literary transcript

Part Three

Historical Rebellion

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            Freedom, “that terrible word inscribed on the chariot of the storm,” [Philothée O’Neddy] is the motivating principle of all revolutions.  Without it, justice seems inconceivable to the rebel’s mind.  There comes a time, however, when justice demands the suspension of freedom.  Then terror, on a grand or small scale, makes its appearance to consummate the revolution.  Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.  But one day nostalgia takes up arms and assumes the responsibility of total guilt; in other words, adopts murder and violence.  The servile rebellions, the regicide revolutions, and those of the twentieth century have thus, consciously, accepted a burden of guilt which increased in proportion to the degree of liberation they proposed to introduce.  This contradiction, which has become only too obvious, prevents our contemporary revolutionaries from displaying that aspect of happiness and optimism which shone forth from the faces and the speeches of the members of the Constituent Assembly in 1789.  Is this contradiction inevitable?  Does it characterize or betray the value of rebellion?  These questions are bound to arise about revolution as they are bound to arise about metaphysical rebellion.  Actually, revolution is only the logical consequence of metaphysical rebellion, and we shall discover, in our analysis of the revolutionary movement, the same desperate and bloody effort to affirm the dignity of man in defiance of the things that deny its existence.  The revolutionary spirit thus undertakes the defence of that part of man which refuses to submit.  In other words, it tries to assure him his crown in the realm of time, and, rejecting God, it chooses history with an apparently inevitable logic.

            In theory, the word revolution retains the meaning that it has in astronomy.  It is a movement that describes a complete circle, that leads from one form of government to another after a complete transition.  A change of regulations concerning property without a corresponding change of government is not a revolution, but a reform.  There is no kind of economic revolution, whether its methods are violent or pacific, which is not, at the same time, manifestly political.  Revolution can already be distinguished, in this way, from rebellion.  The warning given to Louis XVI: “No, sire, this is not a rebellion, it is a revolution,” accents the essential difference.  It means precisely that “it is the absolute certainty of a new form of government.”  Rebellion is, by nature, limited in scope.  It is no more than an incoherent pronouncement.  Revolution, on the contrary, originates in the realm of ideas.  Specifically, it is the injection of ideas into historical experience, while rebellion is only the movement that leads from individual experience into the realm of ideas.  While even the collective history of a movement of rebellion is always that of a fruitless struggle with facts, of an obscure protest which involves neither methods nor reason, a revolution is an attempt to shape actions to ideas, to fit the world into a theoretic frame.  That is why rebellion kills men while revolution destroys both men and principles.  But, for the same reasons, it can be said that there has not yet been a revolution in the course of history.  There could only be one, and that would be the definitive revolution.  The movement that seems to complete the circle already begins to describe another at the precise moment when the new government is formed.  The anarchists, with Varlet as their leader, were made well aware of the fact that government and revolution are incompatible in the direct sense.  “It implies a contradiction,” says Proudhon, “that a government could be revolutionary, for the very simple reason that it is the government.”  Now that the experiment has been made, let us qualify that statement by adding that a government can be revolutionary only in opposition to other governments.  Revolutionary governments are obliged, most of the time, to be war governments.  The more extensive the revolution, the more considerable the chances of the war that it implies.  The society born of the revolution of 1789 wanted to fight for Europe.  The society born of the 1917 revolution is fighting for universal dominion.  Total revolution ends by demanding – we shall see why – the control of the world.

