crisis in which the whole of European society is plunged, that have driven me into this state of misery.

F R 6M

TECH N O CRACY T O T HEOCRACY

39

It is thus without blushing that ram able to confess my misery and to ask for the necessary support to enable me to continue my work." Only towards the very end of his life did Saint-Simon have the good fortune to gain the affectionate admiration of the young rich Jewish financiers, the Rodrigues and Pereira brothers, and with their aid-security and ease. His eyes fixed on the one and all-embracing goal-"progres des lumieres et 1' amelioration du sort de l'humanite"-Saint-Simon is prepared to welcome any of the powers that be as ally. He extols Napoleon in extravagant language that makes one wince as "the scientific Legislator of mankind". He is then enthusiastic about the promise of universal peace contained in the Holy Alliance. He looks to the Bourbon king to effect the passage to an industrial system in a dictatorial way. He then dreams of a union of parlia­ ments as a prelude to a regime of syndicalist and corporative assem­ blies. He lauds the Monarchy, and then writes his most effective piece of journalism in which he compares the effects of the sudden death of the princes of the royal family and the cream of French aristocracy with the consequences of the sudden disappearance of the captains of French industry and the leading scientists of France ; an article which lands him again in prison. On the face of it, a life of utter futility in the midst of public oblivion and contempt. But this was not how Saint-Simon felt about it. He writes about himself in 18rn : "My life appears as a series of disasters, and yet it has not been a failure, because far from descending I have always been rising . . . I have exercised the action of the tides in the realm of discovery; I have often lapsed; but the ascending impetus has always won over the opposing forces. At the age of fifty, when others begin to retreat, I am entering upon my career . . . My moral situation is still more distressing than my pecuniary circumstances; every counsel I receive tends to discourage me. Well, in this situation, I enjoy it, I find myself happy ; I have the sense of my power, and this sensation is more agreeable than any I have ever experienced in my life . . . my esteem for myself has always increased in proportion to the harm I did to my reputation.'' Exalted folly, adds Saint-Simon, is indispensable for the accom­ plishment of great things.

S O CI A LI S T M E S S I ANI S M

(b)

THE QUEST FOR T O TALITY (s o cI OLOGY, HISTORICISM, DIALECTICS )

The French Revolution was a tremendous event, yet not the real thing. It did not just fail; it never happened. This view of the event accounts for Saint-Simon's failure to live the experience of the Revolution. In 1790 he was elected president de l' assemblee electorale of his commune and on that occasion renounced his title of nobility. Apart from that there is no sign in his writings or correspondence that the elans and the spasms of the Revolution ever stirred his soul. The oath in the tennis court, the Bastille, levee en masse, la patrie en danger, la Republique une et indivisible, all the symbolism and mystique of Revolution and nationalism seem to have evoked no response. No Revolutionary hero found in him an admirer. Napoleon did catch his imagination. Not the military genius and conqueror, but the Demiurgus, the great architect and scientific legislator of mankind : "The Emperor will soon conquer the world and give it laws . . . when the war has come to an end, the sciences will become the exclusive object of his attention . . . on the basis of reasoning and observation he will found general principles, which will for ever serve as guides to humanity . . . Legislateur . . . the most transcending genius that ever made its appearance to give laws to mankind . . . It was necessary that he should unite all powers in his hands . . . The Emperor is the scientific chief of mankind, as he is its political head. He holds in one hand the unfailing com­ pass, and in the other the sword which exterminates all opponents of the progress of lights." As against this constructive elan and achievement, the Revolu­ tion offers a spectacle of waste, fatuous debate and bloody chaos, in brief pain inflicting sterility : "and at the end . . . of thirty-two years, we are still in full revolution, the government is still unable to move without bayonets, and I have still to be watched by the Swiss". Arbitrary wills and erroneous views, both parading as the incarnation of eternal reason and the expression of the people's true desire, threw Revolutionary France into a whirlwind of anarchy culminating in terrorist despotism, when the most self-willed sub­ dued all the weaker would-be tyrants. The final destination of mankind cannot be to dwell in ruins; social institutions were made to unite and organize men, and not

F1!b M TECHNOCRACY T O T HEOCRACY

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to be tom down. The rationalist in him cannot shake off the feeling the failure was due to some terrible oversight and intellectual mistake. It is urgently necessary to make the error good, to build on lasting foundations, after the debris of the revolution has been cleared away. "It is the lack of general ideas which has brought us to ruin ; we shall not be really reborn, except with the help of general ideas ; the old ones have fallen en vetuste and cannot be rejuvenated any more. We need new ones . . . a system, that is a view which is by nature trenchant, absolute and exclusive." Nothing is in this respect more characteristic than Saint Simon's expression of disappointment with England, after a visit to that country: he saw no effort at all there to reorganize its scientific thinking (which, as we shall see, is a prelude to and the indispensable condition of any political reconstruction according to our philoso­ pher), and he found no "idee capitale neuve sur le chantier" there. It would not occur to him that a country in which there had been no break of historic continuity did not at all feel the need to redefine the first principles of existence. Saint-Simon experiences the need to anchor the human polity, which the arbitrary wills and vague conjectures of men had set adrift, to the cohesion and regularity of the order of nature. He not only hopes to obtain a measure of certainty about the life of society, and to reassure himself that nature has set confines to the vagaries of men. He has understood more fully than any thinker before him the need to relate the confrontation of rights and the clash of opinions, which has hitherto been taken to constitute the whole of political life, to forces and processes reaching far beyond the actual and immediate awareness of man-into the impersonal and the historical. A new and absolutely certain principle of political legitimacy may be gained from that quest for totality. Since man and society are a part of nature, and nature is deter­ mined by a single principle, surely man and society too must be subject to that primary mover. Man is like a little watch encased in a larger clock, the universe, from which he receives his move­ ment. Saint-Simon dreamt of deducing stage after stage the determining laws and their sequence, descending in tum from the phenomenon of the universe to the solar system; from there to terrestrial phenomena; to come down to the study of our species considered as a dependence of the sublunar phenomenon ; and to

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reach in the end the laws of social organization, through a previous reconstruction of the interdependence of the inorganic and the organic, the fixed bodies and the fluid bodies, matter and move­ ment. A new Encyclopaedia-one feels the impact of his teacher d'Alembert-was to elaborate that vast and complete system of the universe, starting with the most general basic conception, which must be an a priori idea, and filling in the scheme, by the posteriori method, with the most particular laws derived from reasoning and observation. For a time Saint-Simon was convinced that gravitation was the single universal principle which, once we know the plan of the universe, the distribution of matter at a given moment, will enable us to foretell with mathematical precision the successive changes to come in both the universe, and in the life of society, since physical and spiritual phenomena have the same nature. This is the background of Saint-Simon's fantastic early plan for a European Council of Newton, contained in the anonymously published "Letter of a citizen of Geneva". It having been proved that popular sovereignty has no better claim to legitimacy than divine right of Kings, or the Apostolic succession, and being more costly, more wasteful and more erratic than they, we have to recognize that legitimacy is acquired from competence. Twenty­ one of the greatest minds of Europe should be elected from among the four leading nations (English, French, German and Italian) to form the Council of Newton, the supreme spiritual authority of Europe, under whose guidance property owners (at a later date he would have said captains of industry) will exercise temporal power, after being elected by "tout le monde". As soon as this scheme is put into practice, as soon as the elections have taken place and the theory of "pesanteur universelle" has been proclaimed by the Council of Newton, sitting in the gigantic Mausoleum to be built in memory of the great physicist, as the guiding principle of humanity, "the curse of war will leave Europe never to reappear". A European crusade would then undertake the liberation of other continents from the sway of ignorance and superstitious oppression, in order to unite the world into one unit. Saint-Simon soon resigned himself to the fact that his scientific equipment was too inadequate for any attempt to elaborate a truly scientific theory of the universe. In this connection Saint-Simon voices an eloquent denunciation of the scientists (from whom he

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received no aid or encouragei.nent in his efforts) which has a strangely topical ring. "What are the merits that entitle you to occupy at this moment the post of scientific vanguard? Human kind finds itself in the throes of one of the greatest crises which it has experienced since the day of its emergence; what efforts have you made to put an end to that crisis? . . . The whole of Europe 's'egorge', what are you doing to stop that butchery ? Nothing, I say ! It is you who have perfected the means of destruction; it is you who direct their employment; in all armies one sees you at the head of artillery; it is you who supervise the works of siege ! What are you doing, once more, to re-establish peace ? Nothing. What could you do ? Nothing. The knowledge of man is the sole knowledge which can lead to the discovery of means to reconcile the interests of peoples, and you do not study that science . . . Leave therefore the direction of the 'atelier scientifique', allow us to warm the heart which froze under your leadership, and to direct all its attention to the efforts which may bring general peace by reorganizing society." Saint-Simon decided to concentrate on problems of society, and he thus became one of the fathers of modern sociology. In an effort to transcend the conception of politics as a nexus of rights and opinions, and as a debate between men deliberating in full consciousness of what they are and what they want, Saint-Simon, not uninfluenced by Montesquieu, discovers that societies are "corps organises . . . comme phenomenes physiologiques". Society is not an aggregate, an agglomeration of living beings, each with his rights, interests and haphazard actions; it is a "veritable machine organisee" to which all parts contribute in a different way. It is an organism which has evolved through time and by way of self­ adaptation to various situations created its organs. From this point of view the intelligible unit of history is society or rather a civilization, not the state-a juridical and warring institution, nor the nation with a supposed mystical ethos of its own. Saint-Simon rejects the old method of historiography, which treated history "as a collection of facts without 'enchaine­ ment' ", and for lack of "a conception of humanity" classified events according to chronology and geographical position. Saint­ Simon pleads for a ·history which will depict "la serie des developpe, humame . ". ments de 1, espece

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The political and legal framework ofa society have no autonom­ ous standing. They are interwoven with forces and processes which are no one's deliberate creation, with "social physiology". A written constitution represents articulate awareness of the mean­ ing of, and connections between social data. It does not create the social system. It reflects it. A social system is not contrived. It is perceived as a datum. The experts in the "positive science of man", social physiologists, like physicians, diagnose illness, and on the strength of the diagnosis they endeavour to offer a prognosis and remedy. The social physiologists are the only people in a position to "analyse the causes of this war and to discover means to make it stop by making clear the way in which the interests of all could be reconciled . . . disperse the imbroglio of ideas which at present cause the massacre of many millions''. For all his awareness of the working of objective forces, Saint­ Simon is decidedly an "intellectualist' ' thinker, confident that scientific proof is a powerful enough guide for men, and that good moral education is adequate to secure moral conduct and a harmony of interests: "it is ignorance alone which causes all the troubles, the uprisings of the proletarians against the established order . . . the infancy of the science of politics . . . the obscurities of politics engender the troubles of the social order . . . the sole dam the property owners may oppose to the proletarians is a system of morality". "Philosophers reign over opinion, and opinion rules the world." Although Saint-Simon recognizes fully that ideas are also con­ ditioned by social forces and interests, there is no doubt in his mind as to the primacy of ideas. "It is impossible to institute a new regime, without having first established the new philosophical system to which it should correspond . . . The philosopher places himself at the summit of human thought, from which he envisages what the world had been and what it should become. He is not merely an observer, he is an actor; he is an actor of the first order in the world of spirit (monde moral), because it is his views on what the world should become that regulate human society." Every social system is the application of a philosophical system. Religion, politics, morality, public instruction are nothing but the reflection and application of a system of ideas, a Weltanschauung. There is an organic connection between ideas, which is in turn

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reflected by the way in which irtstitutions, interests and social forces form a pattern of society. The social order is nothing but " le systeme de la pensee considere sous differentes faces' '. "Les institu­ tions ne sont que les idees en actes." That system, that Weltan­ schauung is often called by Saint-Simon the religion of an age. Every epoch in history is the expression and manifestation of a philosophical system-its Weltanschauung, and every social­ political transformation is preceded by a revolution in science. Copernicus was the herald of the upheaval of the Reformation; Galileo and Kepler betokened the coming of the Puritan Revolu­ tion; Newton's law of gravity and Locke's teachings on the nature of man and its perfectibility paved the way for the French Revolu­ tion. The evolution of systems of ideas proceeds in accordance with a certain dialectic. They are nor invented, they evolve and are discovered and formulated. Now if evolution and change are a law of history, and a philo­ sophical and social system is nothing but an act of self-adaptation as it were, the inference would be that the criterion of absolute and eternal truth should be eliminated, to make room for the view that true (and just) means true in the circumstances, in the given con­ text. Or should we say in the spirit of Hegel that truth is history, the gradual unfolding of the pattern, till the fullest articulation has been reached ? Saint-Simon cannot be acquitted of a good deal of inconsist­ ency on this point. On occasion he argues against Montesquieu's relativism, maintaining that there can only be one form of govern­ ment, since there is only one true method of reasoning, although he hastens to admit that that universal form needs to be modified according to customs and time. He is asking himself "s' il n' y a point une forme de gouvernement bonne par la seule nature, fondee sur des principes surs, absolus, universels, independants des temps et des lieux". After all, though "human states of mind change with time, the nature of things never varies". But the real answer to the problem is to be found in Saint­ Simon's dialectic. (c)

THE COMING OF THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM

The Saint-Simonist dialectic proceeds on three levels. The first is the theory of the organic and critical ages which

S O CIAL I S T ME S S IANI S M

alternate i n history. An organic age signifies an epoch of integra­ tion and cohesion. It is characterized by the undisputed reign of some fundamental principle, explicit or implicit, over all spheres of life. The self-adjustments of the various aspects of social existence (with no strain) ensure harmony and effortless progress. The Greek world before the appearance of Socrates (or should one say the Sophists ?) and the classical Middle Ages offer examples of an organic era. The critical age is one in which there is no longer a common body of axiomatic beliefs. All principles are questioned ; the various endeavours pull in different directions ; isolationist egoism reigns supreme ; society is tom by class war. Socrates gave birth to a long critical age. At the same time he initiated the most funda­ mental transformation in history before the French Revolution, from polytheism to monotheism, acting thus as precursor of Jesus Christ. The Reformation marks the beginning of another critical age, which the Enlightenment continued and the French Revolution brought to a climax. In the strictly philosophical field, it was the British empiricists who "republicanized" science by a posteriori analysis, after Descartes had "monarchized" it with the help of aprioristic reason (which drove out imagination and fancy). The modem scientists, sons of the critical age-"you, gentlemen, are nothing but anarchists. You deny the existence, the supremacy of a general theory." The French Revolution has revealed the desperate need for the reorganization and reintegration of all the ideas, moral, political, religious into one coherent system which would initiate a new (and lasting ?) organic age. Since the fifteenth century that central medieval institution which unified the European nations, which put a barrier to the ambition of peoples and kings-the Papacy-has been gradually weakened ; it is today completely destroyed, "and a general war, a dreadful war, a war which seems to be destined to swallow up the whole population of Europe, has been raging for the last twenty years, cutting down several millions. You alone (savants) could re­ organize European society. Time presses, blood flows ; hasten to pronounce I." It is not easy to make out whether the new organic age, for which Saint-Simon is praying so ardently, will mark just another swing of the pendulum, another cycle in the theoretically endless

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series of alternating organic and critical epochs, or whether it will usher in a final fulfilment-an eternal organic age. There are indications that the latter is envisaged. The course of the intellectual development of mankind-the second level of his dialectic-is seen by Saint-Simon as an unbroken advance towards scientific precision, certainty and the reign of positive values in the life of society. The mythological and the metaphysical have been steadily giving place to the scientifically demonstrable and clearly useful. Alchemy was driven out by chemistry, astrology evolved into astronomy, witchcraft was re... placed by medicine. There is thus every prospect that politics, for so long dominated by mythology and theology, metaphysics and conjecture, fatuous disquisition and empty verbiage, not to speak of feudal love of war and chivalric theatrical poses, will soon develop into a positive science. "Imprimer a la politique un caractere positif est l'objet de mon ambition", so that it will gain "un caractere entierement neuf ", at once free of both conjecture and unimaginative routine. Now the third strand of Saint-Simonist dialectic has closer sociological associations. The social history of mankind is a process with a Janus face : it is the story of the progressive emancipation of man from personal dependence on his fellow men and the simul­ taneous growth of forms of association and social cohesion. In the earliest times the conqueror slaughtered the captive; later on he turned him into slave ; the relationship of master and slave was then replaced by that of landlord and serf, after that of employer and free worker; and the relationship of the future will be one of free association based on the division of labour. The social-economic stages in the evolution of association have been from the lonely huntsman to the family, village, tribe and nation ; and now the world has become one workshop and one market, creating the con­ ditions for, indeed necessitating world association. Saint-Simon maintains that the strains and stresses inherent in every association and in the relations between the various associations tend to lose in intensity with every widening of the association. At the same time, wider association and higher cohesion, while resulting in greater emancipation of the individual from personal dependence on his fellow men, fasten him more strongly to the collective pattern. "To the degree that civilisation makes progress, the divi­ sion of labour grows in the same proportion, in the spiritual as

S O CIAL I S T M E S S IANIS M

well as the temporal sphere. The result is that men depend less on each other individually, but that everyone of them depends the " more on the mass, exactement sous 1e meme rapport." The point at which the three strands of Saint-Simon's dialectic converge is the idea of the industrial system. That system, towards which the whole of history has been heading, will constitute an organic age in its fullness. It will be the emhodiment of positive and scientific ways of thought par excellence. The industrial regime is synonymous with the system of widest association, and conse­ quently of the emancipation of man. The industrial system will reverse the values and institutions of the past, and at the same time bring to fruition developments which have for a long time been maturing secretly in the womb of society. The Middle Ages were indeed an organic age in the fullest sense of the word. They presented a community of ideas-a spiritual and intellectual universitas. Christian brotherhood of men and nations was a reality. The literate public had one common lan­ guage-Latin. Above the nations stood a recognized and vener­ ated arbiter, the Pope. The existing order of things, the gradua­ tions in society, the Church teachings on the meaning of life and the mystery of death, appeared natural, self-evident. On the other hand, the Medieval world was based on ways of thought, values, assumptions and institutions which negate those positive and scientific postulates which the industrial system is destined to embody, so as to secure "I'ordre de choses le plus favorable a tous les genres de production", and turn society into one great industrial workshop. The ascetic religious ideas of Church-dominated society were certainly not calculated to inspire enthusiasm for a productive indus­ trial effort and the increase of output and consumption. Ration­ ality, precision, sober assessment of data, of human needs and motives were not to be gained from medieval theology or mysticism. The same applies to the other great medieval institution : feudalism. Its emergence may have been necessary, and its earlier functions beneficial; the mass of the people were in need of a specialized class of warriors to protect them from the terrible invasions of Normans, Saracenes and other barbarians. But the effect of these two institu­ tions, a hierarchical Church and feudalism, was that society grew sharply divided into groups destined to rule, and (the vast majority) to be ruled; not on a basis of a real common good, and still less of

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agreement, but by title of soni.e divine right or superior force. Such a state of affairs naturally tended to make mythological­ theological-feudal concepts suppress any considerations of utility, efficiency or scientific examination. In the womb of that society a new force was beginning to form itself at the time of the Crusades-the communes, the towns, bearers of the industrial effort. Craftsmen, artisans, traders, artists, free professions had an interest of their own that had nothing to do with or ran counter to theological and feudal forms. These new developments, coupled with the pacification of Europe and the invention of new techniques such as firearms, and strengthened by the emergence of a secular science and secular scientists, rendered the previously essential role of Church and nobility useless and their privileges parasitic. Without real services rendered, the relation­ ship between nobility and clergy on the one side and the mass of the people on the other assumed the character of naked domination of men over men. When the ruled and the exploited made an attempt to shake off their rulers and to mould the political order in accordance with the needs of the industrial system, they were cried down by the aristocracy as rebels and anarchists. The feudal and ecclesiastical orders seized upon a new divine mission-to keep law and order. A temporary alliance between kings and communes strengthened the Monarchy and enabled it to overcome feudal anarchy, but failed to do away with the feudal-clerical framework of laws, ideas and institutions. These continued to constitute the official structure of society. But almost illegally, hardly recognized, the forces of the industrial order went their own way. They did not wish to assume power, but neither did they resign themselves to obey. They would as it were ignore the State, except for protection from disorder and violence. Among themselves they would settle matters by way of contract, warranted by their own corporations and their laws and customs. Since the feudal-military-clerical State was in no position to render real assistance, but only to do harm, or worse-to extort ransom, the industrial classes developed almost a religion of non-interference by the State. Liberty became identified with the absence of government, individual freedom with isolationism. The experience of feudal-clerical rule was universal­ ized into a philosophy teaching that government as such is a natural enemy, and not "chef de la societe, destine a unir en faisceau et a

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diriger vers u n but commun toutes les activites individuelles". Hence the elaborate theories about checks and balances, guarantees and safeguards, all born out of deep distrust of the State and govern­ ment as the rule of the many by the few. The centrifugal, indi­ vidualistic tendencies were immensely reinforced by Luther and the Reformation, with their condemnation of papacy and insistence on the primacy of the individual conscience. In the meantime objective developments continued to consoli­ date and enlarge the gains of the industrial classes. They succeeded in accumulating all the wealth and power into their hands so that the nobility was left with only the pretence and panache of power. The middle class philosophers, political writers and lawyers and their theories on nature, man and state fascinated the ruling orders, sapped their self-confidence, and made secular thought triumph. The gap between substance and appearance grew wider and wider. "It became monstrous and impractical that the direction of public affairs should be left in the hands of the clergy and the nobility." A revolution became inevitable. In fact it had already taken place before it broke out. It should have, once it broke out, brought the triumph of the industrial system with it. It happened otherwise. The meta­ physicians, lawyers, publicists, fascinated by their own "doctrine politique batarde' ' took over the French Revolution. Whatever their merits in paving the way for the Revolution, their vague and abstract ideas on liberty and equality, division of powers and con­ stitutional guarantees, only served to obscure the real issue, and to make people forget the real need: that of positive, scientific plan­ ning of the industrial system. "Like the clergy and the nobility, they have prolonged their efforts beyond the needs of society," and became a reactionary obstacle. But the industrial system is on the march. Nothing can prevent its coming.