            While waiting for this to happen, if happen it must, the history of man, in one sense, is the sum total of his successive rebellions.  In other words, the movement of transition which can be clearly expressed in terms of space is only an approximation in terms of time.  What was devoutly called, in the nineteenth century, the progressive emancipation of the human race appears, from the outset, like an uninterrupted series of rebellions, which overreach themselves and try to find their formulation in ideas, but which have not yet reached the point of definitive revolution where everything on heaven and on earth would be stabilized.  A superficial examination seems to imply, rather than an real emancipation, an affirmation of mankind by man, an affirmation increasingly broad in scope, but always incomplete.  In fact, if there had ever been one real revolution, there would be no more history.  Unity would have been achieved, and death would have been satiated.  That is why all revolutionaries finally aspire to world unity and act as though they believe that history was concluded.  The originality of twentieth-century revolution lies in the fact that, for the first time, it openly claims to realize the ancient dream of Anarchasis Cloots of unity of the human race and, at the same time, the definitive consummation of history.  Just as the movement of rebellion led to the point of “All or Nothing” and just as metaphysical rebellion demanded the unity of the world, the twentieth-century revolutionary movement, when it arrived at the most obvious conclusions of its logic, insisted with threats of force on arrogating to itself the whole of history.  Rebellion is therefore compelled, on pain of appearing futile or out of date to become revolutionary.  It no longer suffices for the rebel to deify himself like Stirner or to look to his own salvation by adopting a certain attitude of mind.  The species must be deified, as Nietzsche attempted to do, and his ideal of the superman must be adopted so as to assure salvation for all – as Ivan Karamazov wanted.  For the first time, the Possessed appear on the scene and proceed to give the answer to one of the secrets of the times: the identity of reason and of the will to power.  Now that God is dead, the world must be changed and organized by the forces at man’s disposal.  The force of imprecation alone is not enough; weapons are needed and totality must be conquered.  Even revolution, particularly revolution, which claims to be materialist, is only a limitless metaphysical crusade.  But can totality claim to be unity?  That is the question which this book must answer.  So far we can only say that the purpose of this analysis is not to give, for the hundredth time, a description of the revolutionary phenomenon, nor once more to examine the historic or economic causes of great revolutions.  Its purpose is to discover in certain revolutionary data the logical sequence, the explanations, and the invariable themes of metaphysical rebellion.

            The majority of revolutions are shaped by, and derive their originality from, murder.  All, or almost all, have been homicidal.  But some, in addition, have practised regicide and deicide.  Just as the history of metaphysical rebellion began with Sade, so our real inquiry only begins with his contemporaries, the regicides, who attack the incarnation of divinity without yet daring to destroy the principle of eternity.  (But before this the history of mankind also demonstrates the equivalent of the first movement of rebellion – the rebellion of the slave.)

            When a slave rebels against his master, the situation presented is of one man pitted against another, under a cruel sky, far from the exalted realms of principles.  The final result is merely the murder of man.  The servile rebellions, peasant risings, beggar outbreaks, rustic revolts, all advance the concept of a principle of equality, a life for a life, which despite every kind of mystification and audacity will always be found in the purest manifestations of the revolutionary spirit – Russian terrorism in 1905, for example.

            Spartacus’ rebellion, which took place as the ancient world was coming to an end, a few decades before the Christian era, is an excellent illustration of this point.  First we note that this is a rebellion of gladiators – that is to say, of slaves consecrated to single combat and condemned, for the delectation of their masters, to kill or be killed.  Beginning with seventy men, this rebellion ended with an army of seventy thousand insurgents, which crushed the best Roman legions and advanced through Italy to march on the Eternal City itself.  However, as André Proudhommeaux remarks (in The Tragedy of Spartacus), this rebellion introduced no new principle into Roman life.  The proclamation issued by Spartacus goes no farther than to offer “equal rights” to the slaves.  The transition from fact to right, which we analyzed in the first stage of rebellion, is, indeed, the only logical acquisition that one can find on this level of rebellion.  The insurgent rejects slavery and affirms his equality with his master.  He wants to be master in his turn.

            Spartacus’ rebellion is a continual illustration of this principle of positive claims.  The slave army liberates the slaves and immediately hands over their former masters to them in bondage.  According to one tradition, of doubtful veracity it is true, gladiatorial combats were even organized between several hundred Roman citizens, while the slaves sat in the grandstands delirious with joy and excitement.  But to kill men leads to nothing but killing more men.  For one principle to triumph, another principle must be overthrown.  The city of light of which Spartacus dreamed could only have been built on the ruins of eternal Rome, of its institutions and its gods.  Spartacus’ army marches to lay siege to a Rome paralyzed with fear at the prospect of having to pay for its crimes.  At the decisive moment, however, within sight of the sacred walls, the army halts and wavers, as if it were retreating before the principles, the institutions, the city of the gods.  When these had been destroyed, what could be put in their place except the brutal desire for justice, the wounded and exacerbated love that until this moment had kept these wretches on their feet.  [Spartacus’ rebellion recapitulates the programme of the servile rebellions that preceded it.  But this programme is limited to the distribution of land and the abolition of slavery.  It is not directly concerned with the gods of the city.]  In any case, the army retreated without having fought, and then made the curious move of deciding to return to the place where the slave rebellion originated, to retrace the long road of its victories and to return to Sicily.  It was as though these outcasts, forever alone and helpless before the great tasks that awaited them and too daunted to assail the heavens, returned to what was purest and most heartening in their history, to the land of their first awakening, where it was easy and right to die.