(d)

LIBERTY AND PURPO SIVE INTEGRATION

Although Saint-Simon never uses the term Industrial Revolu­ tion, and nowhere deals with the nature and significance of techno­ logical advances, the whc:>le accentuation of his attitude is deter­ mined by awareness of chese developments. Society is about to become an organization geared in all its parts to a productive

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industrial effort to conquer nature and to secure prosperity to all, by activizing all according to their capabilities and the needs of the collective endeavour. The industrial system of the future will be organized "pour travailler a accrottre sa prosperite par les sciences, les beaux arts et les arts et les metiers". "A society is nothing but a great societe d' industrie . . . political economy is the veritable and unique founda­ tion of politics." Politics is "the science which has as its object an order of things the most favourable to all types of production". "The whole of society rests on industry. Industry is the sole guarantee of its existence, the unique source of all its wealth and of all its prosperity. The state of things which is the most favour­ able to industry is therefore, by that alone, the most favourable to society. Here is at once the point of departure and the end of all " a' my errorts. Only things appertaining to the effort to master our environ­ ment and to produce, create, shape and prepare tangible, life- and pleasure-giving objects are real and positive. Things outside that sphere are nonsense, illusions, vague imaginings and fatuous make­ believe. The industrial productive endeavour has an objective quality. Its elements are clearly measurable and tangible to all. Its working is a matter of scientific precision and discipline. In brief, the atti­ tudes and relationships conditioned by and adopted to the industrial effort are inevitably derived from the objective "nature of things, of which man cannot but recognize the justice and proclaim the necessity." This is not a matter oflike or dislike, opinion or prefer­ ence. No one has views on chemistry or mathematics, he has knowledge of them or has not. Some know more and some less, or are wholly ignorant of the subject. The other vital characteristic of the industrial system is organiza­ tion, with a maximum of cohesion and integration. This of course means that society is not an aggregate of individuals, but an organ­ ized whole which is prior to the individual, and indeed fixes his place for him. n'y a societe que la OU s'exerce une action generale et combinee." Society is an orchestra, a ship, an army, a factory, a dynamic effort for the attainment of a clear, specified goal. Does this mean that individual worth and freedom are to be completely annihilated? That depends on the conception of liberty to be adopted.

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To Saint-Simon liberty connotes self-expression. It i s power for, and not freedom from, something. That type of liberty can be realized fully only in the industrial system, where organization naturally starts with the division of labour, with assigning to each the task most congenial to him, one in which he can employ his special capacities to the best and fullest advantage. The absence of such planning and division of labour entails waste and frustration and maladjustment. Liberty is a sense of ease, a thrill experienced in smooth, exhilarating team work, and in the joyous overcoming in common of obstacles. This is a wholly romantic conception of the Industrial Revolution, completely at variance with the concrete realities of the time. Saint-Simon seems completely ignorant of the squalor and drudgery of industry. His imagination is fired by the opportunities of and challenge to self-expression. The traditional and wholly negative concept of freedom is the outcome of a past, in which there was no common social aim in the nature of a dynamic industrial effort. In the absence of such a collective goal and in circumstances of a social cleavage into ruling and ruled classes, it was quite natural for man to feel ill at ease, oppressed and hampered. He called his malaise yearning for free­ dom. He was all the time bent on breaking away, finding solitude, drawing a line of demarcation between him and the state, himself and all the rest ; he wished to resist. But it is precisely in the industrial system, with its "but d'activite", that "true liberty will not consist any more in sitting with folded arms . . . in the association". "Such a tendency should be severely repressed wherever it shows itsel£" Liberty "consists, on the contrary, in the development, without impediment and with all possible extension, of any temporal or spiritual capacity useful to the association . . . The division of labour has linked all men completely together." It was all very well to extol unlimited individual liberties in the course of the struggle against the feudal clerical regime. It weak­ ened the enemy and enhanced the worth and scope of human personality held down by the old system. But in face of an industrial system on the march the theory of individual rights is a reactionary doctrine, a serious obstacle in the way of progress, which is identical with the advance of social cohesion and integration.

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"The vague and metaphysical idea of liberty, such as is current today, if continued to be taken as the basis of political doctrines, would eminently tend to hamper the action of the mass over individuals." From this point of view it would run counter to the development of civilization and the organization of a well­ ordered system, which requires that the parts should be strongly linke d together "et dans sa dependance". It is altogether fallacious to regard liberty, or individual freedom, as the aim of the social contract. People associate to achieve some­ thing positive, and do not join just to be free. Primitive men came together in order to hunt, to make war. If they wished to be merely free, surely they would have done better to remain isolated. Liberty may be a condition of truly human existence. But it is not something primeval, always the same. It is the conse­ quence of the growth of civilization, a function of historic develop­ ment : "progressive comme elle, mais elle ne saurait en [ of the social contract] etre le but''. It is the degree of power over environ­ ment, the scope of opportunities for self-expression offered by a given stage in history. The implications of these ideas for the problem of the organ­ ization of government are clear. Government by men or groups on the ground of some divine right is totally excluded. So is privilege of birth. Saint-Simon rejects vehemently any suggestion that the evil nature of man calls for some permanent guardian to keep law and order, and thus to dominate permanently the vast majority presumed to be prone to riot and mischief He equally repudiates the liberal and democratic ideologies about government based on popular sovereignty, and political decision taken by way of intellectual discussion and then passed on for execution to popularly elected leaders. In view of the scientific nature of the industrial endeavour and the precision which should characterize the positive collective effort, a political decision can only be legitimate when it is derived from "la nature meme des choses". It can only be a matter of intellectual comprehension, and not of "opinion erigee en loi par la masse". Only an act of scientific comprehension deserves to be considered a real act of collective sovereignty by the "corps social lui-meme". For surely, only such an act is a decision directly related to the good of the social body as a whole, to the nature of the indivisible social organism, and is therefore a true expression of society's general will. In the conditions of abstract

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popular sovereignty, a t best a major part of the nation imposes its will and interest on the other parts. At bottom, the sovereignty of the people as preached by the eighteenth-century thinkers and the French Revolution is nothing but a fraud. The people have neither the knowledge nor the leisure to be sovereign, "except in moments of brief delirium". Do not say "souverainete du peuple", because that is altogether misleading, say at most "souverainete par la volonte du peuple". Ultimately the whole conception of the sovereignty of people has meaning only as a counterpart of sovereignty by divine right. It has no greater philosophical validity or merit. The democratic experiments of the French Revolution have not really destroyed the feudal system of government, only modified it. They have retained the system of government of men by men, and failed to initiate the reign of objective principles and scientific competence. The Convention established "so democratic a Re­ public, that it was the poorest and most ignorant class that exercised the greatest inRuence : in one word, the Convention constituted legally the most complete anarchy". To avoid this, restricted suffrage was introduced. It is as if you were to proclaim that any Frenchman who pays a thousand francs in taxes is capable of making discoveries in chemistry. Surely, politics is also a science requiring knowledge and competence. It is claimed that the representative system ensures that the most enlightened and competent of the nation are elected to guide the destinies of the nation. Now a representative regime is "a bastard system which tends to prolong uselessly the anti-scientific and anti­ industrial existence of theological and feudal powers". A parlia­ mentary system entails-in comparison with a feudal regime-a change of form, of personnel, not of substance, since it does not substitute the reign of objective scientific principle for the rule of men over men. The fact that the nobles have been massacred and expelled has shifted power into other hands, but has not changed the nature of power. It is not even true that the hereditary principle has been abolished in favour of equality. If the governmental system of men over men is maintained, the hereditary principle is bound to reappear. The truth of the matter is that in the struggle for power in the French Revolution the "corps de la nation, c'est-a-dire les pro­ ducteurs," took no direct or characteristic part. "Till now, that

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struggle has been a bastard struggle, because it was only waged between the idle and parasitic classes of society. It had no other object but to decide whether the exploitation or abuses should continue to belong to gentlemen and clerics, or whether it should be granted by right to soldiers, lawyers and proprietaires faineants who are not nobles . . . The main body of the nation, the pro­ ducers (bearers of the industrial effort) remained outside the struggle, or at least did not enter into it, except in the capacity of an auxiliary called to its aid by the frelons roturiers." Re-echoing some favourite invectives of Napoleon against "ideologues et avocats", Saint-Simon calls constitutional Monarchy "horribly metaphysical", a "bastard form of social organization", in which "the phrase-makers and the scribblers form the dominant class". "And in effect, the poor French nation and the poor Monarchy have been devoured for nearly forty years by lawyerdom, which is the quintessence of speechifying and scribbling.'' Their disquisitions and debates have nothing real in them, require no specialized knowledge, only a voluble tongue and much impudence. Furthermore, their whole system appears a system of organized distrust and sabotage: after having proudly elected their rulers, they go to inordinate length to invent checks and hindrances to hamper those rulers in the exercise of their powers. Their whole ideology is critical and negative, since it was forged as a weapon of polemic in the past. It is not surprising that it is unable to accomplish the task of reconstruction. And so "we are still in a state of revolution", is Saint-Simon's constant refrain. The industrial system, which alone offers an anchor of salvation and the coming of which is imminent, will do away with all govern­ ment in the sense of government of men by men, and will inaugurate instead the era of the administration of things. "L'action de gouverner est nulle alors ou presque nulle, en tant que signifiait !'action de commander." No one will order and no one will be ordered about. Functions will be fulfilled in a concerted manner in accordance with the nature of things, in response to the needs of the situation. The aim is clearly defined, the tasks precisely apportioned, the workings of the machine scientifically demonstrated. There is no room for arbitrary action, love of giving orders or vague groping. "There would never be any indecision on the subject, and every citizen would naturally tend to restrict himself (a se renfermer) to

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the role for which he was most fitted. The more so as every ques­ tion of social interest would necessarily be decided as well as it could, with the help of existing knowledge . . . scientific demon­ strations absolutely independent of human will and susceptible of being discussed by all who had the degree of instruction which would enable them to understand them." For once the goal and the structure of the association are clearly defined things, are not complex or difficult; and the humblest notary's clerk would pro­ ceed in the same way-when clearly instructed-whether it was a case "uniting men into a corps of nation, or whether the object of the association was to produce matches". Vagueness of purpose spreads a cloud and weighs us down. Of course the division of labour will mean a division into men who guide and people who are guided, persons in possession of knowledge and others in need to be served by that knowledge. Doctors, engineers, chemists employ their skill according to objec­ tive need, and not in order to gain personal power. They are obeyed, not because they are masters and have superior force, but because men are interested in getting their guidance. In this way obedience is spontaneous, almost automatic. And so the relation­ ship between guides and guided will entail no coercion. "Men will enjoy, as a result, in that order of things the highest degree of liberty compatible with the state of society." The regime of the future will also institute "the largest equality possible in regard to the rights of birth". As he has said before, a governmental system is bound to develop a hereditary principle, whereas the administrative regime naturally "bases political rights on positive superiorities in ability". No artificial equality is admitted, but equitable treatment to unequal capacities is guaranteed. "And so . . . we shall see disappear together three main incon­ veniences of the present political system, arbitrariness, incompetence, and intrigue.'' What about keeping law and order ? In the past that was con­ sidered as the supreme and only purpose of government, because the regime was not of order, but of disorder-actual or latent. In the administrative regime this business will become a secondary and ancillary task, of little significance. It will become an utterly simple and easy task to be performed by a few policemen. And so the soldiers and lawyers will cease to be the most important and most powerful members of society. There will simply be no need

FRO M TECHNOCRACY T O T HEOCRACY

57

to enforce the laws. You need- a huge apparatus of government to maintain order where the political system does clearly not aim at public prosperity, and consequently the masses are considered as enemies of the established order. But where the bulk of the people are fully conscious that the whole social framework is geared to increase the public weal, they will exercise "a passive force which almost alone will suffice to contain the anti-social minority". An enlightened society needs to be administered, and not governed and coerced by officers, in order to obey the law, except in the few marginal cases of trouble. Consequently there will be no danger of military tyranny. The masses have come of age and will no longer consent to be under tutelage or treated as would-be-rioters and trouble makers. The events of the French Revolution have proved the maturity of the millions of peasants and workers who obtained land and did responsible jobs. They have thus gained an insight into the nature of the industrial system and learned to will it. They will no longer agree to be passive instruments in the hands of the de­ scendants of the Franks who had governed them for so long by the right of conquest. "The administered and the governed of this population have adopted the industrial principle as the principle guiding their actions; they will obey only the associations which reconcile the interests of the contracting parties; they have come to think that the public fortune should be administered in the interests of the majority; they have a horror of privilege and of the rights of birth . . . in a word, they aim to establish the greatest possible equality." The lower orders have become almost indifferent to "the dis­ cussions on liberty which agitate the middle classes". For they feel instinctively how vague and unreal the metaphysical debates are. And even more, they realize that in the industrial system, which the present state of civilization makes inevitable, "arbitrari­ ness could never affect them''.

( e)

THE BREAKTHROUGH

"All the peoples of the earth are moving towards the same goal. The goal towards which they are heading is to pass from the governmental, feudal, military regime to the administrative, indus­ trial, pacific system . . . No force can resist that march . . . Our

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scheme of social organization i s deduced directly from the march of the human spirit, and its adoption is an inevitable consequence of the political past of European society." The moment has come when an end will be put to the anomaly that an essentially industrial nation has an essentially feudal govern­ ment. The mass of producers, who today make up the bulk of society, are about to ask whether and for how long they should continue to be an object of exploitation to the "mass of parasites". "Le moment ou la lutte doit prendre son vrai caractere, est actuellement arrive. Le parti des producteurs ne va pas tarder a se montrer." In spite of the emphasis on the predetermined, inevitable nature of the imminent transformation, Saint-Simon does not suggest that it will occur by itself and imperceptibly. Conscious and deliberate human action will have to effect the change. The question is how and by whom. The immediate answer is-not by way of revolu­ tion and violence, and not by the masses themselves. Although Saint-Simon precedes the two sentences quoted above with the defiant statement that "the problem will be resolved as soon as it has been posed in a direct and unambiguous manner, because of the immense superiority of the forces of the producers over the non-producers'', he says in another place that experience has shown that those most interested in the establishment of a new order of things are not those who strive with the greatest ardour to bring it about. He believes more in the power of the passionate philan­ thropist and idealistic altruist than in the enlightened self-interest of the masses. The deeper reason for this attitude is the underlying postulate of scientific precision which is held to characterize the industrial system. This implies special competence, and again, notwith­ standing evolutionary determinism, a unitary a priori conception and rapid execution by a ukase, as it were. "The conception of the new system must be a unitary one, that is to say, it must be formed by one single head", like the constitution of an ancient City Republic in Greece by a Legislator. An Assem­ bly may be good for the maintenance of a constitution, but a collec­ tion of individuals is by nature incapable of producing a system. The most Saint-Simon is prepared to concede is that once the plan is produced "d'un seul jet" (although "based on principles derived from observation") it may be debated "by men most capable to

/✓ --·

59 � judge and to perfect it". "It is brusquely and by direct measures that this change has to be effected." The introduction of the new system cannot but have a revolu­ tionary character. "Ce systeme s' organisera promptement, et ii scra promptement mis a execution . . . ne pouvant etre introduit ni par hasard, ni par la routine, ii a du etre con9u a priori . . . invente dans son ensemble, avant de pouvoir etre mis a execution." It is not a little disconcerting to see a thinker so deeply conscious of historic and organic continuity promise instantaneous and radical transformation, not merely of administrative machines and institutions, but also of ideas, habits, in brief the social and spiritual climate, under the sudden impact of the proclamation of a new doctrine. Saint-Simon foreshadows "une action qui, par sa nature, est brusque et tranchante, puisque cette production tend a changer subitement les habitudes intellectuelles contractees par I'esprit public". Saint-Simon points to the rise of Christianity as an example of a sudden transformation of mankind; and he never tires of comparing the change from the feudal-governmental to the positive-industrial system with the replacement of polytheism by Christianity in antiquity. But the latter transformation was hardly "brusque". The truth is that Saint-Simon thinks primarily of the Revelation vouchsafed by the Messiah. In a sense the whole revolution can be reduced to the act of persuading the ruling classes to invite the industrialists and experts to plan and direct public affairs ; "faire concourir les savants, les theologiens, les artistes, les legistes, les militaires et les rentiers les plus capables, a I' etablissement du systeme social le plus avantageux a la production et le plus satisfaisant pour les producteurs", and to make them agree, after opinion has matured for the new "veritably social doctrine", to the calling of industrialists to the helm of temporal affairs and "savants positifs" to direct education and per­ fect theory. The deciding factors, kings, peoples, aristocracies and governments will be brought to that acceptance solely and ex­ clusively by preaching and persuasion, by philanthropists who will convince them of the inevitability and the constructive character of the proposed changes. The philanthropists will rule out any suggestion of violence, for after all their ardent desire is to terminate the revolution, and to root out all those causes of social unrest and dissatisfaction by · an all embracing effort of reconstruction . "Or, I'acte d' investir les industriels les plus importants de la direction FRO M TECHNOCRACY TO T HEOCRACY

60

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supreme des interets pecuniaires d e l a nation, est u n acte d e con­ struction; c' est la disposition politique la plus importante qui puisse etre admise ; cette disposition servira la base a tout le nouvel edifice social ; cette disposition terminera la revolution, elle mettra la nation a l' abri de toute nouvelle secousse." It is precisely the failure to put the public weal into the hands of the industrialists and savants that has perpetuated insurrection and anarchy, and overthrown thrones. Saint-Simon is full of hope that it will be very easy to persuade kings to take initiative in the matter, and the beneficiaries of the old regime to reconcile them­ selves to the necessity of change : "it is so sweet to swim with the tide; it is so extravagant to wish to put civilization in reverse". Saint-Simon puts forward several schemes for effecting the necessary breakthrough. The mildest, and the one most in con­ formity with the Restoration regime, is the plan which proposes that only industrialists, producers and farmers should pay taxes, . while the idlers, like landlords, should be exempted. Since paying taxes accords the franchise, the elected Parliament will be chosen by and contain only members of the productive classes. Another scheme lays down the rule that the budget should from now on be worked out by the representatives of the industrial classes, and that education and the moral code should be the responsi­ bility of the Institut. Three ministers, of Finance, Interior and Marine, will be appointed from among industrialists. With the help of advisory councils of industrialists and experts they will work out a plan for the introduction of the industrial system. There is one scheme which curiously combines parliamentary with revolutionary procedure. Since nothing is to be expected from the present parliament, which consists chiefly of nobles, idlers and government officials, who are hostile to the interests of the industrial classes, the Assembly should be dissolved, and the electors be invited to elect only "chefs des travaux industriels . . . des patentes ou au moins des citoyens partisans du regime industriel", who will carry out the necessary reforms with minimum of disturbance and expense. There was a time when Saint-Simon cherished the hope that the parliaments of France and Britain would combine, with due assist­ ance from the industrialists, to undertake the mighty task. He was sure that the whole of Europe would soon follow the example of the two most enlightened nations. But the hope did not last for

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long. Saint-Simon soon realized that England was a classical case of a bastard regime, without a constitution ; for a constitution means "une combinaison d'organisation sociale", all parts of which derive from one single principle and lead the national forces to one single goal. The social institutions of England were heterogeneous at their source pulling in different, and even opposite directions. "In reality, England does not yet possess a constitution ; the order of things established there has no solidity, no fixedness, and is not even susceptible of acquiring it . . . The political state of England is a state of sickness, a state of crisis, or rather, the regime under which England lives is a transitory regime." Any attempt by the Commons to introduce the industrial system in England would inevitably be sabotaged by the House of Lords, with civil war and bloodshed as an accompaniment. France was in this respect in a much more favour­ able situation. The King had the power to issue an ordinance chang­ ing the system from top to bottom. Saint-Simon makes an ardent appeal to the Bourbon King to take the initiative, and to start by proclaiming himself the head of a provisional dictatorship ; "charged with the task of annihilating the feudal-theological regime and establishing the scientific and industrial system." The momentary concentration of all public powers in a single hand would ensure a swift and easy transition. If it be true that a change of regime can be effected only by revolution or by dictatorship, surely dictatorship was a lesser evil. Furthermore, once the goal was clearly defined, there would be little danger that the dictator would swerve from the prescribed course. Public opinion would prevent him from straying. "Le roi deviendra le premier des industriels" ; monarchy would be scientific, and no longer feudal and theological. The French planner is unable to let things sort themselves out by some undefmed and undirected internal mechanism of self-adjustment, like in England. "The industrialists will constitute themselves as the first class in society ; the most important industrialists will undertake gratui­ tously to direct the administration of the public fortune; it will be they who will make the law ; it will be they who will fix the rank to be occupied by the other classes ; they will grant to each of them an importance proportionate to the services rendered to indus­ try. Such will be the inevitable result of the present revolution. And when that result is obtained, tranquillity will be completely secured, public prosperity will march forward with all possible

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speed, and society will enjoy all the individual and collective happiness, which human nature could expect." There is not much point in dwelling on the details of Saint­ Simon's schemes of organization. He was an essentially intuitive thinker given to generalization, and he had no interest in details. The various plans of organizing the administrative authorities give sometimes the impression of a game of patience. There are to be three chambers in the society of the future: a chamber of invention consisting of three hundred members chosen from among engineers and artists-they will plan public works and national festivals to increase wealth and happiness ; a chamber of examination-a hundred mathematicians, a hundred physicists, a hundred physiologists will together examine the projects sub­ mitted by the first chamber and supervise education ; a chamber of execution which will comprise solely representatives of industry, trade and agriculture-they will frame the budget, and thus ultim­ ately determine policies. Another scheme envisages the establishment of two academies, one of sciences (including economics and humanities), the other of sentiments. The former will lay down rules for industrial organ­ ization, while the latter will have as its task to inspire the right kind of sentiments, and will comprise teachers of morality, lawyers, theologians, poets, painters, musicians and others. Above those two, a College Scientifique Supreme, nominated by both, will endeavour to bring about a synthesis between the principles and schemes evolved by the two academies. The thus achieved "doc­ trine generale" will form the vade mecum for the administration. "The strongest link that could unite the members of a society consists in the similarity of their principles and their knowledge (connaissances) ; and that similarity cannot be established, except by uniformity of teaching."

(j)

PROPERTY AND POVERTY-SO CIALISM

Having started with a planned society, it was inevitable that Saint-Simon should soon recognize the crucial importance of the problem of property. Collective organization means the disposal of the means of production, in other words property. It is impos­ sible if the absolute sanctity of private property and of free enterprise be maintained. He was led to the same conclusion by his views on

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the all determining significance· of economic interests. If politics is nothing but the "science of production", and the "production of useful things the sole reasonable and positive goal" that political societies may put to themselves, it follows that there is an "ordre d'interets . . . appertaining to the maintenance of life and well­ being . . . felt by all men", and that this order is the only one, on which "all men understand each other and have the need to agree upon ; the only one which requires them to deliberate and to act in common ; the sole issue therefore around which politics can operate and which must be taken as a unique measure in the criticism of all things social''. Clearly there can be no change in the social order, without a change in the distribution of property and the system of ownership. It was the fatal error of the French Revolution, as well as of the English and other European nations groping for reform, to mistake forms of government and political machinery for the decisive factor, and to leave property relationships untouched and unrecon­ stituted. Saint-Simon analyses the problem of property exclusively from the point of view of production. He makes no reference to natural rights. His glorification of production contrasts with the ascetic preoccupations of some of the eighteenth-century socialist thinkers. "Property should be reconstituted and founded upon a basis which would render it most favourable to production." Property is an instrument, a means of production, as well as a condition of personal self-expression. Property must therefore be related to ability. If a person with the ability to turn property to the best advantage to himself and society is deprived of it, he is also deprived of the freedom of self-expression. His frustration is a loss to society. Property in the hands of the incapable is social waste. Saint-Simon does not wish to attack the institution of property as such, only its particular forms. It is true that property is the guaran­ tee of political stability, but only on condition that "talent and possession should not be separated", and that the modalities of property be determined by the needs of the general productive effort. The inference is that the system of property relationships is subject to historic evolution, to changes in the modes of production. No age can bind future generations by laying down a principle of distribution (or any other principle) for ever. Humanity is advanc­ ing and constantly changing.

S O CI A LI S T MES SIANI S M

"Such questions, therefore, as : what are the things susceptible of becoming property ? By what means may individuals acquire property ? How may they use it once they come into ownership ? -are questions which the legislators of all countries and all ages have the right to review at any time they think desirable, because the individual right to property can only be founded upon common utility and the general exercise of this right-a utility which may change from time to time.'' It is at this juncture that Saint-Simon becomes a Socialist. The criteria of efficiency and the increase of production become involved with issues of justice. The contemporary system of property con­ stitutes a negation of both postulates, the utilitarian as well as the moral. The means of production are for the most part in the hands of incompetent idle parasites, whereas the real producers are deprived of them and pay ransom for their use on behalf of society. The poor have to maintain the rich thieves who consume without toiling. "Society today is truly topsy turvy. Since the nation has admitted as a fundamental principle that the poor should be generous towards the rich, and that as a consequence the less well-off should deprive themselves daily of their necessities in order to swell the surplus of the big owners . . . Since ignorance, superstition, idle­ ness and love of sumptuous pleasure are characteristics of the supreme chiefs of society, and the capable, economical and hard­ working are employed only as subordinates and instruments . . A horde of parasites who, without producing anything, want to consume, as if they were producing . . . frauds, that is to say thieves. The workers thus see themselves deprived of the enjoyment of the fruits of their labour, which is the aim of their labour." The existing system of government is a legalization of mass robbery. It is intended to protect the idlers and to enable them to deprive the workers of the fruits of their toil with impunity, in safety. Such a government is a regime of naked violence and force. The great criminals and mighty thieves joyfully fleece the mass of working citizens of three or four hundred millions for the service they render in judging and punishing petty offenders against the public peace. This means that "l'espece humaine, politique­ ment parlant, est encore plongee dans l'immoralite". For indeed the nations which are today considered the most civilized will remain in a state of barbarism so long as the "most hardworking

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FR O M TE C H N O CRACY T O THEO CRACY

and most pacific class do not c;ntrol public force and so long as the military class are not completely subordinated". As already said, Saint-Simon accepts the institution of private property. Nor is he a leveller in the crude Babouvist sense of the word. He rejects mechanical equality based on an assumption of natural equality. True equality, he maintains, consists in everyone deriving benefits commensurate with his contribution, that is to say his ability and the useful employment of his talents and his means-"fondement naturel de la societe industrielle". In this respect the industrial system, by rejecting any kind of unequal start like privilege of birth, deserves to be considered as a regime of "perfect equality". From the point of view of the industrial effort as well as of human self-expression, the paramount task of society is to activize fully, by offering scope and facilities, e.g. free access to tools, those potentialities and abilities of the poor and oppressed which an immoral and wasteful system had stultified. " The most important expenses of the State should be those which are necessary for producing work for all healthy men, in order to secure their physical existence; those which have as their object to spread as swiftly as possible in the proletarian class positive acquired knowledge ; and finally those which can guarantee to the individuals composing that class the pleasures and enjoyments suited to develop their intelligence . . . improve to the highest possible degree the lot of that class which has no other means of existence than the labour of their hands."

(g)

THE NEW DI SPENSATIO N : N OUVEAU CHRISTIANISME

The quest for the One and the brooding over the puzzle how the many could be made into One gave rise to "Nouveau Chris­ tianisme", the testament and gospel of Saint-Simon, which con­ tributed more than anything else to the salvationist fervour of the Saint-Simonist confraternity. The postulate of a single totality, informed by one single prin­ ciple and characterized by perfect cohesion on the one hand, and the anti-ascetic glorification of human vitality on the other, left no room for any pluralism or any dualism such as that of matter and spirit, body and soul. Modes of production, distribution of pro­ perty, scientific ideas, political institutions, ethical conceptions, P . M .-C

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religious beliefs, aesthetic criteria, psychological responses-all must be derived from one basic assumption and form a single pattern. We have already seen that to Saint-Simon a framework of ideas is not a reflection or function of objective relationships, but on the contrary precedes and to some extent conditions them. This coherent and closely knit Weltanschauung is called by Saint-Simon the religion of the age. Although it comprises so much more than theology, ritual and Church, it fulfils the dual role of religion: offers both a picture of the universe and a code of life, designed to bring the believer into line with the universal order. "Religion . . . has always served and will always serve as the basis of social organization . . . humanity has always found itself in a scientific, moral and political crisis, whenever the religious idea was undergoing modification." Politics is a consequence of moral­ ity, since the concern of politics is with the relationships between men and between man and society; and political institutions are thus consequences of ideas. Because of this organic interdependence politics must embrace all walks of life, and ca1mot be merely a set of pragmatic precepts for a limited sphere of action. No division between Church and State, God and Caesar is possible, or for that matter between spiritual pursuits and secular interests. That consciousness of oneness is not only a mighty cohesive force determining all our attitudes, but also one that, if it does not precisely make for equality, prevents the selfish domination of some over others and the unbridled conflict of selfish interests. We become imbued by it with a vivid and primary sense of de­ pendence on something objective, outside ourselves. Take the example of Christianity. When it reigned supreme till the fifteenth century, "the human race was principally occupied with the co­ ordination of its general sentiments, with the establishment of a universal and unique principle, and with the founding of a general institution . . . the subjection of all private interests to the general interest". As an accompaniment, deductive thinking took pre­ cedence over empirical observation of detail. Right as the postulate of one universal principle was, the Middle Ages were in no position of course to work out a truly scientific general theory. Luther inaugurated the trend away from the general theory. Great as his services have been "in presenting morality as more deserving . . . than worship and dogma'', and in emphasizing individual responsi-

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FROM TECHNOCRACY TO T HEOCRACY

bility, the Reformation as such had a dissolving effect on the fabric of European society. "And during this second period, the opinion has prevailed that reasonings upon general facts, upon general principles, and general interests of the human race, were only vague and metaphysical reasonings, not capable of contributing to the progress of mind and the advancement of civilization." By direct­ ing man's attention to particular facts, it broke up knowledge into watertight compartments, and brought into relief the particular and conflicting interests of the various classes. As a result of the weakening of the unifying bond and the sense of belonging to one single whole as brethren, Caesars were encour­ aged to raise their secular and power-thirsty dominion over the intrinsic values of the spirit. Following Caesar's victory by brute force, class domination based on privilege and force took the place of the principle of talent and human worth, which the medieval Church considered as the only relevant factors for preference in its ranks. "It is to this egotism that we must attribute the political malady of our epoch; a malady which brings suffering to all the useful labourers of society ; a malady which enables kings to absorb a great part of the income of the poor for their own expenses, and those of their courtesans and their soldiers . . . a malady which occasions an enormous superiority on the part of royalty and the aristocracy of birth over the respect due to the men of science, artists, and the chiefs of industrious labour, for the services of direct and positive utility which they render to the community." Saint-Simon professes to be alarmed by the growing and seem­ ingly irresistible tendency towards atomization and selfish isola­ tionism in modem society. "Society today is in a state of extreme moral disorder, egoism is making frightening progress, all tends towards isolationism. " What still keep society together are certain deeply ingrained habits of sociability, and a certain sense of a com­ munity of the "grossest interests". In the light of this spreading moral nihilism, which saps all loyalties and all social sentiments, the problem of inducing man to bring his personal interest into line with the general good has become the most vital issue. Now how can we make an effective appeal to man to act in this spirit ? For a long time Saint-Simon remained steeped in the ideas of

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Helvetius and Bentham, Adam Smith and Condorcet. The under­ lying harmony and cohesion of planned society, based on the scientific division of labour, would cause men to adjust themselves and fall in almost automatically, spontaneously and effortlessly. Add to this the evident and well understood interest of everyone to keep the machine going. Finally, Saint-Simon set high hopes on the "Catechisme national" which would embody the "doctrine generale" of the future society. "Society equally needs to have its sentiments as well as its ideas well co-ordinated and subject to good general regulations, that is to say good laws." (There is hardly any need to comment on this view on the regulation of sentiments and ideas from above.) The two schools, of sentiments and reasoning, would furnish data, "a large number of comparisons and combinations to execute". On the basis of these findings the Institute would formulate the "Catechisme national" to be taught at schools, and to be binding on teachers and clergy. Nothing contrary to the catechism would be taught at schools, and any public appointment would be condi­ tional on passing an examination on the moral teachings of the catechism. This would also apply to the European Confederation. Although it is most important, indeed vital, that the "doctrine generale" should percolate to the lowest strata, the rich will be taught in a more elaborate way, "but the instruction of the poorest class will be pushed far enough for the rich not to be able to abuse their superior knowledge at the expense of the poor". Special university chairs in social and moral sciences will teach "how each individual, in whatever social position he may find himself, can combine his particular interest with the general good . . . that man voluntarily submits himself to the greatest moral evil with which he may be affiicted, when he seeks his personal well­ being in a direction which he knows to be harmful to society, just as he elevates himself to the highest degree of enjoyment . . . when he works for the improvement of his personal lot in a direction which he clearly feels to be useful to the majority . . . principles . . . which are the best, the most solid, the only ones capable of rendering society as happy as it could be". But Saint-Simon soon realized that none of the proposed incen­ tives-appeal to enlightened self-interest, scientific proof, sustained training, moral teaching-was strong enough to secure perfect social cohesion and the individual's self-identification with the collective

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FRO M TE CHNOCRACY T O T H E O CRACY

ideal. Deeper, more vital, and at the same time more exacting forces were necessary: a vital religion. Casting his eyes about he was struck by the discovery that original genuine Christianity had the inspiration and the strength to realize the oneness of life and fill its believers with a living and stirring sense of dynamic fulfilment and brotherhood. It was a great calamity that the Church leaders had failed to take Christianity seriously, and thus became guilty of a great betrayal and heresy. Recoiling from the struggle to christianize society, they taught the unworthiness of life here and held out the promise of bliss eternal in the other world. They thus resigned themselves to social evils, allowed fratricidal wars and sung the Te Deum for all combatants alike, enjoined the poor to suffer meekly oppression from the hands of their bullies, and sanctified privilege of birth. Only personal holiness came to matter, and that meant escape from the problems of the world, and useless asceticism. The living lava of faith degenerated into empty ritual. The Church abdicated spiritual leadership, and thus let the sciences and arts slip away from its influence, till the clergy, as time went on, inferior to educated laity, lost all claim to guide and educate the people. "I accuse the Pope of being a heretic . . . of pursuing a system of government more opposed to the moral and physical welfare of the indigent class of his temporal subjects than . . . any lay prince." In order to revitalize Christianity and to make it the "general, universal and sole" religion of the society of the future, it must be made into a vital synthesis of the knowledge, the ideas and strivings of contemporary humanity. It will not deserve the title religion, and will have no effect, unless it incorporates all the scientific achievements, unless it fully identifies itself with the constructive elan of the producers class, unless it replaces metaphysical ideas and transcendental expectations with social ideals and, finally, unless it takes up with the greatest zeal the task "of ameliorating promptly the moral and physical condition of the most numerous class . . . and preventing the wealthy and the powerful from oppressing the poor''. It is incumbent upon the new Church to take the initiative in bringing the industrial system to fruition, in mobilizing scientists, artists, and industrialists to draw up plans which would activize human intelligence to the utmost and would turn this earth into

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"the most agreeable to inhabit i n every way". It should be i n the power of the Church to accomplish the historic transition to the industrial regime, without bloodshed, by dissuading the poor from "acts of violence against the rich and against the government", and by at the same time persuading the rich, artists, savants and indus­ trialists that "their interests are essentially the same as those of the mass of the people; that they belong to the class of labourers, at the same time as they are their natural chiefs". And this is Saint-Simon's prophecy on the coming of "general and definitive Christianity'' : "The people of God, that people which received revelations before the coming of Christ, that people which is the most univer­ sally spread over the surface of the earth, has always perceived that the Christian doctrine founded by the Fathers of the Church was incomplete. It has always proclaimed that a grand epoch will come, to which it has given the name of Messiah's Kingdom; an epoch in which religious doctrine shall be presented in all the generality of which it is susceptible; that it will regulate alike the action of the temporal and that of the spiritual power; and that then all the human race will have but one religion and one organization." "The imagination of poets has placed the golden age at the cradle of the human species, among the i gnorance and coarseness of the early times; the age of iron should rather be relegated to those days. The golden age of mankind is not behind us; it is in front of us; it is in the perfection of the social order : our fathers have not seen it, our children will arrive there one day; it is for us to pave the way. " ( I I ) THE D IALECTIC OF ROMANTIC TOTALITARIANI SM THE S AINT-SIMONIST SCHOOL

(a)

THE APOSTOLIC COMMUNITY

"For the last fifteen days I have been preoccupied, my friends, with the arrangements most capable of making our enterprise [the journal 'Producteur'] succeed; for the last three hours, I have been trying, in spite of my sufferings, to give you a resume of my ideas. You are coming into an age when the well combined efforts will obtain immeasurable results . . . The pear is ripe; it is for you to reap . . . The last part of my labours (Nouveau Christ­ ianisme) will not be immediately understood. People have believed

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that the whole religious system·would disappear, because they have succeeded in showing the decadence of the catholic system. They have been mistaken: religion cannot disappear from the face of the earth; it can only undergo transformation . . . Rodrigues, remem­ ber, to accomplish great things, one has to be passionate . . . My whole life may be summed up in one single sentence: secure to all men the freest development of their faculties.'' These were the last words spoken by Saint-Simon on his death­ bed to his few disciples. He fell silent for a few minutes. When already seized by agony, he lifted himself and said: "Forty-eight hours after our second publication, the party of workers will have come into existence." Few people marched in the funeral procession to Pere-Lachaise. There were the two eminent former disciples of the philosopher, who had also served as his secretaries, the great historian Augustin Thierry and Auguste Comte, and several of the followers, who remained faithful to the end, Olinde Rodrigues, Dr. Bailly, Leon Halevy and others. At the end of the funeral, Rodrigues collected the faithful to his home. The school of Saint-Simon was launched at that meeting. Its members felt themselves to be an apostolic community, indeed a replica of that small confraternity in Jerusalem some eighteen hundred years earlier, with a similar mission and future before them. "The universe has in all fullness (tout entier) been given for a second time to men" by Saint-Simon, just as it was handed over for the first time by Jesus Christ. "The world has been waiting for a saviour . . . Saint-Simon appeared. Moses, Orpheus, Numa have organized the material labours, Jesus Christ organized the spiritual effort. Saint-Simon organized the religious endeavour. Saint-Simon has therefore brought about a synthesis of Moses and Jesus Christ. In the future, Moses will be the chief of the cult; Jesus Christ the chief of dogma; Saint-Simon will be chief of religion, the Pope." Now who were the men who saw themselves called to revolu­ tionize the whole world and what were the elements which com­ bined to make up this strangest and spiritually richest movement of the nineteenth century, which with all its freakish features, left an impact on such men as Carlyle and Mazzini, Heine and de Vigny, George Sand and Michelet, Berlioz and Liszt, and of course Marx and Engels ?