            Then began their defeat and martyrdom.  Before the last battle, Spartacus crucified a Roman citizen to show his men the fate that was in store for them.  During the battle, Spartacus himself tried with frenzied determination, the symbolism of which is obvious, to reach Crassus, who was commanding the Roman legions.  He wanted to perish, but in single combat with the man who symbolized, at that moment, every Roman master; it was his dearest wish to die, but in absolute equality.  He did not reach Crassus: principles wage war at a distance and the Roman general kept himself apart.  Spartacus died, as he wished, but at the hands of mercenaries, slaves like himself, who killed their own freedom with his.  In revenge for the one crucified citizen, Crassus crucified thousands of slaves.  The six thousand crosses which, after such a just rebellion, staked out the road from Capua to Rome demonstrated to the servile crowd that there is no equality in the world of power and that the masters calculate, at a usurious rate, the price of their own blood.

            The cross is also Christ’s punishment.  One might imagine that he chose a slave’s punishment, a few years later, only so as to reduce the enormous distance that henceforth would separate humiliated humanity from the implacable face of the Master.  He intercedes, He submits to the most extreme injustice so that rebellion shall not divide the world in two, so that suffering will also light the way to heaven and preserve it from the curses of mankind.  What is astonishing in the fact that the revolutionary spirit, when it wanted to affirm the separation of heaven and earth, should begin by disembodying the divinity by killing His representatives on earth?  In certain aspects, the period of rebellions comes to an end in 1793 and revolutionary times begin – on a scaffold.  [In that this book is not concerned with the spirit of rebellion inside Christianity, the Reformation has no place here, nor the numerous rebellions against ecclesiastical authority which preceded it.  But we can say, at least, that the Reformation prepares the way for Jacobinism and in one sense initiates the reforms that 1789 carries out.]

The Regicides

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            Kings were put to death long before January 21, 1793, and before the regicides of the nineteenth century.  But Ravaillac, Damiens, and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king.  They wanted another king and that was all.  It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty forever. 1789 is the starting-point of modern times, because the men of that period wished, among other things, to overthrow the principle of divine right and to introduce to the historical scene the forces of negation and rebellion which had become the essence of intellectual discussion in the previous centuries.  Thus they added to traditional tyrannicide the concept of calculated deicide.  The so-called freethinkers, the philosophers and jurists, served as levers for this revolution.  [The kings themselves collaborated in this by allowing political power gradually to encroach on religious power, thus threatening the very principle of their legitimacy.]  In order for such an undertaking to enter into the realms of possibility and to be considered legitimate, it was first necessary for the Church, whose infinite responsibility it is, to place itself on the side of the masters by compromising with the executioner – a step that developed into the Inquisition and was perpetuated by complicity with the temporal powers.  Michelet is quite correct in wanting to recognize only two outstanding characters in the revolutionary saga: Christianity and the French Revolution.  In fact, for him, 1789 is explained by the struggle between divine grace and justice.  Although Michelet shared the taste for all-embracing abstractions with his intemperate period, he saw that this taste was one of the profound causes of the revolutionary crisis.