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In the first place it was a movement of very young people. There was no one above thirty-five when the school was constituted in 1825. The oldest, Bazard, was then thirty-four, Enfantin, the rival leader, only twenty-nine, and Rodrigues had just reached the age of thirty-one. They were all intellectuals of middle class origin. There were no aristocrats and hardly any workers among them. Already contemporaries were struck by the high proportion of former students of the Ecole Polytechnique. Besides engineers and mathematicians the school comprised very able economists, some doctors and lawyers, a fair number of litterateurs and publicists, teachers at higher institutions of learning, one or two minor poets, artists and musicians. D'Eichthal, a highly attractive and representative type of the movement, as we shall see, supplies a revealing piece of information when he remarks that there was hardly a person in the Saint­ Simonist school who was not driven by some "family chagrin". To take only the example of the three above-mentioned leaders ; Bazard had a sombre youth because of his illegitimate birth. Enfantin was the son of a discharged bankrupt banker. He failed because of that to obtain admission to the garde du corps and was refused by the girl he loved and wished to marry. He turned to commerce, desiring to become rich. He took up the wine trade, spending some years in Germany and St. Petersbourg. Olinde Rodrigues came from a family of Jewish financiers. Although a brilliant mathematician, with some scientific discoveries to his credit, he was barred, because of his Judaism, from the Ecole Normale Superieure, which he wished to join. He went on the stock exchange and accumulated a great fortune. Another important characteristic to be borne in mind is the fact that quite a few of the Saint-Simonists had had close political associations and had played some part in political life, before coming to Saint-Simonism. Bazard was the founder of the Charbonnerie Franfaise and President of the Haute Vente. Before that in 1814 he distinguished himself by showing high military courage and gaining admission to the Legion d'honneur. Bazard presided over the Free Masons Congress in Bordeaux in 1821, and in the same year organized the plot of Belfort. Buchez, a former student of medicine, one of the original members of the school, to become later leader of Christian Socialism, historian of the French Revolution, and President of the National Assembly in

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1848, also started as an active ahd leading Carbonaro. Cerclet, one of the editors of the "Producteur' ', who soon seceded, had been closely connected with the Nestor of conspiracy Buonarroti in Geneva. He later on became editor of the influential "National", and eventually secretary of the French Chamber of Deputies. Bazard seems to have been speaking for all of them, when he explained the reasons which made him abandon conspiratorial activity in the Revolutionary underground and join the Saint­ Simonist movement. He began to feel that plotting was a sterile effort, and that the vaguely outlined political ideal of the Revolu­ tionary movement was of too thin a texture. It had no real scien­ tific foundation, was not integrated into a more embracing Weltanschauung, and failed to give an answer to many of the human urges and longings. The Saint-Simonist religion fulfilled all these conditions. The Saint-Simonists made their first public appearance as a school in the journal "Producteur", plans for which were laid a few months before the Master's death. The full title was char­ acteristically "Producteur-Journal philosophique de l'Industrie, des Sciences et des Beaux-Arts", and carried as a device Saint-Simon's prophecy on the coming of the golden age. The early contributors included men who could hardly be called Saint-Simonists, such as Adolphe Blanqui, the economist and brother of the famous Revolu­ tionary plotter, August Comte, Armand Carrel, republican leader, Adolphe Garnier and others ; which again goes to show how much coming and going there was among the various opposition groups at that period. It was, surprisingly enough, Carrel, a Republican saint, who answered the attacks of liberals, like Stendhal and Benjamin Constant, on the authoritarianism of the ideas of the Saint-Simonist "priests of Memphis and Thebes". The "Producteur" came to grief by the end of 1826, after having, first as a weekly, and then as a monthly, served as a platform for vigorous ideas expressed in a defiant, but generous manner. The demise of the journal was followed by what came to be called by the Saint-Simonists a period of silent expansion, which lasted for some two years. Personal contacts, correspondence, missionary zeal and ardent sincerity, and the invisible flow of ideas won over some young men of high ability and radiant character : Michel Chevalier, brilliant polytechnicien, eminent economist and a fine stylist, impressionable, imaginative and drawing admiring affection

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from all he came in contact with-he was destined to become pro­ fessor at the College de France and a decisive figure under the Second Empire (ironically enough he negotiated with Cobden the famous Free Trade Treaty of I 860) ; Henri Foumel, high priest of technology, who gave up the management of the great Creusot works employi,ng 2500 workers to join the inner circle of the school ; Jules Lechevalier, an ardent student of Hegel whom he had known during his stay in Germany ; the son of the great Carnot ; the brothers Emile and Isaac Pereira, cousins of Rodrigues, who like Olinde, became in due course great captains of French industry, banking and railway construction; Gustave d'Eichthal, another Jew, although baptized in early childhood, a close disciple and friend of Comte, a youth of ardent idealism and diverse gifts ; the poly­ technicians Cazeaux, Edmond Talabot, Abel Transom, Charles Lambert, all men of ability and high minded; Hoart, an artillery officer who gave up his commission in order to devote himself to the Saint-Simonist crusade for universal peace and constructive effort; visionaries, ecstatic orators and mystics like the poet Charles Duveyrier and the preachers Barrault, professor of Literature, and Charton. The years 1 828-9 were years of intense proselytizing activity by way of public lectures and regular meetings. The lectures were given first at the Caisse hypothecafre, and then at the rue Taranne, under the general title of "Exposition de la Doctrine de Saint­ Simon", and were edited in book form. They constitute by far the most comprehensive and most important formulation of the ideology of the school (rather than of Saint-Simon), before it became wholly swamped by religious preoccupations. Emissaries from the Paris centre, usually in twos, travelled long distances to spread the gospel and to establish local branches of the movement. Souls were won and brotherhoods were set up in all parts of France and in all its major cities, in Belgium, England, Germany. The missionaries would receive instructions from and send regular reports to the centre. It was a revivalist type of preaching and yet distinguished by close reasoning and scientific terms of reference and proo£ The generation was attuned to this synthesis of dialectics and emotion­ alism. There was a thirst for ideas in France, after the years of intellectual barrenness under Napoleon. The Romantic climate made people intensely receptive and impressionable. In a regime of constitutional liberties with a very restricted franchise, intellectual

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debate became a substitute fo� genuine political action. As dis­ cussion was not concerned with immediate practical choices it ranged widely over world-embracing systems of ideas. We learn something of the response of the audiences to Saint­ Simonist preaching from a description by a brother of the famous catholic leader Lacordaire. His description is paralleled in other reports : "The hall was full to overflow, and the speaker was listened to attentively. And yet these were catholics, liberals, republicans, who were witnessing catholicism, liberalism, republicanism being tom to pieces. Seeing the enthusiasm, the lively sympathy elicited by the audience, and which I myself felt with an emotion hitherto unknown to me as the speaker's words were giving more and more evidence of his profound conviction, I realized that all that was not artificial, and that a doctrine which could engender such unexpected sentiments among the audience, and so much devotion in the heart of that young man of twenty-five [Lechevalier], alone before a huge crowd, that that doctrine, I say, was not perhaps merely a philosophical system, ill proved in theory, impossible in practice, but perhaps one that could contain the destinies of mankind." A little later, after also having perused some literature, he writes : "and yet, after those two evenings, which will never be effaced from my memory, what a change in my being ! What kind of sentiments, hitherto unknown to me, have been seething in my heart and causing me to cast a glance of contempt over my whole past life ! . . . I was unhappy, profoundly miserable . . . Now, I am no longer, the future offers itself to me full of life and youth. That life, that youth are those of humanity living in God, which comprises me in its bosom, which draws unto itself all my affections, all my sympathy . . . And that Europe which shook to the voice of St. Bernard, and which seemed to tear itself away from its foundations in order to throw itself on Palestine and liberate it from the Moslem yoke, is no longer an object of astonish­ ment to me. Because I experience all that, it is given to me to understand the ancient miracle of the Christian faith and to look forward to the near accomplishment of better destinies for the suffering classes.'' The School came into the possession of two effective journals, a weekly "Organisateur, journal des progres de la science generale", which soon began to identify itself as 'Journal de la doctrine de

SOCIAL I S T ME S S IANI S M

Saint-Simon"; and the "Globe", a liberal daily which was taken over by the Saint-Simonists in 1830 and edited by Pierre Leroux, who was soon to develop his own brand of Romantic socialism. The "Globe" carried on the front page three slogans: "Toutes les institutions sociales doivent avoir pour but l' amelioration du sort moral, physique et intellectuel de la classe la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre ; tous les privileges de la naissance, sans exception, seront abolis ; a chacun selon sa capacite, a chaque capacite selon ses oeuvres." The "Globe" started by printing 2500 copies, but had only 500 subscribers. Most copies were distributed gratis. The paper ceased to appear on April 20th, 1832. The Saint-Simonist activities among the working classes deserve special attention. Rodrigues, Foumel, Holstein and Mme Bazard were concerned with the training of apostles to the workers. Paris was divided into twelve arrondissements for that purpose. It was planned to combine missionary activity with organization of co­ operative workshops and medical services. Three hundred and thirty faithful were organized, among them a hundred and ten women. They were divided into three groups: functionaries, (who were counted as members of the Family or College), aspirants or novices, and visitors. Two workshops were set up, one for tailors, the other for couturiers. These were held to be not "soup kitchens for the poor and collections of clothing for the needy'', but an "reuvre apostolique", and to form "the cadres of that great pacific army of workers with such high destinies in front of it". The Saint-Simonists organized also a special propaganda service for the working classes, a service of handbills-Feuilles populaires-which were distributed freely on Sundays. From a coterie of like....minded persons with a missionary zeal to spread their ideas the group was gradually becoming trans­ formed into a rigidly organized sect with a ritual, hierarchy and discipline. Several members went to live together at rue Monsigny. Their house became the headquarters of the movement. The lead­ ing and most active members would meet regularly three, four times a week, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, at the house of Mme Bazard. These reunions were not mere Committee meet­ ings. They bore the character of the breaking of bread by an apostolic community accompanied by chanted songs and benedic­ tions and overflowing with tender brotherly love, culminating often in ecstasy. A special ceremonial and elaborate rites were

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gradually worked out for aH manner of occasions, initiation, marriage, funeral, laying on of hands. We read in a description of one of the apostolic reunions by one of the participants: "It is impossible to imagine the charm which there was for us in listening to persons who were on the threshold of conversion; in listening to bits of happy reports (from missionaries) or in hearing the extravagant things said about us. We would read the attacks on us in the press, the jokes in the 'Figaro', and we laughed heartily, when they were good. The two chiefs (Bazard and Enfantin) were placed face to face. Enfantin was serving; he would show such anxious solicitude for every one of us, asking us, one after the other, thousands of questions. Bazard directed the conversation . . . In that atmosphere of self-sacrifice, a fervour of soul (chaleur d' a.me), sweet like the mercy of the poor, would not cease to intoxicate me. I loved all those who sur­ rounded me and they all loved me. Oh ! May God attach a similar illusion to each of the years that are still left to me." In this atmosphere, charged with lust for love and affection, and full of ecstatic transports, the earliest apostle, Olinde Rodrigues solemnly nominated on Christmas Day I 829 Bazard and Enfantin as the two peres, or popes of the school.

(b)

THE JEWI S H INGREDIENT

If there is reason to attach special significance to the fact that Karl Marx was of Jewish ancestry and that Jews have played a prominent and conspicuous part in extreme radical and revolution­ ary movements in modem times, the quest for an explanation should really start a generation before Marx, namely with the Saint-Simonist school. If now political Messianism, with all the dispositions, tensions, climate and patterns of action it engendered, is to be considered a maj or and essential feature of the modem era, the Jewish ingredient in it is of far greater importance and interest than as an episodic and accidental matter. The high tide of political Messianism began with Saint-Simon. We have already noted in passing the presence and part played by individual Jews in the movement, Olinde Rodrigues and his younger brother Eugene, their cousins, the brothers Emile and Isaac Pereira, Gustave d'Eichthal, the poet Leon Halevy of the family of the com poser, Moise Renaudet, Felicien David. The fact

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did not fail to attract the attention of contemporaries. Much of the violent antisemitism of Fourier and his disciples may be ascribed to the bitter rivalry between the two schools. On the opposite end, a poetic drama by the Polish ultramontane poet Zygmunt Krasinski significantly called "The Godless Comedy" (Nieboska Komedja) and composed in the eighteen-thirties depicts Saint­ Simon.ism as a Judaic plot to subvert Christian civilization and plunge the European nations into an abyss of social anarchy and moral debauchery; all out of implacable demoniacal hatred for Christianity. In the middle of the nineteenth century people on the Paris stock exchange would tell each other the joke about a Christian businessman who on being told that for the success of his new scheme he would need to have a Jewish partner, promptly replied that he had two Saint-Simonists with him. The phenomenal suc­ cess of Rodrigues and the Pereira brothers in business, their decisive role in vital branches of the French national economy, coupled with their socialist and universalist ideas, was calculated to present to the enemies of Jews the pattern of an anti-semitic myth which was revived with such frightful results in the second quarter of the twentieth century : capitalism and communism have both been represented as Judaic weapons of war wielded by a sinister cosmo­ politan force, alien and hostile to any national tradition, and acting everywhere as a poisonous agent of disintegration. There is sufficient evidence to show that the Saint-Simonists were not unaware of the presence of a Jewish ingredient, amounting to more than the accidental fact that a few of their members hap­ pened to be of Jewish extraction. We have already quoted the passage in Saint-Simon on the Jewish Messianic vision of "the people of God, that people which received revelations before the coming of Christ, that people which is the most universally spread over the surface of the earth, (and which) has always perceived that the doctrine founded by the Fathers of the Church was incomplete". Saint-Simon as we have seen, fully identifies his own vision of the ultimate scheme of things with the Jewish "Messiah's Kingdom ; an epoch in which religious doctrine shall be presented in all the generality of which it is susceptible ; it will regulate alike the action of the temporal, and that of the spiritual power ; and then all the human race will have but one religion and one organization". This emphatic association of ideas must have come to Saint-Simon from his close contacts in the last years of his life with that type of

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recently emancipated Jew who was at pains to bring into relief the universalist nature of Hebrew prophecy and Messianic expectation and to tone down the nationalist overtones of the vision of the miraculous return to Zion and Judah's triumph over all his gentile oppressors. This seems to be confirmed by Olinde Rodrigues, in his preface to the r 8 32 edition of Saint- Simon's works, after his break with Enfantin as a result of the latter's proclamation that from now on paternity is to be the mother's exclusive secret: "The crisis of destruction has come to an end in you (en vous, Enfantin), the crisis of reorganization in politics and morality com­ mences with me by Saint-Simon, whose heir I am by virtue of function . . . From the day when Saint-Simon met the man who, enamoured with the future, had understood the sciences, felt the fine arts and practised industry; the man who carried in him by blood the tradition of Moses, by disinterestedness that of Christ ; from the day when that man, who, savant and industrialist, had learned from contact with industrialists and savants, the secret of their force and the weakness of their morality; from the day when that man, burning in his bowels with the living flame of Saint­ Simon, felt himself penetrated by a new life, and recognized in Saint-Simon, the Christian feudal, a new father; from that day was born the association of the universal family; from that day became possible the reunion of Jews and Christians in the bosom of a new Christianity, a universal religion." Replying to Rodrigues, and defending Enfantin, d'Eichthal writes that "it is incumbent upon me, like you a Jew, who derives from his race the language of the prophets, the word of truth, to correct your errors". The man who had a decisive influence on the religious Messianic evolution of the Saint- Simonist movement was Olinde Rodrigues' younger brother, Eugene. He died at the age of twenty-three, consumed by an idealistic ardour, which his ailing body was too weak to contain. He translated Ephraim Lessing's "Letters on the Enlightenment of Humanity" into French, and prefaced it with a long Introduction. In that preface, Eugene pleads movingly and in exalted language for a religion of mankind which would synthe­ size the best that is in all existing religions, will fill all its adherents with a joyous and solemn sense of universal oneness, and sanctify the endeavour for eternal progress through constructive effort and social justice. The cry that humanity has a religious future comes

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from him. Eugene was a self-dedicated soul. He parted from the girl whom he loved with all the tenderness and passion of a young romantic being, in order to dedicate himself to the cause of humanity. If Eugene was the Evangelist to Enfantin the Father and Pope of the Church, Olinde Rodrigues, as hinted before, played the part of St. Paul in that he initiated the movement on the death of Saint­ Simon. Although all disciples who had any means generously put whatever they could at the disposal of the confraternity, Rodrigues' contribution was the most substantial. He was also responsible for the financial side of the mission. Many years later, under the Second Empire, Olinde devoted much time, effort and money to bring out the collected writings of Saint-Simon and the disciples and anything that had any documentary value to offer which he could lay hands on. In view of the hopeless verbosity and repeti­ tiveness of the Saint-Simonist writings, Rodrigues could hardly be said to have earned the gratitude of posterity. The non-Jewish Saint-Simonists wished to express their respect, and possibly sense of indebtedness to Judaism by sending a small delegation in Saint-Simonist robes to attend the Day of Atonement service at the Paris central synagogue. Some of them fervently prophesied that the Woman Messiah, the Mother, for whose coming they were waiting, would be a Jewess from the Orient, Jerusalem, Constantinople or Egypt, where-as we shall see-they went to await her, and to revive the Orient by constructive works at the same time. What was it that attracted Jews to the Saint-Simonist move­ ment and what may be regarded as a specific Jewish contribution to or ingredient in the Movement ? There is something in the Jewish tradition which refuses to take history as the :flow of time for granted. History must be heading towards a certain denouement of a Messianic nature. This disposition is partly due to Judaic teachings on History as the story of election, sin, atonement and redemption at the end of the days, partly to the millennial status of the Jewish dispersion as a minority. A non-conforming minority, persecuted or at best questioning itself and being questioned by the world on the meaning and pur­ pose of its separateness, must either assert a superior peculiarity and missionary destiny or regard its position as essentially pro­ visional and its life as a kind of preparation for some apocalyptic

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denouement, after a violent spas�. That explains for instance the very heavily charged climate in which the Jews of Eastern Europe, caught between two Messianic fires, Zionist redemption and Com­ munist world revolution, lived between the two World Wars, before they were engulfed by the abyss of night eternal. Saint-Simonism presented the purpose of a nation to be not merely life as it is and always has been, but as partaking in some march towards a universal goal. The universalism of the ideology had a particular attraction to those newly emancipated Jews who could neither identify themselves with nor be accepted as an integral part of the French tradition, so strongly tinged with catholicism. Most of them were too proud and respected themselves too much to take the easiest opportunist course, baptism and apostasy. The Saint-Simonist religion of mankind superseding all religions and expressing what seemed to be the essence of Jewish Messianism appeared as a creed offering salvation also from the special ailings of the Jew in a gentile world. Furthermore, the ideology of industrialism glorified virtues and achievements in which Jews could excel, and by promising reward according to personal desert rendered any question of race and birth wholly irrelevant. Scien­ tists, industrialists, technicians and bankers were destined to be the saviours of mankind. The young Jewish followers of Saint-Simon had just shed the all-embracing Jewish religious heritage to which countless genera­ tions of their ancestors dedicated themselves with total abandon­ ment. The accumulated intensity was suddenly left without object as it were. In such a situation men are driven sometimes to ideal­ istic sainthood, sometimes to ruthless and shameless self-assertion, and sometimes are seized by insatiable greed. In the case of spiritual and idealistic sublimation, the age long Jewish tradition of solidarity and of imaginative compassion with the sufferings of others was able to find a kindred disposition in socialism, and Jews threw them­ selves into its arms enthusiastically and lovingly. Saint-Simonism, furthermore, proclaimed a religion of love. It extended a tender embrace to all the lonely, the injured, the rejected and those poised between different worlds and yearning for a sense of belonging and life-giving affection. It is enough to read some utterances of d'Eichthal, who had been baptized in his early childhood, to grasp that magic.

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(c)

DO GMA AND EXPERIENCE

In the Introduction to the "Exposition de la Doctrine de Saint­ Simon" (1828-9), the aim of the Saint-Simonist school is defined as "to liberate the sentiments, the sciences, industry from all bonds which oppose their progress . . . to prove that new bonds were necessary in order to combine all efforts in an orderly manner; to direct all social activity towards the same goal''. In the spirit of Saint-Simon, the ideal is not freedom, but liberation in the sense of complete activization. Such full activiza­ tion is brought about only by perfect purposive integration. With­ out it, there is frustration and waste. The Saint-Simonists were intensely sensitive to the accusation of being enemies of freedom. "Far from breaking the idol of our youth, we have surrounded it with a more worthy homage; we have not deserted its cult, but purified it; we have not over­ thrown its altar, but transferred it from the solitary domain of personality to the vast and animated expanses of association. If we have renounced farouche, debilitated and isolated liberty, accom­ panied by hatred and suspicion, it was in order to follow fecund and powerful liberty, of which the companions are peace and love." Isolationist individualism is the Prince of Denmark to the Hamlet of egoism, and that is the "enemy of man", the father of all the scourges afflicting the fatherland-"et pour moi (Enfantin) la patrie, c'est l' univers". The Saint-Simonists are striving for a liberty which "abjures the indiscipline of pride" ("orgueil"), but guards "la noblesse de fierte", which throws off the symbols of anarchic turbulence, the phrygian cap and the dagger, but grasps the "palme pacifique" of science and industry, the pencil, the spade. They wish to spread not fear, but hope of happiness, and exaltation. In brief, the Saint-Simon school proclaims the liberty of genius which is kept at present in bondage, since privilege of birth and inherited wealth condemn the talents of the poor to impotence and waste, or at best to exploitation by gilded vice, while letting the abilities of the rich rot in idleness. The harnessing of all efforts, by removing from talent and sentiment all obstacles to their self-realization, is possible only in a fully integrated society with a design, in other words in an organic age. Now the advance of the school on the Master is in the emphatic conviction that the organic nature of society is the normal

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and healthy state, while a critical age is a state of malady and de­ rangement. The disciples abandon the theory of alternating ages. They recognize that ages had been alternating in the past. But now mankind has come to the threshold of its real and ultimate destiny-progress unbroken by any relapses and unhampered by any internal conflicts and tensions. The Saint-Simonists employed enormous energy to elaborate the Prophet's ideas on this point ad nauseam. The integrating principle of the clear collective aim­ they resume Saint-Simon's master idea-will naturally ensure an objective co-ordination of efforts, contributions and awards. Education and legislation will ceaselessly condition men subjec­ tively to adjust themselves to the common pattern. As the direc­ tion of society will be in the hands of truly competent leaders, their authority will possess in all eyes undisputed legitimacy. It will be respected as authority, and not feared as superior force. The weaker will thus trustingly accept the guidance of the more expert, and the stronger will extend a helping hand to the less gifted. A harmony of social relations will ensue, "regi par providence . . . volonte bienfaisante". As in a healthy, integrated person, free from schizophrenic ambivalences, ideas and actions will in that society be in harmony. There will be no meaning in that conventional distinction between theory and practice, theory and facts. Furthermore, there will be no room for the dichotomy between religion and science, and incongruity between intellectual prowess and moral inadequacy, or barrier between the personal good, interest and liberty on one side, and the general good and duty on the other. Men are called to "aid each other, since their destinies are inter­ twined (enchamees) . . . They cannot advance on the road of love, science and power, except by extending incessantly that solidarity." The Saint-Simonists attached supreme importance to the liber­ ating, revitalizing sense of solidarity which Saint-Simon sought in the living experience of oneness. History, the sense of its unity and of its Messianic purposefulness across seeming incoherence and futility, was to them a life-giving force. Having no clear notion of the forces of history, and being be­ wildered by the apparent meaningless flux of events, no wonder that man felt in the past impotent, weak and enchained by blind powers, his paramount experience that of fear and resignation. But now a new instrument having been offered to man to pierce

S O CIAL I S T MES SIAN I S M

the mystery of history and t o survey its logical course, man i s able to look with calm and confidence into his future destiny. He is now a free and intelligent agent; in a position to hasten his happiness by his own efforts. Saint-Simon has reversed the Christian device: "all will be called, and all will be chosen". Now this clear understanding of history and of the forces of the future is also a guarantee of peaceful evolution. The "regeneration defmitive" of mankind needs no violent spasm or sudden overthrow of those who refuse to be regenerated. Persuasion will suffice to spread conviction of the history-willed constructive and orderly nature of the desired order of things. Men "can now verify . . . the future . . . prepare for realisation . . . foresee and avoid disorders and violence, which appear to have been as it were a condition of all progress in the past". What a heightening and liberating effect is to be experienced from this sympathy with "la vie du monde . . . the plan followed by the human species during the whole duration of its existence, (from) the desire we haye to contribute our part to the execution of that plan, (from) the belief that it is a beautiful thing to play a great role on that immense stage . . . to offer the help of my arm, of my intelligence". As said before, mankind having gained full clarity of vision, and brought intellectual cognition and emotional disposition into accord, infmite progress towards perfectibility will be free from those influences of ignorance and conflict which in the past clogged its march. History will as it were begin then only. "Aucune retrogradation desormais." No violent crises, no wars, no en­ tanglements. The principle of association will expand constantly by taking in new spheres, and by causing the texture of the com­ munity to thicken more and more. Science will enjoy the most rapid development, industry will grow and expand smoothly, the fine arts will blossom on the enthusiasm prevailing in the com­ munity and fed by the secret joys of private life. The sense of oneness presupposes a clear and trenchant intellec­ tual formula, in other words a dogma. It is the tendency of every science to strive to bring back all particular facts to one hypothesis, a single principle, an all-embracing conception. In the critical age the prevailing social anarchy had as its accompaniment scientific isolationism, extreme specialization, in short it lacked a master idea. The organic age succeeds in linking up all the leading hypotheses

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of the various sciences into onit general synthesis, e.g. a dogma, which serves as "base a la science generale". A general dogma is however necessary not only for scientific progress, but for a general Weltanschammg and social progress. Auguste Comte was at pains to prove that "dogmatism is the normal state of human intelligence, the state to which it strives by its nature, continuously in all ways, even when it seems to depart from it furthest". Even the revolutionary age, which was deter­ mined to put an end to the sway of dogma which had been thought natural till then, had to give a dogmatic form to its purely critical ideas, be it for the purpose of destroying alone. Those who debunk ideas, do not know what they are saying. Every action presupposes some explicit or implicit "principes prealables de direction", some overall view on social relationships. There are no wholly spon­ taneous acts. They would then be mere caprices. It may be said paradoxically that only the vitality of a deeply embedded dogma makes spontaneous action possible. For it implies "the disposition to believe spontaneously without prior demonstration". This gives our actions spontaneity and at the same time coherence and purposefulness. This conception of the role of dogma is strongly reminiscent of the views of Burke and the ultramontane Right. There is how­ ever a fundamental difference. To the latter the dogma was em­ bedded in tradition ; partly in history, partly in the religious canon (and its qualified exponents) . It implied primarily unreflecting and almost instinctive habit. Saint-Simonist dogma is a strictly con­ ceptual idea and has a dynamic quality. It connotes a scientific theory, and not a texture of habits, prejudices and reflexes. This has far-reaching implications. The Saint-Simonists postulate a dogma of the future, the "gener­ ality" and "universality" of which will be superior to any of the dogmas which had prevailed in the past. It will inculcate into everyone "love for all", unite all the wills into one will, direct all efforts towards one social goal : "the largest principle on which are founded all views of the future . . . determines the citizen's affection for society, for the universe of which he is a part . . . He finds that principle manifested everywhere and under a thousand different forms ; to it industry, the savant and the artist refer all their actions, all their ideas, because that principle alone sanctifies or condemns definitely, because it alone presents us the world and humanity,

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not a s an obscure chaos, but as the execution of a plan, of an har­ moniously conceived will, which imposes duties, the fulfilling of which should give man his happiness." Civilization's progress is tantamount to the growth of integration: the greater the integration, the greater the need for dogma. The intellectual character of the dogma makes it inevitable that only a very small class "eminemment active dans l'ordre speculatif ", only the "small number" of those who devote their lives to the investigation of social sciences will be able to analyse the dogma scientifically. They will constitute the "autorite competente". They have as their "destination propre le gouvemement de I' opinion". As to the masses, "presque la totalite des hommes" will have to dispense with demonstration and proo£ They will have to accept the new doctrine like doctrines in the past "d'une maniere dogmatique". Anyway in the case of most people, a scientific and logical proof, while it may convince them of the convenience of this or that action, and indicate the means to achieve a certain goal, is not enough to stimulate them to prefer one action over another, and above all to act. Other faculties have to be active in man for that besides reason: his sentimental powers of love and sympathy, "fortement prononcee", with the general aim. This gives a very sharp and decisive tum to the whole theory of the Saint-Simonist school. It envisages the total man. Not the reasoning creature alone, but man with his sentiments, passions and impulses. "Man is one." The division into faculties is an arbitrary abstraction. A man acts as a whole, not in any partial capacity. Do not say now he reas_ons, now he feels, now he imagines. Say he experiences, and that covers all, because all the elements are always mixed up and present. Experience is height­ ened feeling-if you like, love. As an act of affirmation it is faith. Real scientific discovery and advance is not made by laborious putting one and two together. It is preceded by fl.ashes of intuition, which some call revelation and others inspiration. Their source is in intense, heightened experience. Some have more of it and so�e less. Those who have it in the highest degree we call gemuses. "The general opinion is that the human spirit, observing a mass of facts, passes successively from one to the other and arrives thus without interruption from particular facts to one general fact, to the law which binds them; that is to say that the conception, the dis-

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covery of that law would be the consequence, the logical result of the last fact observed. There is no example of such a procedure in the history of human discoveries . . . the creative idea (pensee creatrice) comes from the inspiration of genius, and not by means of a method.'' Heightened, loving experience has also the wonderful quality of fusing things together into one living, vibrant whole. Merely critical analysis breaks them up, turns them into atoms, dust, "it carries death with it everywhere". Loving experience penetrates intuitively and directly into the inner spirit, innermost mystery of the things. Critical analysis has as its task to follow and verify the revelations of genius. Now what is true of the scientific endeavour should be no less, indeed still more true, about our relationship to the totality of existence, the life of society and the universe. That conception of the unity of history, that meaning of progress, which to fathom we have been straining so hard, concepts which cannot be broken up into molecules, and sorted out analytically by a calculating machine, must be experienced intensely to uncover their mystery and to yield life-giving power. That type of experience has been called religion: "cette disposition mystique au moyen de laquelle l'homme se met en rapport sentimental avec l'univers et imagine une vie etemelle". The religious sentiment in fact comprises and activizes at once a whole range of sentiments-love, devotion, faith, awe, compassion and sympathy. When one of these is stirred, all oth�rs are set into motion. This is why, when one loving emotion-say paternal love-is affected, all impulses of love seem to become active and to expand beyond. The link between our sentiments is not merely philanthropy, which affects only rela­ tions between persons. It is of a higher order, for it propels our experience beyond human beings, into cosmic boundlessness, evoking a type of religious tremor and infinite yearning. "Humanity has a religious future." The scope and intensity of the religious sentiment will grow in proportion to the expansion of our knowledge of the world and the thickening of the texture of social organization. "The religion of the future will be greater and more powerful than all the religions of the past . . . the synthesis of all the concep­ tions of mankind, and more still, of all its ways of existence . . . it will not merely dominate the political order, but the political order,

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'dans son ensemble', will become a religious institution; fo r no fact should be conceived outside God or develop outside His law; . . . it will embrace the whole world, because the law of God is universal.''

(J)

FROM SCIENTIFIC PROOF TO THE INT UITI O N OF THE LEADER

The law of the future is association. Rationalist critical analysis, without passion, without love, and without faith, was the natural companion and ally of an aggregate of isolated individuals, without a living link. The dynamic association of the future will require the "fusing of all hearts in one and the same love": faith. The que�tion of leadership must be viewed in this new context. If the reign of dogma required an intellectual elite to expound it, indeed to impose it on the unenlightened, living faith needs priests of special emotional depth. It will be found, the school says, that in all times leadership fell into the hands of men "who spoke to the heart". Reasoning, syllogisms were secondary means. Society "has never been directly carried away except by various forms of I' expression sentimentale". It is not merely that an emotional appeal is more effective in stirring the masses than a closely reasoned argument. There are deeper reasons. The real leader is the one who experiences the unity of the universe more intensely than others, whose affrrming and loving faith gives him exceptional, indeed supernatural power to impart his experience to others. He has the magic capacity to unite men in ecstatic love and faith. The leader is above all how­ ever a seer, a prophet. His experience of universal unity is so heightened that he is enabled to obtain prophetic intimations into the meaning of the age and the future shape of things. It is his most urgent need and sacred mission to reveal the mysteries unbared to him on the "destinees sociales" to his fellow men. "Where does he have his birth, genius ? In the inspiration of social destinies; it is to him alone that is reserved the glorious mission of revealing to men that which all desire, that which all call for, that which only one among them knows to express the first. Pro­ foundly moved by the pangs of humanity, burning with a desire to put an end to them, he wrests it from a world which mankind no longer understands . . . which hurts it, where it is being torn.

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FR O M TECHNOCRACY TO THE O CRACY

At his word, that world, already reduced to dust, disappears ; a new world is created, because in those new regions order and harmony reign ; all those phenomena, which isolate themselves daily and "s'individualisaient" more and more, will, once united by a common bond, converge towards the same goal; they will become dependent on each other, while in the past they seemed to march . . . towards independence . . . with the passions which agitated the savants themselves imprinted upon them. "There are, no doubt, privileged beings, who hear the voice of God first, who run with the greatest ardour ahead of it, who raise themselves to the heights of love and intelligence, given by God to His creatures . . . Not all ascend Mount Sinai, not all contemplate . . . the majesty of the Most High face to face ; but those whom He allows to rise almost to His heights, they are those whom He commands most emphatically to enlighten others, in order to establish that chain of sympathy of devout submission. loving power . . . elevating them to God." Progress-the leap from one phase to another, the overthrowing of old dead forms and the creation of new worlds-is thus the achievement of genius, in the most intense sympathy with social destiny, endowed with "cette faculte vraiment generatrice, prim­ ordiale", which manifests itself at all stages of human progress. This creative faculty unites the disunited, fuses in love and concord forces torn asunder by hatred and strife, and creates order, harmony and mutual attraction, where there had been formerly only repul­ sion and antagonism. "All will be brethren . . . families, cities, nations", which had till now been pursuing each its own ethos, " . . . will be one single human family, one sole city, one single fatherland" based on one "science universelle". If the mark of solely true and solely legitimate leadership is divine inspiration gained from superior experience, clearly it cannot be a matter of popular election and deposition. Surely the chief of the future will not wait for an assembly to clothe him with the purple, after having divined his genius. Genius will reveal itself; "il ne sort pas d' une urne de scrutin". Authority imposes itsel£ It does not argue or teach. It compels, it sweeps. Life is dynamic, and leadership must be dynamic. Situations vary infinitely, circumstances are in a state of flux, every human condition is unique. Life is lava. Now it was the error of the past to expect abstract, lifeless, codified law to act as ciphers for

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concrete situations. It envisaged standardized realities, stereotyped cases, forgetting that life consists precisely in exceptions, devia­ tions, differences. The judges were as it were "impulsion mecan­ ique donnee a une matiere inerte". Written law, so much vaunted by metaphysicians and logicians, is nothing but a "sterile abstrac­ tion". Furthermore, written law has also been revealed by some superior mind at some past date. Why assume that it has been revealed for all time ? After all mankind is progressing all the time, and unexpected situations crop up daily. Why should there not be a progressive revelation, a living law, "loi vivante" ? "Un homme se charge de continuer cette revelation, et d'en transformer, successivement et selon les besoins, les sacres caracteres." The true leader is a "loi vivante". Moses, Jesus, Saint-Simon have been three "lois vivantes". The different character of the authority exercised by each of them resulted from the different mission of each. But they all represented the same individual, social and religious principle of authority. The successors of Moses and Jesus had legitimate authority so long as humanity needed Jewish or Christian revelation. "Celle de Saint-Simon est definitive, car c'est la revelation du progres." It emerges that written law is a dead weight, an impediment to the endless living variety of life and an obstacle to the dynamic creative response to it. Enfantin pours scorn on those who absurdly claimed that the leader-legislator is the son of the law. No, he is the creator of the law. His intuitive grasp of the situation and response to it is law. For the leader is an artist. He lays down the law for every contingency as it arises. He creates, he does not interpret. Yes, the artists should be the future leaders of society. Their mission will be to sweep on the masses towards the realization of their future social destiny. "The highest poetry will be the most powerful predication." For what is the artist's superiority if not in the more intense experience of reality, in the superior sensitiveness and responsiveness ? Art must therefore by definition be progres­ sive. The artist's heightened experience senses long before others the trend of progress-"a qui a ete devoile le secret des destinees sociales". Artists pierce the veil which separates us from the future and they thus offer to the scientists in the form of a revelation the grand hypothesis which the scientists in tum are called to verify and to prove as linking up the facts of the past with the trend of the future-"nouvelle conception d'ordre universe!".

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The reason for the decline o'f the arts was the social relations prevailing in the past. In a critical age of isolationist individualism, the poet and artist voiced the sense of malaise and maladjustment, or gave their whole attention to pure formalism and technique. Poets wrote elegies and satire. The artist revelled in solitude and anguish. He turned to things perverse and depraved in order to shock or bemuse. There was no real, sincere experience behind that type of art. In the future, society bent on its great collective tasks will march to the rhythm chosen for it by the artist. The question arises: does this conception of leadership not entail the total subordination, indeed self-effacement of the led ? The very fact of putting the question-answer the Saint-Simonists­ shows that one who asks it is still completely steeped in the past, and has not enough imagination to visualize the state of the future, where every person, :from birth, finds a :friendly and all powerful hand which comes to sustain his first steps, help him to find the career which he should pursue, give him the strength which he needs to march, put him finally in the place marked for him by God, and still support him at that terminm;, guide him, assist him all the time; and you will see that the independence which you laud so much is nothing but servitude and fatalism, and that the reign of authority which we announce is one of Liberty and Providence. It is true that in the past leaders were almost always the enemies of the led. They practically always harmed them. They had selfish interests, wanted to amass property and power and pass them on to their descendants. Since in the future there will be no inheritance of property and privilege, leader-administrators will be towards their subordinates like captains to their crew, officers to their troops. The objective nexus will be decisive. Direction is not arbitrary despotism. People 'Joyously surrender themselves" to authority, when marching under the aegis of men they love and venerate, when they know their fate to be in the hands of devoted genius. This type of surrender is abject and revolting when it means self-surrender into selfish hands, but it is "high virtue . . . so easy and so sweet among beings who have a common aim". "Nous reviendrons avec amour a l' obeissance" towards those who do not chain, but attract; who inspire, but use no force; who stimulate without mutilating; do not constrain, yet make follow. It was the grave mistake of individualistic liberalism to eschew education for social purposes by the State. The result was that

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force was left as the sole means of maintaining order in society. If individual reason and individual conscience are the sole sources of social morality and the antagonism of interests is recognized as natural and legitimate, penal, repressive legislation can be the only arbiter. Violence remains the sole teacher of moral and social sentiments, and the hangman the representative of moral authority. There society is subject to real and abject despotism. There is little need to resort to penal measures where education for social morality never ceases and is maintained and manifested by a community of spiritual values, and where the doctrine "s' empare de l'homme tout entier", conditioning his ideas and sentiments in their totality. It shall be education marked by maximum publicity, it will endeavour to give suggestive effective­ ness to acts of leadership, public praise and public opprobrium by the authorities, and will keep man under permanent scrutiny through­ out his life. In the past the liberals rightly fought for publicity as means of control and guarantee against arbitrary despotism. In the future system, where "the interest of the greatest number is the basis of all social actions", publicity will have an educational significance : "the love of the leaders will ceaselessly solicit the affection and zeal of their subordinates, by presenting to them the picture of the blessings of the past and the needs of the future". Verdicts pronounced by organs of social justice will carry real joy or sorrow into the hearts of all. They will recover the qualities of canonization and excommunication by ecclesiastical authority. "Un jour viendra enfin ou le repentir pourra connaitre I' esperance." Where the individual is left to his own resources, selfishness must be the result. This is also one of the reasons why Enfantin insists on the importance of confession, especially public confession, to the leader-priest. It is also essential for the priest to feel hearts opening themselves unto him. It enhances his power and sense of authority, and thus heightens his life-giving faculties. Is this a heavy yoke, a new despotism ? "Blessed be the yoke imposed by conviction which satisfies all sentiments; blessed be the power which drives men on to progress . . . fructifies all the sources of public prosperity." There is no middle between central­ ization and anarchy-is the Saint-Simonist claim. "All are free, because they are advancing with love towards the same destiny . . . for the people is in him (the Saint-Simonist pope), loving, wise and powerful, marching like one man towards the future which God

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has destined for it." The Sairit-Simonists repudiate vehemently any suggestion of having renounced spontaneity, abdicated their personality and chained their intelligence. Their personality and spontaneity has been only enhanced and developed in the Saint­ Simonist family. They reassure all those who dream of happiness for the people and are jealous of liberty, "the sacred object of their own first affections": "Que chacun de nous se sente plus que jamais le droit de s'eerier ici, non pas comme expression d'une sauvage independance, mais comme un eclatant hommage a I'existence d'une hierarchie pure de toute contrainte et de tout privilege : je marche dans ma force et dans ma liberte". There being no sense of oppression, there could not be any corresponding yearning for deliverance. Love redeems and liberates.