            Even if the monarchy of the ancient regime was not always arbitrary in its manner of governing, it was undoubtedly arbitrary in principle.  It was founded on divine right, which means that its legitimacy could never be questioned.  Its legitimacy often was questioned, however, in particular by various parliaments.  But those who exercised it considered and presented it as an axiom.  Louis XIV, as is well known, rigidly adhered to the principle of divine right.  [Charles I clung so tenaciously to the principle of divine right that he considered it unnecessary to be just and loyal to those who denied it.]  Bossuet gave him considerable help in this direction by saying to the kings of France: “You are gods.”  The king, in one of his aspects, is the divine emissary in charge of human affairs and therefore of the administration of justice.  Like God Himself, he is the last recourse of the victims of misery and injustice.  In principle, the people can appeal to the king for help against their oppressors.  “If the King only knew, if the Czar only knew …” was the frequently expressed sentiment of the French and Russian people during periods of great distress.  It is true in France, at least, that, when the monarchy did know, it often tried to defend the lower classes against the oppressions of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie.  But was this, essentially, justice?  From the absolute point of view, which was the point of view of the writers of the period, it was not.  Even though it is possible to appeal to the king, it is impossible to appeal against him insofar as he is the embodiment of a principle.  His dispenses his protection and his assistance if and when he wants to.  One of the attributes of grace is that it is discretionary.  Monarchy in its theocratic form is a type of government which wants to put grace before justice by always letting it have the last word.  Rousseau in his Savoyard curate’s declaration, on the other hand, is only original insofar as he submits God to justice and in this way inaugurates, with the rather naïve solemnity of the period, contemporary history.

            From the moment that the freethinkers began to question the existence of God, the problem of justice became of primary importance.  The justice of the period was, quite simply, confused with equality.  The throne of God totters and justice, to confirm its support of equality, must give it the final push by making a direct attack on His representative on earth.  Divine right to all intents and purposes was already destroyed by being opposed and forced to compromise with natural right for three years, from 1789 to 1792.  In the last resort, grace is incapable of compromise.  It can give in on certain points, but never on the final point.  But that does not suffice.  According to Michelet, Louis XVI still wanted to be king in prison.  In a France entirely governed by new principles, the principle that had been defeated still survived behind prison walls through the mere power of faith and through the existence of one human being.  Justice has this in common with grace, and this alone, that it wants to be total and to rule absolutely.  From the moment they conflict, they fight to the death.  “We do not want to condemn the King,” said Danton, who had not even the good manners of a lawyer, “we want to kill him.”  In fact, if God is denied, the King must die.  Saint-Just, it seems, was responsible for Louis XVI’s death; but when he exclaims: “To determine the principle in virtue of which the accused is perhaps to die, is to determine the principle by which the society that judges him lives,” he demonstrates that it is the philosophers who are going to kill the King: the King must die in the name of the social contract.  [Rousseau would not, of course, have wanted this.  It must be remembered, before proceeding with this analysis and in order to set its limits, that Rousseau firmly declared: “Nothing on this earth is worth buying at the price of human blood.”]  But this demands an explanation.

            The New Gospel

            The Social Contract is, primarily, an inquiry into the legitimacy of power.  But it is a book about rights, not about facts, and at no time is it a collection of sociological observations.  It is concerned with principles and for this very reason is bound to be controversial.  It presumes that traditional legitimacy, which is supposedly of divine origin, is not acquired.  Thus it proclaims another sort of legitimacy and other principles.  The Social Contract is also a catechism, of which it has both the tone and the dogmatic language.  Just as 1789 completes the conquest of the English and American revolutions, so Rousseau pushes to its limits the theory of the social contract to be found in Hobbes.  The Social Contract amplifies and dogmatically explains the new religion whose god is reason, confused with nature, and whose representative on earth, in place of the king, is the people considered as an expression of the general will.

            The attack on the traditional order is so evident that, from the very first chapter, Rousseau is determined to demonstrate the precedence of the citizens’ pact, which established the people, over the pact between the people and the king, which founded royalty.  Until Rousseau’s time, God created kings, who, in their turn, created peoples.  After The Social Contract, peoples create themselves before creating kings.  As for God, there is nothing more to be said, for the time being.  Here we have, in the political field, the equivalent of Newton’s revolution.  Power, therefore, is no longer arbitrary, but derives its existence from general consent.  In other words, power is no longer what is, but what should be.  Fortunately, according to Rousseau, what is cannot be separated from what should be.  The people are sovereign “only because they are always everything that they should be.”  Confronted with this statement of principle, it is perfectly justifiable to say that reason, which was always obstinately invoked at that period, is not particularly well treated in the context.  It is evident that, with The Social Contract, we are assisting at the birth of a new mystique – the will of the people being substituted for God Himself.  “Each of us,” says Rousseau, “places his person and his entire capabilities under the supreme guidance of the will of the people, and we receive each individual member into the body as an indivisible part of the whole.”

            This political entity, proclaimed sovereign, is also defined as a divine entity.  Moreover, it has all the attributes of a divine entity.  It is, in fact, infallible in that, in its role of sovereign, it cannot even wish to commit abuses.  “Under the law of reason, nothing is done without cause.”  It is totally free, if it is true that absolute freedom is freedom in regard to oneself.  Thus Rousseau declares that it is against the nature of the body politic for the sovereign power to impose a law upon itself that it cannot violate.  It is also inalienable, indivisible; and, finally, it even aims at solving the great theological problem, the contradiction between absolute power and divine innocence.  The will of the people is, in fact, coercive; its power has no limits.  But the punishment it inflicts on those who refuse to obey it is nothing more than a means of “compelling them to be free.”  The deification is completed when Rousseau, separating the sovereign from his very origins, reaches the point of distinguishing between the general will and the will of all.  This can be logically deduced from Rousseau’s premises.  If man is naturally good, if nature as expressed in him is identified with reason, [Every ideology is contrary to human psychology.] he will express the pre-eminence of reason, on the one condition that he expresses himself freely and naturally.  He can no longer, therefore, go back on his decision, which henceforth hovers over him.  The will of the people is primarily the expression of universal reason, which is categorical.  The new God is born.

            That is why the words that are to be found most often in The Social Contract are the words absolute, sacred, inviolable.  The body politic thus defined, whose laws are sacred commandments, is only a by-product of the mystic body of temporal Christianity.  The Social Contract, moreover, terminates with a description of a civil religion and makes Rousseau a harbinger of contemporary forms of society which exclude not only opposition but even neutrality.  Rousseau is, in fact, the first man in modern times to institute the profession of civil faith.  He is also the first to justify the death penalty in a civil society and the absolute submission of the subject to the authority of the sovereign.  “It is in order not to become victim of an assassin that we consent to die if we become assassins.”  A strange justification, but one which firmly establishes the fact that you must know how to die if the sovereign commands, and must, if necessary, concede that he is right and you are wrong.  This mystic idea explains Saint-Just’s silence from the time of his arrest until he goes to the scaffold.  Suitably developed, it equally well explains the enthusiasm of the defendants in the Moscow trials.

            We are witnessing the dawn of a new religion with its martyrs, its ascetics, and its saints.  To be able to estimate the influence achieved by this gospel, one must have some idea of the inspired tones of the proclamations of 1789.  Fauchet, confronted with the skeletons discovered in the Bastille, exclaims: “The day of revelation is upon us…. The very bones have risen at the sound of the voice of French freedom; they bear witness against the centuries of oppression and death, and prophesy the regeneration of human nature and of the life of nations.”  Then he predicts: “We have reached the heart of time.  The tyrants are ready to fall.”  It is the moment of astonished and generous faith when a remarkably enlightened mob overthrows the scaffold and the wheel at Versailles. [The same idyll takes place in Russia, in 1905, where the soviet of St. Petersburg parades through the streets carrying placards demanding the abolition of the death penalty, and again in 1917.]  Scaffolds seemed to be the very altars of religion and injustice.  The new faith could not tolerate them.  But a moment comes when faith, if it becomes dogmatic, erects its own altars and demands unconditional adoration.  Then scaffolds reappear and despite the altars, the freedom, the oaths, and the feasts of Reason, the Masses of the new faith must now be celebrated with blood.  In any case, in order that 1789 shall mark the beginning of the reign of “holy humanity” [Vergniaud] and of “Our Lord the human race,” [Anarchasis Cloots] the fallen sovereign must first of all disappear.  The murder of the King-priest will sanction the new age – which endures to this day.