(e)

A S OCIALIST DOCTRINE

To a still higher degree than to Saint-Simon was the existence of the poor a standing reproach to his followers. In the face of the poor the postulate of the oneness of being sounded hollow, the oneness of goal a mockery. The loving elan of those, touched by the experience of oneness, encountered as its first object the misery of the most numerous and the most unfortunate class. It could not take flight, without first lifting those who dwell in darkness into brotherly communion. This self-dedication to the task of healing the social malady was by no means fed on a striving for economic equality. In the sharpest contrast to Babeu£'s crude mechanical egalitarianism of rewards as well as contributions, the Saint-Simonists, like their master, insist that the Jacobin-Babouvist type of equality was an attack on liberty and an impediment to progress. Abilities and talents are indubitably unequal. The imposition of a dead level would stultify and frustrate self-expression of the more gifted, in other words-violate their freedom. Frustrated contribution of the able connotes loss to society. Division of labour, which is the great instrument of progress, is based precisely on the classifica­ tion of men in accordance with their varying abilities. Merit being the sole consideration in the division of tasks for the great collective effort, all privileges of birth or inherited wealth are not only irrelevant; when awarded special treatment they con­ stitute a denial of the sacred principle that everyone is placed

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according t o his ability and compensated according t o his works. Differences of reward in proportion to contribution are designed to obtain maximum effectiveness by acting as incentives and tokens of recognition. The problem of private property is viewed by the Saint-Simon­ ists from the same angle as that of the Master: as an instrument of production, the distribution of which should be determined by the evolution of the modes of production and the needs of the overall social plan. Saint-Simon was trying to prove the evolutionary character of the institution of property by pointing out the different and changing conceptions underlying it, such as slavery, the Roman concept of property, medieval serfdom, primogeniture, progressive taxation, forced expropriation for public purposes. But, as said earlier, he did not question the principle of private property as such. He only insisted that it should be modified all the time so as to ensure that ownership is placed in the hands of the best able to use it as instruments to the advantage of the general productive effort. For practical purposes and as an immediate measure Saint-Simon proposed to make a clear distinction between agricultural and industrial property. The position of the farmer was to be strengthened and the rights of the landowner curbed. The farmer for instance was to have the right to deduct from rent all the sums spent by him on improving the land, and moreover, to mortgage the land, without the landlord's consent. The reason is clear: to Saint-Simon the landlord who did not cultivate his land himself was an idler, while the farmer was a producer. No similar devices to protect the industrial producer at the expense of the capitalist were envisaged. A farmer taking land on lease has his possibilities of gain strictly limited, whereas the industrialist borrowing money or hiring instruments has unpredictable opportunities of gain and expansion before him. The landlord imposing conditions on the farmer is the waster placing a dead hand on the producer's enterprise. The Saint-Simonists followed up the philosopher's trend of thought and delivered a frontal attack on the very principle of private property and inheritance. Their acute sense for historic evolu­ tion and dialectical change-, sharpened by the truly historic insights of Saint-Simon caused them to rejoice in the fact themselves that the institution of private property had been salvaged from the wreckage of all the destroyed privileges of birth. That "in-

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consequence des hommes" preserved an "ancre de salut", an "arche sainte" ; that "truly religious superstition (respect for property) . . . in the enemies of superstition and fanaticism . . . is a miracle. As the only institution which remained erect in the midst of the "intellectual and moral anarchy" of the Revolution, private property emerged as the sole remaining suggestion of order and stability, and the vehicle of reconstruction. Whatever temporary service the institution may have rendered at a certain historical juncture, it has now outlived its usefulness and justification, and become an unmitigated evil. In the vast collective effort, which is to become now the pivot of society, the privilege of inherited wealth runs counter to the principle of placing everyone in accordance with his ability and rewarding him according to his output. It confers unmerited advantage. Further­ more, the sanctity of inherited property results in placing instruments of production in the hands of persons incompetent to handle them and in consequence depriving the talented of means of self-expres­ sion. The idle capitalist whom chance of birth leaves in possession of those means, leases them out to the propertyless producers, levies taxes on the industrious, and prescribes absurd and injurious conditions, which hamper the productive effort of the nation. It is necessary to organize the distribution of property in a manner that will ensure that the instruments of production are in the right, competent hands, and more still, that overall social-economic planning is made possible. This means in the first place the abolition of private property, and in the second-social ownership and collec­ tive control: "L'etat devenu Association des Travailleurs". Not only for the sake of planning higher production, but also in order to do away with the "heredity of misery", which is the accompani­ ment of the "monopoly of wealth" based on the right of conquest. The Saint-Simonist school was highly optimistic, where Marx was most pessimistic. Not only did they not believe in the pro­ gressive pauperization of the masses as a result of the monopolization of the means of production in the hands of the few, they maintained that history has been witnessing a process of progressive transfer of the means of production from the hands of the minority of idlers into the hands of the majority of producers, in other words­ society. The rise of the middle classes-the communes, the growth of money economy, of credit and banking appear to them as a sustained effort, almost a conspiracy on the part of the producers

S OCIAL I S T MES SIANI S M

t o deprive the feudal lords of their power, to mobilize their re­ sources for the industrial effort, and finally to subject them to the ultimate control of the industrial and commercial interest. The Jews and the Lombards played an important part: by lending money to the feudal lords on interest, they gradually squeezed out all the utilizable resources from the nobility and placed them at the dis­ posal of industry. The idlers were thus deprived of means of pro­ duction and the producers were enabled to gain possession of them. A similar development may be observed in the relations between capitalists, that is to say owners of capital goods, not themselves engaged in the productive effort, and the real producers, e.g. workers. The rate of interest has been steadily declining, while wages have been rising. In disputes between employers and workers the employees have been steadily gaining ground. Their advance seems irresistible. The expansion of the credit system, the growth of joint stock companies, the rise of co-operative undertakings, rising taxation and death duties-all these developments are calcu­ lated to spread ownership rather than to cause its concentration in few hands. As a result more and more people come to participate in the industrial effort. Numerous interlocking interests are created. Association is promoted. There arises the inescapable necessity of surveying, planning and controlling the national economy as a whole. In this respect, the bankers are destined to become the architects of the future economy based on social owner­ ship and centralized planning. Having in their hands the disposal of finance, the bankers have in fact the means of production under their control. In granting credit they determine the course of production. Before according a loan, bankers carefully investigate the possibilities of the given undertaking. This is bound to lead to systematic economic research, periodic stock-taking of the economic situation as a whole, and inevitably to planning. Whether they are conscious of it or not, bankers act thus on behalf of society. The dispossession of all private owners is the distant goal, so that property should become an "institution sociale, depositaire de tous les instruments de production". The dispossession need not be sudden. It may be accomplished gradually and with minimum injury to the actual property owners. Compensation may even be offered to the immediate heirs for the first transitional period, in order to spare them-a thing about which Bentham was so anxious -the pain of being disappointed in their high expectations of the

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delights of inheriting a forturre. Michel Chevalier, who with Enfantin and Olinde Rodrigues formed the economic brains trust of the school envisaged the turning of all property-with the agree­ ment of the proprietors-into State leases. For one or two genera­ tions the former proprietors would enjoy the rights of lease holders and pay rent to the State. The leases would expire in the third generation. That would hurt no one : "for who, in this selfish world, gives now a thought to the third generation ?" Social ownership is an end in itself not because it ensures a com­ munity of goods and enjoyments, but in that it makes a planned economy possible: "en un mot, l'industrie est organisee, tout s'enchame, tout est prevue; la division du travail est proportionee . . . la combinaison des efforts devient chaque jour plus puissante". The potentialities of the poor are activized. They become full participants in the organized struggle against nature. They receive their share of the fruits of civilization. Social criticism by the Saint-Simonist school is characterized by much stronger socialist accents than the analysis offered by the Founder. In the early days, Saint-Simon's distinction between idlers and producers put into the latter category property owners, capitalists, scientists, artists, workers-all who had anything to do with the productive effort. Idlers were: nobles, soldiers, priests, lawyers, renders, in short all those who had no share in the metabolistic process of changing matter into something usable. The division into bourgeoisie and proletariat was from this point of view irrelevant. Some bourgeois were of course idlers, but as a whole they belonged to the industrial class. They hardly con­ stituted an entity for Saint-Simon's purposes. As time went on, he began more and more to juxtapose the two classes, and to refuse to identify the bourgeoisie with the industrial class. He rather accused the bourgeoisie, especially its spokesmen in the Revolution, the lawyers, metaphysicians and ideologues of spreading deliber­ ately a philosophical cloud over the social problem, and then joy­ fully accepting aristocratic titles from Napoleon. "It was not the industrialists, but the bourgeoisie that made the Revolution." At a later date "it chose from its ranks a bourgeois whom they made King ; it gave to those of its members who played a principal role in the Revolution titles of princes, dukes, counts, barons, knights, etc. ; it created entails in favour of those newly baked nobles ; in one word, it reconstituted feudalism to its own P.M.-D

S OCIAL I S T MES S IANI S M

profit". And so the bourgeoisie, Saint-Simon goes on to say, has no more real social justification than the nobility. "The indus­ trialists are interested in getting rid ·of them." It would hardly be correct to call the Saint-Simonists a "parti des travailleurs", what the Master wanted them to be. They cer­ tainly however carry the distinction of bourgeoisie and proletariat far. The reality of class war is sharply underlined by them. Characteristically, liberals and bourgeois are to them synonymous. Liberalism appears as a rationalization of class interest or as its fig lea£ The bourgeoisie has arrived and has constituted a new feudal system-the theme adumbrated by Saint-Simon is greatly elaborated by the disciples. "The bourgeois guard has arrived. It would be an error to believe that the capital fact of the Restoration was the reappearance of the Jesuits and of the old nobility; its fundamental character is the triumph of the bourgeoisie. We have now the proof (after r 8 3 o) : for in the days of July the bourgeoisie alone remained erect; it has invaded everything, the legislature, the judiciary and the military power, the elections, the jury and the National Guard. Elle est la tout entiere; the bourgeois is on the forum, on the pretoire, in the corps-de-garde; he legislates, he sits in judgment, and above all, he grows moustaches . . . Now the bourgeois as such produces nothing, teaches nothing and has no other care but himsel£ It is not he who moves and animates the peoples, he does not enlighten them nor enrich them; it is not he who directs them in their labours, of which he is ignorant . . . An idle class in the midst of a working society. And if the existence of such a phen­ omenon is hard to comprehend, its survival is still less conceivable." Having arrived and replaced feudal nobility, and like the feudal lords living on the toil of others by collecting tithes and rent from the toilers, the bourgeoisie has adopted a suitable ideology. They are against any violent change. Why should they want change ? They are satisfied. "Il est naturellement pacifique et peu processif; ce qu'il aime avant tout c'est sa chere tranquillite." The rumblings from below are described by them as a symptom of social malady to be fought with electoral chicanery, ruse, or bayonets and violence. Of course, they oppose any collective action by the state in the direction of social reform. They wish to be left to do what they like. They decry any social action by the state as act of tyranny

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leading to despotism. Their lib;rty is "libcrtc sans but social", only concerned with negative and preventive checks and guarantees. Similarly, the liberal-bourgeois economics theory on the automatic mechanism of demand and supply and harmony of interests as a result of perfect competition, is an expression of class interest, where it is not an obsolete doctrine inspired by realities which no longer hold good. The early liberal obsession with competition and the vision of buyers enabled to buy best products at the lowest prices, was a natural response of its early theoreticians to the spectacle of disintegrating feudalism and the background of a critical age. Having landlords at the back of their minds, those economists �re anxious to defend the consumer from monopolistic exploitation. They could not see that the unproducing idle con­ sumer, who is at the same time property owner, may impose a tithe on the producers in the form of rent, interest and profits of all kinds. The capitalist-liberal theory of wages is equally fallacious. It is not true that the employer and worker are equal partners in a freely concluded contract, and that, in the right circumstances, the wage of the labourer would be equal to the effort put into the product. The capitalist offering employment and the worker seek­ ing labour are in different situations. They do not offer each other comparable quantities. The capitalist offers the finished product of labour, while the worker has only a promise of future labour to give. And the bargain is far from including the surplus value, the increment, which labour, especially when skilfully harnessed, brings with it. This is the tithe the worker pays to the idler. It is also untrue that the mechanism of competition secures the best commodity at the lowest price, for in the main prices are lowered at the expense of the workers' wages. The net result is not the natural identity of the interests of all, on the debris of monopolistic feudalism, but a new version of feudalism. The vast majority, the poor, are condemned by the accident of birth to live in poverty and ignorance, and to be ex­ ploited by those whom the accident of birth enables to inherit fortunes and to live, without toiling or spinning, a parasitic life. "It is enough to cast a glance on what is going on around us to realize that the worker, but for intensity, is exploited materially, intellectually and morally, as was in the past the slave."

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(j)

THE CHALLENGE TO ACTION-1 8 3 0

The Saint-Simonist school regarded as its mission the conversion of all mankind and the bringing about of its regeneration in all spheres of life, in obedience to a single inspiration. What were they to do, apart from teaching, preaching, converting and waiting till the pear was ripe ? What attitude should they take up to immediate issues in the life of the country and to the contending forces on the political arena ? The Saint-Simonists considered themselves above the melee of parties and factions. It was their aspiration to do away with all political parties. They would not abdicate their salvationist mission by becoming one of them. They would not take the obvious step to contest parliamentary elections. They considered the repre­ sentative system a sterile sham and fraud. The road of secret conspiracy and violent coup was condemned by them. Theirs was a religion of love. The aim was reconstruction and reorganiza­ tion of the totality of human existence. Coups were futile demon­ strations in this respect. There was little point in such practical measures as organizing co-operatives or espousing a particular proletarian grievance. All issues were interdependent and none could really be solved in isolation. There was only an all-embracing salvation. It could come solely from a complete spiritual rebirth and a clear resolve to reshape all. Once this had happened, all would follow suit. Without it, no palliative would be of any use. Furthermore, Saint-Simonism was a religion, the heir and synthesis of all religions of the past. It could avoid the erosion of the ancient religions only by refusing to .become contaminated by the trickery and squalor inseparable from compromise and mixing with the worldly forces. Unexpectedly to the school, as to everybody else, the July Revolution broke out. The very first impulse of the upper leader­ ship was to stay aloo£ They were taken by surprise. The Revolu­ tion was not initiated by them. It was not at all envisaged in their scheme of things. It belonged to the unregenerated world. There was the example of Saint-Simon's aloofness vis-a-vis the great Revolution. He looked on and meditated and drew a lesson. The young, generous idealists, who till yesterday were mixed up in every secret society and underground conspiracy, brought up in earlier days on the Revolutionary legend and taught to hate the

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miserable attempt of a Charles at a clerical-feudal restoration, could not remain unmoved by the sight of the tricolor floating over Government buildings and indifferent to the sound of firing from the barricades. "The firing of rifle and gun can be heard from all sides"-writes Enfantin on July 29th to d'Eichthal-"and there is something to make the hearts boil over, those hearts which have till a little while ago been beating for liberalism, and which beat stronger than ever in the face of human suffering." When behold­ ing the Tricolor waving over the Tuileries-writes Bazard-"the flag for which they had been gambling their heads in their first youth, they could not defend themselves against a lively sentiment of joy and hope". A number of the younger polytechniciens put on their uniforms, grabbed pistols and swords and ran into the streets. The elder members, with political experience and connec­ tions, went to interview leading personalities, attend revolutionary conclaves and participate in consultations. Carnot and Laurent participated in the meeting at the Restaurant Lointier at rue Riche­ lieu, called by Joubert, the brother-in-law of Bazard, in order to strengthen the hands of Lafayette in his struggle against the re­ actionary tendencies of the 221. They gave their vote for the Republic. While Transon and Jules Lechevalier went to the Hotel de Ville, Bazard went with Michel Chevalier to see Lafayette. It seems that Enfantin advised Bazard to approach the glorious veteran, with whom the Saint-Simonist leader had been in close touch and to whom he had rendered important and dangerous services in the early eighteen twenties. The interview took place in the early morning hours. Bazard urged the old hero to proclaim a dictatorship as "the only means, at least for the moment, of putting some order into this mess". Lafayette turned a deaf ear to these entreaties. On Bazard's return home after dawn, he was greeted by Enfantin with the question-"well, has the time come to go to the Tuileries ?" To which Bazard answered "not yet". In later days the Saint-Si.monists were at pains to depict this exchange between the two leaders as a joke. The attitude of Enfantin was on the whole an attitude of indulgent, half-amused, half-ironical superiority, which agrees equally with nonchalant inactivity reduced to writing observa­ tions on the events as well as with sudden jerks of megalomaniac endeavour, such as the sending of Bazard to Lafayette and the calling upon Louis Philippe to abdicate in favour of the Saint-Si.monist leaders. Both were well in keeping with the man's romantic temper.

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On August 4th the Left wing followers of Lafayette met at the Hotel de Ville, the symbol of direct, popular democracy. Saint­ Simonists such as Carnot, Laurent, Michel Chevalier and others sat beside Republican leaders, Godefroy Cavaignac, Arman Marrast, Charles Teste, Jules Bastide. Carnot was a member of the delega­ tion which went to see the Duke of Orleans. The Saint-Simonist reconstruction and interpretation of the Revolutionary events of 1830 are highly important and revealing from the doctrinal point of view as well as for the light they shed on the inner strains and stresses of the movement in the face of the challenge to action. At the outbreak of the Revolution the leaders felt that they should keep clear of the turmoil, otherwise the School would make itself "purement et simplement, je dirais meme naisement liberale". Mere rioting and destruction was an impious act from the Saint­ Simonist point of view. And the "soil . . . was not yet fructified by the word of love" sufficiently to expect the rise of a new world out of the ashes of destruction. All the same, there was the intense urge to go out and to mix with the crowds, the troops, the leaders­ old comrades in the work for liberal ideas. There was a hope that in the incipient struggle between a new Gironde, which took fright at the populace that incited by it had brought it the power, and the only vaguely outlined Montagne, there could be found leaders who, animated by some premonition of aims and rights beyond the liberal cliches and the "old Revolutionary ferment", would resolutely prevent the return of the old order in any shape or form. The Saint-Simonists would then have tried to calm, guide, "maitriser meme'' those leaders and aspirations, hoped for vaguely by some, dreaded by others, and furthermore to offer a "mot de ralliement" to the people bewildered by the shrill chorus of contradictory voices. This was the background of the approach to Lafayette. The Saint-Simonists were soon undeceived. In the general's entourage they found no one capable of under­ standing and leading the masses. Elsewhere they found men per­ haps admirably fit to carry out a coup, but incapable of realising an "acte social" . In view of the fact that the new message was still little known to the masses, there was for the time being no choice but to ride with the tide. The plan of dictatorship, submitted to Lafayette, was intended to do away with the Chamber elected under the old dispens 1tion, and to make the existing parties ineffective.