            The Execution of the King

            Saint-Just introduced Rousseau’s ideas into the pages of history.  At the King’s trial, the essential part of his arguments consisted in saying that the King is not inviolable and should be judged by the Assembly and not by a special tribunal.  His arguments he owed to Rousseau.  A tribunal cannot be the judge between the king and the sovereign people.  The general will cannot be cited before ordinary judges.  It is above everything.  The inviolability and the transcendence of the general will are thus proclaimed.  We know that the predominant theme of the trial was the inviolability of the royal person.  The struggle between grace and justice finds its most provocative illustration in 1793 when two different conceptions of transcendence meet in mortal combat.  Moreover, Saint-Just is perfectly aware of how much is at stake: “The spirit in which the King is judged will be the same in which the spirit of the Republic is established.”

            Saint-Just’s famous speech has, therefore, all the earmarks of a theological treatise.  “Louis, the stranger in our midst,” is the thesis of this youthful prosecutor.  If a contract, either civil or natural, could still bind the king and his people, there would be a mutual obligation; the will of the people could not set itself up as absolute judge to pronounce absolute judgement.  Therefore it is necessary to prove that no agreement binds the people and the king.  In order to prove that the people are themselves the embodiment of eternal truth it is necessary to demonstrate that royalty is the embodiment of eternal crime.  Saint-Just, therefore, postulates that every king is a rebel or a usurper.  He is a rebel against the people whose absolute sovereignty he usurps.  Monarchy is not a king, “it is crime.”  Not a crime, but crime itself, says Saint-Just; in other words, absolute profanation.  That is the precise, and at the same time ultimate, meaning of Saint-Just’s remark, the import of which has been stretched too far: [Or at least the significance of which has been anticipated.  When Saint-Just made this remark, he did not know that he was already speaking for himself.] “No one can rule innocently.”  Every king is guilty, because any man who wants to be king is automatically on the side of death.  Saint-Just says exactly the same thing when he proceeds to demonstrate that the sovereignty of the people is a “sacred matter.”  Citizens are inviolable and sacred and can be constrained only by the law, which is an expression of their common will.  Louis alone does not benefit by this particular inviolability or by the assistance of the law, for he is placed outside the contract.  He is not part of the general will; on the contrary, by his very existence he is a blasphemer against this all-powerful will.  He is not a “citizen,” which is the only way of participating in the new divine dispensation.  “What is a king in comparison with a Frenchman?”  Therefore, he should be judged and nothing more.

            But who will interpret the will of the people and pronounce judgement?  The Assembly, which by its origin has attained the right to administer this will, and which participates as an inspired council in the new divinity.  Should the people be asked to ratify the judgement?  We know that the efforts of the monarchists in the Assembly were finally concentrated on this point.  In this way the life of the King could be rescued from the logic of the bourgeois jurists and at least entrusted to the spontaneous emotions and compassion of the people.  But here again Saint-Just pushes his logic to its extremes and makes use of the conflict, invented by Rousseau, between the general will and the will of all.  Even though the will of all would pardon, the general will cannot do so.  Even the people cannot efface the crime of tyranny.  Cannot the victims, according to law, withdraw their complaint?  We are not dealing with law, we are dealing with theology.  The crime of the king is, at the same time, a sin against the ultimate nature of things.  A crime is committed; then it is pardoned, punished, and forgotten.  But the crime of royalty is permanent; it is inextricably bound to the person of the king, to his very existence.  Christ Himself, though He can forgive sinners, cannot absolve false gods.  They must disappear or conquer.  If the people forgive today, they will find the crime intact tomorrow, even though the criminal sleeps peacefully in prison.  Therefore there is only one solution: “To avenge the murder of the people by the death of the King.”