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The Dictator would have called together after a fair interval the Primary Assemblies. During that interval the Saint-Simonist school would have done everything possible to saturate the masses with their Doctrine. "But"-exclaims Bazard-"the immovable American was totally deaf in that ear.'' And so the conclusion was that the people had no chiefs. No heads "ambitious for the people" could be seen above the dead "level of equality". "The bour­ geois could still sleep in peace . . . The representative machine was going to resume its grinding for some time still." The hour had not yet struck for the disciples of Saint-Simon. They beat a retreat. However, they felt far from having been defeated. What was the lesson of the July events ? A possession which had till now been precarious, has become safe : "the French Revolu­ tion has at last received its definitive sanction"-the bourgeoisie has asserted its unrivalled sway thanks to the sacrifices of the dis­ inherited and the proletarians, those whom a liberal Constitution thinks unworthy of attention, and those whom the penal code remembers only as would-be rioters to be squashed. The masses fought with courage and generosity and defeated "Cesar et ses soldats pour ses eligibles et ses electeurs, pour ses joumalistes et ses deputes, pour ses bourgeois et contribuables, pour ses chefs d' ateliers et proprietaires". The July events were a revolt, but they do not deserve the sacred title of Revolution, because nothing has changed in the social system. Yet, the 1830 Revolution had some positive significance. It settled beyond all possibility of doubt the fact that any attempts by · the clerical and feudal forces to stage a come-back were doomed for ever. Thus far it was "derniere consequence de la Revolution franc;aise". The events have at the same time revealed to all generous lovers of the people the inadequacy of a purely political Revolution, the futility of Constitution making, and evoked a longing anticipation of a truly new order through a social revolution. "All the Constitutions have till now been transactions between the classes which have never admitted the people to discuss (the laws) with them, to sign them. Their evil is not in that, because the people never makes its laws. None of these constitutions had as its object the amelioration of the moral, physical and intellectual lot of the most numerous and poorest class ; and all have been over­ thrown after a short while. All those Charters, constantly torn

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up and reprinted with corrections and additions, are powerless to give us order and liberty." Liberalism has revealed its utter sterility after its easy victory. Its "imbecile attempts at retrogression" showed a faltering grip, languor and uncertainty. Every progressive doctrine is evidenced at its rise and at every stage of its development by the emergence of some men who enjoy "a total ascendancy over their fellow men whom they carry with them irresistibly": Jesus and the Apostles, St. Athanasius and St. Augustine, Gregory VII, Innocent III, Luther, Calvin, Voltaire and Rousseau, Mirabeau and Robespierre. Where are the leaders of liberalism ? The vital and only real issue of the time was the social problem. Now the problem of improving the lot of the most numerous and poorest class was beyond the scope of liberal theories and sympathies. Notwithstanding all the cliches on popular sovereignty, natural and inalienable rights of man, equality, not a single liberal voice was raised after the 18 3 0 victory in favour of the class which won their victory for the liberals ; not a word was said about ending "cette iniquite et avec elle la fatalite" which has made weigh on the labouring classes for so many generations the burden of physical, intellectual and moral degradation. See the signs of time. They break over your heads. "On all sides, the labouring classes, which have been thought for nothing till now, agitate and are on the move. Every day brings news of rallies, of workers associations and unions" . . . in Paris, in "the whole of France, in Belgium, Germany, indeed in the whole of Europe from the south to the north". The excesses and disorders accompanying the working class agitation are an elemental, blind reflex of a class demoralized by servitude. "Repress, repress these disorders and excesses; oppose every­ where your bourgeois guards to the crazed multitude, to that proletarian mass, which, dissatisfied with its lot, worn out by poverty, knows not where to find a remedy to its miseries, but in violence, and how to march towards the better but through pillage and devastation. But, in God's name, see in these calamitous events something other than an occasion to exercise the valour of your urban cohorts, as is said by many a sheet which every morning displays its barbarism with revolting lightheartedness. See in them the revelation of the sufferings which become more and more insuffer­ able every day, and a symptom of a new era of liberation for the

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innumerable unfortunates who a1.'e still subjected to the exploitation of man by man." You will not be able to conjure away the spectre of misery in revolt by employing the formidable machine of draconian laws and bloody suppression, "que la bourgeoisie a faite, que la bourgeoisie applique, que la bourgeoisie execute". In the midst of this confusion and anxious questioning, the Saint-Simonists saw themselves to be the only force, which did not feel the soil tremble under its feet; marching with a firm step to a determined goal, sure of the future, a future which links them by an uninterrupted chain to the most distant generations. "Nous sommes les hommes de l'avenir." They had studied the past, not in order to offer pale, servile and impotent imitation, but in order to derive a "rational justification of the new order, the entirely new order, which their philanthropic inspiration and religious sympathies revealed to them". The Saint-Simonist inaction vis-a-vis the 1830 events should not-insists the School-be interpreted as timid keeping out of trouble. They would not take up a position amidst the parties. Their place was above the parties, and their mission to enlighten victor and vanquished about what was missing to make the "victory (or defeat) definitive". The parties could not know what the Saint-Simonists were. They knew however that they were differ­ ent from them all, and that they had made "a more complete break with the past than any of them ; and that thus placed in advance of them all", the Saint-Simonists were working for a future, which people may find difficult to understand or even think impossible to achieve, but which must meet with sympathetic approval from every generous soul. The Saint-Simonists may appear as dreamers, as "generous and audacious dreamers (voila ce que nous voulions)", but soon even those who had previously failed to comprehend, will exclaim : "The Saint-Simonists have told us so" ("nous I'avaient bien dit"). They were the realists, while prophesying, whereas the realists were groping in the dark. The liberal game in constitution­ making will soon collapse. The liberal leaders will quit in despair, frightened by a new upsurge of the masses threatening pillage and murder. Then will come the hour of the Saint-Simonists. "Car nous seuls pourrons, lorsque le peuple cherchera vraiment des chefs, et lorsque ses deputes, electeurs, bourgeois, journalistes, philosophes, proprietaires se tiendront tremblants a I'ecart, nous seuls pourrons avoir la foi de I'autorite et commander I'obeissance; nous seuls

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pourrons decouvrir les elements d 'ordre alors existants, les reunir, les feconder, appeler a nous ce qui sera vraiment en progres ; parce que l'avenir est a nous." The Saint-Simonists are the heirs of all parties. Their pro­ gramme offers a synthesized totality of what is best in all political and religious traditions. After all, it is the historical culmination of all past thinking and the point where all strands converge : "Come to us, all of you, old Royalists and new Royalists, democrats of all shades ! For we justify all that is justifiable in you ; for it is in us alone that that fusion can be effected, that reconciliation of parties . . . we are able to make the friends of liberty cherish power, and the friends of power love liberty." No class should be frightened by Saint-Simonism. The more the possessing classes fear disorder and anarchy, and fear to be robbed of their possessions, the more reason they have to join a creed which strives to do for them what the Gospel did for the slave owners, and what kings did for lords of serfs, "peut seule desarmer la colere des masses". Not by resort to iron and fire and armed force, but through a religion of universal association "que l' elan des coeurs doit rendre irresistible", and which by offering means of dignified existence to the poor will put an end to all the antagonisms between rich and poor, learned and ignorant, egoist and philanthropist. Saint-Simonism aspires to supersede all regimes and all parties by a new, we may say totalitarian dispensation, which makes the old powers look empty and purposeless. "The chiefs of society-in the Saint-Simonist regime to come­ will be those who will love society most . . . les privilegies de l' amour, de la science, de la richesse . . . who will reveal to it its destinies and who will be capable of guiding towards it. The peoples will surrender themselves with love to their direction ; and will rejoice at their power, and their sole desire will be to see that power grow. For every growth of that power of their leaders will be a sign of progress achieved for themselves, and the warrant of new advances to be made. "Alors il y aura une religion, et cette religion, qui sera, non plus dominante, mais seule, sera la foi politique." As the depositaries of that faith, and trustees of posterity, destined to regenerate man­ kind, the children of Saint-Simon cannot of course regard the ideas, creeds, movements and parties that be as legitimate, and the con-

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tinuation of the struggle and ri;alry between them on the basis of freedom of opinion as natural and desirable. That is anarchy and social malady, much as sick society may be unaware as yet of the disease. The essence of the Saint-Simonist mission is to put an end to social anarchy by enthroning unity of effort and communion of spirit. What should therefore be their attitude to the liberal values, hailed by many as an end in themselves and guarantee of liberty ? Without believing in liberal liberty as a value and goal in itself, the Saint-Simonist school is called upon to demand it and for the time being work for it, as a safety measure and tactical device. Europe is moving towards a preordained and inevitable dis­ solution, which is a necessary prelude to and condition of the new social order. The free clash of opinions may bring the crisis closer and make it eventually less painful and less dangerous. Free discussion and government through discussion will reveal the futility of the system based on it more clearly. Revolutionary violence may be conjured away by talk, while many young idealists, fatigued by incessant political discussion and warfare with no end in sight, may be brought to experience a longing for "un pouvoir aimant, intelligent et fort", towards which obedience and not in­ surrection is the most sacred duty. The Saint-Simonists will demand freedom in order to liquidate freedom : "If we demand at the moment freedom of worship, it is in order that one single cult may more easily rise above the ruins of all the old religions of mankind. We want liberty of the press, because it is the indispensable condition for the early creation of a truly legitimate direction of thought, of morality and science. We demand liberty of teaching, so that our doctrine may be propagated more easily, without obstacle, and so that it may one day alone be loved, known and practised by all. We agitate for the destruction of all commercial monopolies and all privileged corporations which still exist, but only as a means of arriving at a definitive organisation of the corps industriel." The Saint-Simonists should not fear to bewilder the public, if having appeared before 1 8 3 0 as ultramontanes, Jesuits, priests of Thebes and Memphis, they suddenly emerge as Montagnard dema­ gogues. "Nous sommes restes les memes." The liberals were

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formerly obsessed with the fear of theocratic feudal despotism, now they are frightened out of their wits by the spectre of social revolution. "Glory to him who proclaimed the exclusive reign of God, and the ever-growing happiness of the people ! He was the most humane of the theocrats, and the most divine of democrats ! . . . The Man of God of the Christians has come in the person of Saint­ Simon, !'Homme Peuple ! Under that divine name, one and multi­ plied at the same time, the sovereigns of the future, the popes of the new Church will at last realize that sovereignty of the people, which is an impracticable dream to those who see in the people nothing but a multitude without leaders ; a truth to the Saint­ Simonist pope, because the people is in him, loving, wise and power­ ful, marching like one man towards the future which God has marked out to him."

(g)

MATER DOLOROSA

The failure to act in face of the I 8 3 o challenge engendered a deep malaise in the Saint-Simonist ranks. While it revealed the paralysing effect of the elan towards totality on the capacity to act in a concrete situation and by limited action, it also strengthened the tendency towards pantheism and chiliasm, m1til the individual, with his free will and concrete responsibility was sucked up com­ pletely by superior forces. Owing to the Romantic predispositions and the fact that the whole development of Saint-Simonism took place solely within the sphere of an intellectual and emotional dialectic gone wild-without any contact with real situations and definite tasks-a School which originally started as a defiantly positivist message succumbed completely to a most extravagant irrationalism, albeit buttressed by a vigorously consistent logic of a kind. We are faced here with what one may call the Romantic version of totalitarianism. In disavowing any claims to leadership, in spite of his being the only direct disciple of the master, and in laying his hands on Bazard and Enfantin as the more deserving to lead, Olinde Rodrigues wished to demonstrate the living truth of Saint-Simon philosophy: everyone takes his place assigned to him by his abilities and the requirements of the collective endeavour. Mutual love and a priori trust bind all into one family. Rodrigues claimed that he had

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"never felt greater in Saint-S1mon than that day, when he suc­ ceeded in raising greater men above himself ". A condominium of two was hardly a way of ensuring mono­ lithic thinking and action, on the basis of a sole and exclusive dogma. There were fundamental differences in temperament and approach between the two Peres. Bazard had a crisp . and clear mind, and was a man of great integrity, who would not be carried away by or succumb to emotional self-deception. His imagination was not perhaps great enough and his emotional response was too much kept in check for those flights of mystical self-identification with the God appointed genii of the past and for direct communion with God. If Bazard was the rationalist and logician, Enfantin, though a highly trained polytechnician and economist, represented a unique mixture of natural gaiety, exceptional physical beauty, caressing, sweet magnetism which irresistibly attracted weaker natures in need of affection, and an almost paranoiac belief in himself and his mission, which no humiliation or failure could destroy or shake, and which made him obtuse and even indulgent towards enmity and insults. He had no malice and was free of pettiness and low cunning. He seems to have had a quite exceptional capacity for being as it were propelled by any, and even most trivial occurrences and experiences, into flights into upper regions of solemn and mean­ ingful drama. Any point of experience, even a painful and ugly one, would become charged with symbolism and mystical import, as a wondrous intimation. Not surprisingly there went with all this a marked sense for pageantry, pomp and circumstance, and theatrical pose. In the emotionally charged climate of the apostolic community, where men's nerves were subject to constant tensions and ecstasies, Enfantin easily won complete ascendency. "L'Ecole est comme dissoute depuis votre depart, vous etiez le lien qui unissait les parties"-wrote to him Buchez, who had little taste for leader worship, and who left the School very soon on that account. In spite ofhis acceptance of dictatorial leadership as a guarantee of monolithic structure and symbol of harmony, Bazard was not free of qualms. At times he was inclined to regard dictatorial leadership as only a provisional phase dictated by conditions of apostolate and the requirements of a Church militant. " . . . nous ne sommes ni des superieurs de capucins, ni des colonels prussiens, et si nous n'avons pas, dans le sens democratique

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du mot, a vous rendre compte de nos actes, nous avons pourtant l' obligation tres reelle, et cela meme sous peine de decheance, de vous les faire aimer et comprendre . . . " In the same letter to Resseguier, who had criticized the Paris centre for its conduct during the 1 8 3 0 Revolution, Bazard speaks scathingly of the correspon­ dent's display of the "sovereignty" of his reason, and "protestant and republican" attitudes towards Saint-Simonist leadership. Enfantin spoke quite differently. He believed in leaders who bear the sign imprinted by God on their foreheads, "teachers of man, true priests". "Ouvre les yeux-he wrote to a cousin­ regarde celui que Dieu aima par-dessus tous les hommes, parce que c' est le plus aimant de tous ; voici le chef, le roi, le pontife de la Jerusalem nouvelle, ecoute-le sans crainte, suis-le avec amour. C'est par lui que Dieu donne la vie au monde." Charlety quotes the answer given by Enfantin to Duveyrier for having sent him a "simple letter" : would he also have addressed a simple letter to Moses, Jesus or Saint-Simon? The Saint-Simonist popes have no one above them but God, who is eternally calm and loving. "A smile of your Father . . . shall exercise on you the same power that there is in all the joys of humanity taken together . . . the word of God in our mouth shall be as miraculous, nay thousand times more miraculous than were ever His words revealed in the past through the mouth of prophets and apostles." The accent was strongly on community. Solitude, the refrain of critical poets and groaning Christians, is the devil's opportunity. Joyous communion is bliss. There is life only in the community ; in isolation there is only death and misery. He who cuts himself off from the community, renounces life. With what pity the Saint-Simonists speak of the schismatics who quitted the fold! The community is right by definition, and the individual's "sover­ eign reason" wrong by definition. Where is the community's voice ? Of course, in the leader. Where would it be in the case of a split between the two leaders ? The majority principle is no criterion in such a contingency. The issue would have to be decided by the greater magnetism of one of the leaders and his power to keep others with him. Those who are capable of resisting his divine love, become as a result and by definition dry, dead branches. Others who may be able to resist the magnetism, but to whom the integrity and unity of the Church are dear above anything else as the witness to the truth of their creed and to man-

FRO M TECHNOCRACY T O T HEOCRACY

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kind's salvation, must accept · fhe a priori truth of the Church speaking through the most loving leader. The issue came to a head in a striking and tragic form in the controversy between Enfantin and Bazard on the role of women. The Saint-Simonist school preached from the start the liberation of women alongside the liberation of the proletariat. Simultaneously the Saint-Simonists, like Fourier, taught that the social individual is really the couple, man and woman. This was of course calculated to lead to a strong affirmation of the indissolubility of traditional monogamic marriage, and of the equal rights of the woman in marriage and divorce. Perfect brotherhood and collectivist con­ demnation of private inheritance do not however go very well with private family, since paternal love will always militate against total self-dedication to a collective ideal. In denying the ascetic distinction between matter and spirit, the School laid also great emphasis on the rehabilitation of the flesh. The problem of love and sex became a test case par excellence. Curiously, the first solution was a Catholic distinction between the ordinary believers who were enjoined to live in marriage in a traditional way, and the priests and priestesses who were ordered to observe strict celibacy, because their spouse is the Church-the ideal of association. But the Saint-Simonist antinomy of the liberation of all natural impulses on the one hand, and total collectivism on the other, was pressing for another solution: how to release the sexual instinct-a thing that seemed called for by the basic philosophy-without creating, in the monogamic marriage, a partial bond militating against universal brotherhood, and without, on the other hand, also stifling the urge by the obligation of monogamy ? The abolition of the old type of marriage seemed the only answer. Enfantin taught that account must be taken of the existence of two types, those who are constant by nature, and those whose passions are changing and restless. Granted that the urgent passion is not evil, it must be allowed to assert itself, freed of the restraint of monogamic marriage. False pretence and hypocrisy would thus no longer need to feed prostitution and adultery. Mothers alone will know the secret of the paternity of their children. This would clinch their emancipation. In the eyes of Bazard that was calculated to lead to promiscuity, and as a consequence to a greater degradation of the woman, instead of her liberation. The conflict between the two leaders was at first kept secret

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from the general body of believers. In fact, some months before it came into the open, Bazard and Enfantin sent a joint letter to the President of the Chamber of Deputies, protesting against the accusation of maintaining "la communaute des femmes"-"ex­ pression qu' il est impossible de reproduire sans repugnance". The Saint-Simonists claim to recognize fully the sanctity of marriage as taught by Christianity, and to wish only to strengthen it by a new sanction so as to re-emphasize its inviolability. Desperate efforts were made to prevent a break and to keep the conflict from the rest of the Famille. The three Saint-Simonist women who were in the secret, and who were deeply repelled by Enfantin' s theories, were most anxious to overcome their repug­ nance. Cecile Fournel, tormented by the conflict between her ardent love for her husband (from whom she had to separate because of the provisional obligation of celibacy on the apostles), horror of Enfantin' s ideas and passionate faith in Saint-Simonism, left for a while the sect and then returned again, yielding to Enfantin. Aglae Saint-Hilaire, a severe idealist, found it extremely difficult to overcome her promptings to quit. At last the duel had to be fought out before the whole assembly. Carnot, one of the participants, compared these deliberations to the famous councils in the early Christian era. They could be com­ pared more pertinently today to those conclaves in totalitarian parties held in the deepest secrecy, the results of which are announced in the form of excommunication of leaders who till yesterday were all-powerful and beloved teachers; and demonstrated in the form of bewildering public confessions, abjurations and furious separa­ tions. "il nous semblait assister a l'un de ces fameux conciles ou se traitaient, au debut de l'Eglise chretienne, des questions destinees a remuer le monde; le terrain de la philosophie, de la religion, de la morale, etait profondement laboure devant nous par deux intelli­ gences superieures. Sans precautions oratoires, sans declamations, sans digressions, sans passion, avec une severe simplicite, Bazard faisant tourner sa tabatiere entre ses doigts, son geste habituel quand il pensait tout haut, argumentait vigoureusement et sobrement contre les pensees hardies et les sophismes subtils d'Enfantin . . . Peut-etre reconnaissait-il trop tard que l'engrenage meta physique de son collaborateur l'avait mene fort au dela des applications aux­ quelles son esprit consentait. Les preoccupations etaient si austeres, que les femmes purent tout entendre et tout dire sans hesitation,

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sans que personne n'en fut surpris, ni qu'un sourire effieurat les levres.'' In the course of the deliberations those stern logicians and relent­ less dialecticians were seized by ecstasies and shakings like the crudest revivalists. Some had fits of fainting, others fell into trance and swooning began to prophesy. When Jean Reynaud expressed his disbelief in Olinde Rodrigues' claim that the Holy Ghost dwelt in him, Olinde had an attack of apoplexy. A few days later several members addressed an imploring letter to the Peres begging them to settle their differences and not to wreck the sect. By the end of August 183 1 Bazard had a stroke (congestion cerebrale). Soon after his recovery, the crisis broke out anew. Enfantin insisted on public confession by everyone. He gave the lead. Then came the turn of Bazard. In the middle of his confession, he was inter­ rupted by a brother who shouted to the Pere: "tu as menti". The old Carbonari trained in conspiratorial secrecy omitted some detail deliberately or unwittingly. "Cette seance acheva d'accabler le malheureux apotre. A member who lived through those days of torment, the preacher Charton, thus describes the atmosphere he found on his return from a mission: "Toutes les figures portaient les traces de longues insomnies ; les yeux etaient plombes, les levres pales, les cheveux en desordre. U y avait des traits decomposes, des regards ecstatiques, des joues creuses et lugubres. Dans de certains mo­ ments, toutes les voix s'elevaient ensemble, se melaient, grandissaient confuses et aigues comme les clameurs d'une emeute ; ensuite elles s'abaissaient, s'apaisaient et tombaient comme sous un coup de vent ; ce que j'entendais me donnait le vertige ; on parlait d'un des chefs et d'un grand nombre de ceux que j'etais habitue a aimer, a con­ sulter, comme de personnes mortes." The struggle for supremacy between Bazard and Enfantin was at first patched up, but soon Enfantin emerged the winner. A decision was taken that Bazard was to be chef du dogme, Rodrigues chef du culte, and Enfantin the sole Pere suprime. Bazard could not bring himself to acquiesce, and he left the sect. A general assembly of the College was summoned. It was a moment of supreme crisis, one of those which follow an open split between leaders sharing dictatorial power. Whom will the rank and file, or rather the lower leadership strata follow ? The more politically minded veterans of secret societies, nurtured on Jacobin A

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traditions, such as Carnot and Pierre Leroux, proclaimed their exit with furious determination. Tragic was the predicament of those who had put all their ardent and tender hopes in the movement, who saw in it the meaning of their life, the comer stone of their Weltanschauung. Thus Lechevalier cried: "On the day of my conversion I said that in God's name I put my destiny into the hands of Bazard-Enfantin. They are no longer in agreement, I withdraw . . . I recognize the Saint-Simonist Family no more.' Then came the heart-rending words of disenchantment: "yes, I doubt, I doubt even Saint-Simon, I am full of doubts about his successors ; I doubt everything now ; I am again a philosophe . . • I am once more alone in the world."-"Oh, to see my beautiful future, my beautiful sky so tom and tattered"-lamented Charton. -"I am no philosophe ; I am a religious being . . . I am simply a standard bearer ; if I cannot carry your flag any more, if I do not believe in it any more, I disappear . . . I go to find a religion"-was the confession of Transon, who was incapable of living without a creed and outside a Church. Like Lechevalier, he soon joined the Fourierists. No one gave a more acute analysis of the crisis than Jean Reynaud: "The heart seems to fail at times. The idea will kill me . . . the theory which the Pere Enfantin professes about women is nothing but a detail of his general theory of humanity ; I believe that that theory abolishes all human freedom . . . it deprives man of his dignity and his conscience." But he would not quit: "we have brought men to this creed ; it is an enormous responsi­ bility". Reynaud was determined to unmask Enfantin, when the time came. Quite different was the reaction of Baud, one of those who could not resist the calm, magnetic serenity of Enfantin: "No, God would not have allowed a man to stand before fellow­ men, with that calm and serene face, with such greatness and beauty, in order to use them as tools, in order to seduce and destroy them." This evoked such a general ecstasy that Reynaud threw himself upon Enfantin's neck. Upon which the St. Paul of the Sect, Rodrigues, the last of the early apostles to remain in the fold, threw all the weight of his patriarchal authority on Enfantin' s side: "In the name of the living God, who was revealed to me by Saint-Simon, the master of all of you, and in particular mine, this shall be my first act of faith here-to proclaim you, Enfantin, the most moral man of our time, the real successor of Saint-Simon, the supreme chief of the Saint-Simonist religion." The Saint-

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Simonist journal summed up the event: "Every one of the members felt his love for Our Pere Supreme grow hundredfold- . . . for he . . . has revealed himself to all hundred times more moral, hundred times better, hundred times greater and deeper, hundred times more powerful and more beautiful, hundred times more priest . . . The Family has in one little while lived the life of the Pere Supreme . . . His smile delivers from sorrow and gives . Joy. " And what was said about the schismatics ? Not a word of abuse, no invectives, no insinuations of evil motives; no personal attacks. The declarations of the dissidents were even published in the official Saint-Simonist organ. While paying tribute to their idealism and devotion, Enfantin proclaimed them men without real religiosity ; they were too inhibited to love God incarnate in Man, in Enfantin. "The dissidents have never felt who I am; they are all susceptible of the most generous devotion to principles and ideas ; but they are ashamed to confess the same love for men, as if God had not made His word incarnate. None of them has ever been truly religious." Outside the Church they are dry branches, withered limbs, dead. Rodrigues himself soon broke with the Pere Supreme and left the Family. The last straw was Enfantin's final verdict that it was the woman's exclusive right to know the secret of the paternity of her child. It was particularly sad that the break came in the midst of the successful launching of the Saint-Simonist loan by Olinde. Although there was no suggestion of fraud or bad faith, the break led to squalid proceedings. Rodrigues then proclaimed himself head of the Church, as direct disciple of the Master. There were by now three Peres Supremes at war with each other, for Bazard too continued to claim to be the real Pere, but he died shortly as a result of the stroke which he had suffered earlier. Most of the Family remained with Enfantin. Enfantin is "Christ des nations", exclaims Duveyrier in a poem, and Michel Chevalier encourages Louis Philippe to abdicate in favour of Enfantin. If the King will be sincere and bold enough to compare his own position with the universal love which surrounds the Pere, he will no doubt realize that the throne belongs to him, who "de son doigt, comblant les vallees et abaissant les monts, tracera entre elles des voies rapides afin qu'elles soient unies et qu'il n'y ait bientot qu'une vie, qu'une foi, qu'un chef pour toute la terre".

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The Pere Supreme gathered his faithful apostles and retreated with them to live a monastic existence in Menilmontant, near Paris. The retreat to Menilmontant and the monastic experiment mark the climax of the Saint-Simonist story. It was meant to be a period of preparation, but it was also perhaps an act of despair, as Charlety suggests. The "Globe" had ceased to appear; the salle Taitbout, which witnessed so many triumphs of Saint-Simonist oratory and preaching, was closed down by the police ; a trial for illegal gather­ ings, incitement to immorality and financial fraud was impending. The resources of the School, in spite of the admirable generosity of members and sympathizers, were nearly exhausted. Finally, the sect had been shattered by a terrible schism and painful secessions. The faithful had to close their ranks to face the attacks of the world and the adversity of fortune. The theoretical elaboration of dogma through debate and dis­ cussion had been accomplished. Leadership was from now on undivided, all authority vested in Enfantin, the loi vivante, the God appointed. The separation from the world and the retreat to Menilmontant were proclaimed with an air of prophetic solemnity becoming an event of the profoundest significance and symbolism. In the last number of the "Globe", of April 20th, Enfantin issued the following proclamation: ''I, Father of the new Family . . . God has given me the mission to call the proletariat and women to a new destiny ; to make enter into the holy family of man all those who had been till now excluded, or had been treated till now as minors ; to realize the universal association which the cries of liberty intoned by all the slaves, women or proletarians, invoke since the birth of the world.'' He then announces to the world that a new epoch is starting in his life : he had spoken, the time has now come to act. But before acting he needs to be silent for a while. He is therefore retiring with forty disciples into solitude, leaving to the other sons the charge of Apostolate in the world. The aim of the monastic retreat was according to Enfantin not just to found "une fabrique OU un chemin a grandes ornieres, ni meme de fonder un phalanstere". It was to be a school of char­ acter, a noviciate, a period of strenuous concentration from which they would emerge steeled, ready for conquest. Strict celibacy was enforced in the monastery by these theore­ ticians of the rehabilitation of the flesh, and heart rending separations

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were enforced between young loving spouses. All menial work was to be done by the monks themselves in order to demonstrate with their horny hands the rehabilitation of the proletariat. The hours were strictly regulated : they rise at five in the morning, breakfast at seven, lunch at one, have dinner at seven, go to bed at ten. The monks never leave the precincts, except for those two members who were appointed to deal with the outside world. All was held in common of course, all meals were taken together, accompanied by singing. Lectures and seminars were held-which goes without saying. The Saint-Simonists were anxious to sur­ round their life with all possible solemnity and symbolic meaning. They grew beards in order to acquire a more majestic air. They resorted to all the arts, poetry, painting and music in order to lend the character of a pageant to their festivals and celebrations, and indeed to every trivial occasion. Not for nothing were some of them artists. The retreat was punctuated by solemn celebrations. The prologue as it were was the funeral of Enfantin�s mother, with all disciples present. The adoption by the sect of Enfantin's illegiti­ mate son was another solemn day. The festival of prise d'habits, after the Pere had withdrawn for three days, into total solitude and silence, was a great occasion. The robes were so made that the buttons were on the back : one needed always the help of someone else to button them up-symbol of brotherly love and aid. The ceremony of Ouverture des travaux du Temple was probably the climax of the monastic experiment, and it attracted huge crowds from Paris, who stared with open mouths at this grand review of a semi-priestly and semi-military character, accentuated by chants, well rehearsed motions and an air of unearthly solemnity on the handsome faces of those forty young men parading with working utensils on their shoulders. "A Menilmontant, writes Michel Chevalier, toutes les vies se melent les unes aux autres, les fibres se frottent a nu, les caracteres se degagent, les individualites se dessinent, les coeurs se mettent en perce et s'epanchent, le coeur est le principal agent de cette vie nouvelle ; or, cela veut dire : que la hierarchie d'amour se fonde au lieu d'une hierarchie de raison,-que la religion vient; car Dieu est la ou les hommes s' aiment pour une oeuvre eminemment catholique; rien ne dispose aux elans religieux comme les joies de la Famille. Que I'art nouveau ·se constitue; que la poesie, le costume, la musique s'implantent dans l'apostolat, l'art est le levier, avec lequel nous

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remuerons le coeur de l'humanite, c 'est-a-dire les femmes, les artistes et les proletaires." The pantheistic philosophy-or should we say poetry-was worked out at Menilmontant. All is God, and God is in all. Everything is part of the one quivering cosmic organism, in space as well as in time: the inchoate mass of matter, before our planets, land masses and oceans were shaped; formed matter, all living organisms; and especially those marginal states which betoken the passage from matter to life, affinity between the conscious and un­ conscious, the natural and the supernatural, such as magnetism, mesmerism, somnambulism, telepathy, dreams-up to the most advanced creative intellect. A living substance, la vie universelle, works through all; and the creative effort of artists, architects, poets, industrialists does not imply overcoming nature, by resisting and changing it, but the most refined activity of the divine substance in its highest sublimation. We reach thus the antithesis of the earlier philosophy of industrialism-man's conquest of nature and creative quality. This type of pantheistic affirmation of cosmic oneness was bound to lead to moral antinomism. The seeming contradictions must be made to appear unreal. The world cannot have two contra­ dictory principles, like the Manichaean distinction of original good and perennial evil. Thejuxtaposition of two contradictory pheno­ mena comes thus to be seen as the swaying and swinging of a pendulum, e.g. of one and the same substance, from one pole to another. There is only one thing with two aspects, between which there is a continuous fl.ow. The cardinal principle of the world is the law of contradiction and tension, yet they are reconciled in the solely real oneness: the Ego and the non-Ego, virtue and vice, Othello and Don Juan, the Jew and the Christian, the Orient and the Occident, thought and action, constancy and change. If this be so, can one really speak of evil at all? Ultimately, not. The distinction between matter and spirit, soul and flesh, good impulses and the evil urges cannot be maintained. Hence rehabilitation of flesh and matter. "Les jouissances materielles ne sont plus un crime ni un larcin. Les fils de Dieu verront sans peche que les filles des hommes sont belles, et la terre aussi, belle et paree, sera la couche aux mille harmonies ou se borneront les joies, les ecstases, les ravissements de l'humanite progressant dans sa chair comme dans son esprit . . . pour nous la gloire rattache au monde autant que I' abnegation. L'orgueil n' est pas plus irreligieux que l'humilite."

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In view of this interconnection of spirit and matter, one could hardly dissociate physical from spiritual aspects. External, physical beauty is held to betoken spiritual fineness, and Enfantin insists on the junction of the two elements, the sensual and the spiritual, in all stimuli and reactions. Hence his strong belief in the particular significance of his physical beauty and in the power of his "regard", and his demand that the priests or priestesses should influence, guide and comfort the believers not merely through spiritual persuasion, but with the use of sensuous means, including sexual love. Hence also the addiction to symbolism and to reading of hidden meanings and signs in fortuitous coincidences and trivial accidents. The pantheist philosophy was worked out to its last conclusion. The emphasis upon interconnection, interlocking, flow in terms of love tended to diffuse all contours of individual separateness. There is no I and thou, but a vie universelle, of which I and thou partake. In so far as we are joined in love we dwell in each other, I am an aspect of you and you are an aspect of me. This interpenetration takes place not only among contemporaries, but also between the living and the dead, and the yet unborn. It means much more than the communion of the generations, or the survival through achievements and works inherited from past ages and passed on to future generations, more than the immortality of fame. It means immortality of the souls by way of metampsychosis. Quan­ tities of souls hover in space. They contain the germs of all future possibilities, they enter souls; sometimes the same soul enters many individuals. The ordinary souls are as it were hardly differentiated, it may even be said that the individual soul is most alive when it communes with other souls, lives in other souls, gives itself to them. But there are extraordinary souls of a compact, clear cut, and iden­ tifiable personality. They pass in toto as it were from one provi­ dential man, one genius into another. And when the soul is in them, they feel a vivid sense of kinship, indeed identity with those, in whom the soul had dwelt in its earlier incarnations. ''Je suis le descendant direct de Saint-Paul-claimed Enfantin­ c' est-a-dire que j' etais en lui, en germe, comme il est aujourd'hui resume en moi. C'est par moi que Saint-Simon marche vers Dieu; car je suis en verite, ce que Dieu a voulu que fut eternellement Saint-Simon, le pere des hommes" . . . "Enfantin qui na1t et qui meurt n' est done ·que la manifestation dans le temps et dans 1' espace de l'Enfantin Eternel."

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Life universal is life eternal, without any real break between life and death, life here, and life beyond. Life is sympathy. Life is love. Revulsion, hatred, withdrawal mean death. Life is received, and life is given back, passed on to others-this is what birth and death are. Enfantin proclaimed that it was not his wish to introduce the new morality preached by him here and now. The :final decision, the task of formulating the new code must be left to the Femme -Mere-Messie, who will one day make her appearance and take her seat at the Pere's side. Till then the old morality is binding, and, as said earlier, on the peres gathered at their retreat of Menil­ monta.nt, strict celibacy is imposed. Gradually the expectation of and waiting for the Mere and her :final dispensation assumed the dimensions of a chiliastic, all-embracing experience. It calls for comment. As has already been pointed out, almost every one of those ardent young men who gathered together in the sect had a back­ ground of some personal unhappiness to which some stigma was attached. In several cases that stigma was associated with the father. Perhaps as a result of that, their pathetic yearning for affec­ tion, their ivy-like mentality was exceptional even in an age of Romanticism, with its cult of feeling and its belief that all feelings are beautiful, the stronger the better, the more sickly the better; and that therefore no reticence needs to be practised about them. Man is good, and surely his feelings a.re the measure of his excel­ lence. The woman appeared to these young men not just a person of the opposite sex, but a saviour, a Mater dolorosa, a superior, finer being, offering love, forgiveness and comfort. ''Je conc;ois certaines circonstances-writes Enfantin to his dearly beloved mother-ou je jugerais que ma femme seule serait capable de donner du bonheur, de la sante, de la vie a l'un de mes fils en Saint-Simon, de le ra.ppeler aux sympathies sociales pretes a le quitter, de le recha.uffer entre ses bras caressants au moment ou quelque profonde douleur exigerait une profonde diversion." This is preceded by a striking and strange sentence : "I man, who feels in his heart the power of love for a woman, and who because of that would not marry". Because of his longing for great love, Enfa.ntin cannot just get married to just a woman. In his letters to a pupil he tells him to marry somebody great, superior. All

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the best that men and women do is always drawn out of them as a tribute and homage to a person of the opposite sex. "It is from the hands of a woman that the new Adam regenerated by Saint-Simon will receive the fruit of the tree of science ; by her he will be led to God, contrary to the Christian belief that he had been removed from Him by her. Mary has already come to con­ sole the women by giving a Saviour to men . . . alone with God, she has conceived the law of love ; the mysterious prophecy of the order of the future." Where could one find a more striking, more astonishing mani­ festation of the spirit of Romanticism incarnate ? An empty chair is always reserved at the side of the Pere's chair for the Mere-Messie. Again and again, the Pere takes God as a witness that he cannot carry out the promise so long as the Mere has not arrived, that he is paralysed by her absence. All is provi­ sional till her appearance. Ultimately, Enfantin is only the mes­ senger of her coming, her John the Baptist. ' " "Nous croyons a' la venue · d' un Napoleon ' de cette espece. Napoleon had answered the prayers of millions for a strong man to put an end to anarchy in politics. She will put an end to anarchy in morals, to prostitution, adultery and the miseries plaguing families. "Do not ask us how we conceive that the society of the future will be organized . . . Our ideas on the matter have no import­ ance; man should be tired by now of all the social systems made by men; do you not see them fall like hail in the last forty years ?'' Why ? Because all such systems and plans are of no use, without a fundamental change in the sentiments. "The phase of the doctors is finished, all theories have been made ; now comes the phase of sentiment, of woman in short . . . that a woman truly grand, equally good and wise, comes to sum up all, and give force of law to sentiments . . . " "The Mother cannot be far, for the world is suffering too much" -wrote Cecile. The Pere gives poignant expression to his yearnings in "L'att­ ente". "Grand Dieu ! j'ai fait ta volonte, j' attends ta nouvelle parole . . . J'attends . . . la douce voix que tu m'as promise se tait ! Que ce silence est lourd a mon a.me ! et pourtant je te rends grace, o mon Dieu ! J'avais besoin de te sentir muet en moi pour avoir foi en elle autant qu'en nioi-meme . . . Attendre ! attendre ! que fait-elle a cette heure ? Depuis si longtemps je 1'aime ! Dis-moi, mon

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Dieu, dis-moi, si deja elle m'aime aussi . . . Oh ! oui, mon Pere, je n'ai point fait assez encore pour la gloire de ton grand nom, et pour le faire repeter a la terre. Je ne merite pas que tu m'envoies l'ange de gloire et d'enthousiasme, que tu m'as promis d'attacher a ma vie d'homme ; ta fille ne me connait pas . . . J'ai foi, Pere, j'attendrai." Here is stupendous symbolism: Woman has brought perdition to mankind, Woman will bring its redemption. The curse of original sin, of which She was the author, will be undone by Her. This frame of mind was intensified with the disintegration of the Menilmontant retreat and the imprisonment of the Pere. The Saint-Simonists appeared at the court in priestly attire. They re­ fused, at the Pere's orders, to take the oath. Their speeches, over­ flowing with the pride of the regenerate and full of contempt for the pettiness and stupidity of the unregenerate world-represented by the Court-exasperated the judges, jury and counsel. Enfantin tried the power of his magnetic silent eyes on the judges, and ex­ pressed his compassionate contempt at their insensitiveness to spirit-soaked beauty. At the end of the trial and on the eve of his imprisonment, the Pere abdicated: "n'effacez pas le Pere, mes enfants, mais songez a la Mere . . . le Pere sommeille ; le Pere dort." While the Pere was serving his sentence in prison, Barrault re­ organized the group and called it "Les Compagnons de la Femme". "Mere, cried Barrault, je suis a toi l Ton reil penetrant, sous les rides austeres de ta face, devinera sans peine cet indicible besoin d'aimer et d'etre aime que rien encore n' a pu satisfaire, et ta main, douce et legere, en touchant mon front, effacera les sillons qu'y creusa la souffrance.'' At this stage the vision of the Femme-Messie becomes associated with the grandiose dream of wedding the Orient with the Occident, and effecting an apocalyptic synthesis between the world of Othello and of Don Juan, between the mysterious, dream-like, contem­ plative East, and the dynamic, restless West. This vision has its positivist aspect in the vast Mediterranean scheme of Michel Cheva­ lier of a huge network of railways to join together all the parts of the Mediterranean with the capitals of Europe, and in the plan of a Suez Canal in Egypt, and gigantic public works in the Near East. ''J'entends au fond de ma prison"-wrote Enfantin-"l'Orient qui s'eveille et qui ne chante point encore, et qui crie: Je vois I'etend­ ard du prophete souille, brise, le vin coulant avec le sang engourdi

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d' opium dans les ruisseaux de .. Stamboul. Le Nil a rompu les digues et se repand loin qu' il n' a jamais marche, portant les germes que la main de Napoleon a secoues sur ses bords et que Mehemet a fccondes ; . . . la grande Communion se prepare, la Mediterranee sera belle cette annce. Depuis Gibraltar jusqu'a Scutari, cette cote brulante se souleve, et appelle !'Occident endormi sous la parole de ses phraseurs de tribune." Above all, the Femme-Messie will reveal herself there in the Orient. It is so fitting that she should emerge from her hiding in Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium and of the Ottoman Empire; or in Egypt of the burning desert and the Pharaohs, build­ ers of the Pyramids ; or in Judaea, the cradle of religions, prophets and saviours ; in India, that mysterious continent of mysticism and romance on the banks of the Ganges-"OU la fecondite est divinisee" and bulls have their altars. All the signs of the prophecies-comets,' Mme de Berry, Jewish dream of Zion, Epileptics' prophecies-be­ token Her coming in the coming year, and in the Orient: "Le Pere a Paris, la Mere a Constantinople ! Paris ! Constantinople ! Dieu, sur le vaste clavier du monde, a touche ces deux notes, et un accord sublime en jaillira' '-cried Barrault. The Mere is on her way, the gift of the Orient : "A toi, I' Orient, I'enfantement glorieux de la Mere . . . De que1s points de !'horizon et par quels chemins viendra-t-elle ? Hao1te-t-elle un palais ? Fille de rois, doit-elle, par ces bienfaits inattendus, reconcilier avec le trone les masses populaires qui grondent . . . Surgira-t-elle de la poudre des champs ou de la fange des villes ?" In fact she has al­ ready arrived. Barrault knows it, because he feels it. "Plus d' appel a la Femme ! La Femme a entendu ! Plus d'attente de la Femme ! Je veux, et mon creur s' en gonfle d' orgueil et de joie, je veux, des qu' elle paraitra et jettera un regard autour d' elle, qu' elle trouve a ses cotes, docile sous sa main, mais fiere, calme et imposante a ses ennemis, ma tete de lion.'' And the Mere will be a Jewess, like the Mother of the Saviour of the Christians. She will make her appearance in Constantinople, the coming year, in the month of May. Barrault issues anonymously a proclamation aux femmes juives: "Gloire, gloire a vous, femmes juives ! qui avez proteste contre cette monstrosite de I' esprit, contre cet enfantement de la femme qui met au monde son seigneur, son mai:tre, son