            The only purpose of Saint-Just’s speech is, once and for all, to block every egress for the King except the one leading to the scaffold.  If, in fact, the premises of The Social Contract are accepted, this is logically inevitable.  At last, after Saint-Just, “kings will flee to the desert, and nature will resume her rights.”  It was quite pointless of the Convention to vote a reservation and say that it did not intend to create a precedent if it passed judgement on Louis XVI or if it pronounced a security measure.  In doing so, it refused to face the consequences of its own principles and tried to camouflage, with shocking hypocrisy, its real purpose, which was to found a new form of absolutism.  Jacques Roux, at least, was speaking the truth of the times when he called the King Louis the Last, thus indicating that the real revolution, which had already been accomplished on the economic level, was then taking place on the philosophic plane and that it implied a twilight of the gods.  Theocracy was attacked in principle in 1789 and killed in its incarnation in 1793.  Brissot was right in saying: “The most solid monument to our revolution is philosophy.” [The religious Wars of the Vendée showed him to be right again.]

            On January 21, with the murder of the King-priest, was consummated what has significantly been called the passion of Louis XVI.  It is certainly a crying scandal that the public assassination of a weak but good-hearted man has been presented as a great moment in French history.  That scaffold marked no climax – far from it.  But the fact remains that, by its consequences, the condemnation of the King is at the crux of our contemporary history.  It symbolizes the secularization of our history and the disincarnation of the Christian God.  Up to now God played a part in history through the medium of the kings.  But His representative in history has been killed, for there is no longer a king.  Therefore there is nothing but a semblance of God, relegated to the heaven of principles. [This will become the God of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte.]

            The revolutionaries may well refer to the Gospel, but in fact they dealt a terrible blow to Christianity, from which it has not yet recovered.  It really seems as if the execution of the King, followed, as we know, by hysterical scenes of suicide and madness, took place in complete awareness of what was being done.  Louis XVI seems, sometimes, to have doubted his divine right, though he systematically rejected any projected legislation which threatened his faith.  But from the moment that he suspected or knew his fate, he seemed to identify himself, as his language betrayed, with the divine mission, so that there would be no possible doubt that the attempt on his person was aimed at the King-Christ, the incarnation of the divinity, and not at the craven flesh of a mere man.  His bedside book in the Temple was the Imitation.  The calmness and perfection that this man of rather average sensibility displayed during his last moments, his indifference to everything of this world, and, finally, his brief display of weakness on the solitary scaffold, so far removed from the people whose ears he had wanted to reach, while the terrible rolling of the drum drowned his voice, give us the right to imagine that it was not Capet who died, but Louis appointed by divine right, and that with him, in a certain manner, died temporal Christianity.  To emphasize this sacred bond, his confessor sustained him, in his moment of weakness, by reminding him of his “resemblance” to the God of Sorrows.  And Louis XVI recovers himself and speaks in the language of this God: “I shall drink,” he says, “the cup to the last dregs.”  Then he commits himself, trembling, into the ignoble hands of the executioner.

            The Religion of Virtue

            A religion that executes its obsolete sovereign must now establish the power of its new sovereign; it closes the churches, and this leads to an endeavour to build a temple.  The blood of the gods, which for a second bespatters the confessor of Louis XVI, announces a new baptism.  Joseph de Maistre qualified the Revolution as satanic.  We can see why and in what sense.  Michelet, however, was closer to the truth when he called it a purgatory.  An era blindly embarks down this tunnel on an attempt to discover a new illumination, a new happiness, and the face of the real God.  But what will this new god be?  Let us ask Saint-Just once more.

            The year 1789 does not yet affirm the divinity of man, but the divinity of the people, to the degree in which the will of the people coincides with the will of nature and of reason.  If the general will is freely expressed, it can only be the universal expression of reason.  If the people are free, they are infallible.  Once the King is dead, and the chains of the old despotism thrown off, the people are going to express what, at all times and in all places, is, has been, and will be the truth.  They are the oracle that must be consulted to know what the eternal order of the world demands.  Vox populi, vox naturæ.  Eternal principles govern our conduct: Truth, Justice, finally Reason.  There we have the new God.  The Supreme Being, whom cohorts of young girls come to adore at the Feast of Reason, is only the ancient god disembodied, peremptorily deprived of any connection with the earth, and launched like a balloon into a heaven empty of all transcendent principles.  Deprived of all his representatives, of an intercessor, the god of the lawyers and philosophers only has the value of a demonstration.  He is not very strong, in fact, and we can see why Rousseau, who preached tolerance, though that atheists should be condemned to death.  To ensure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough; a police force is needed as well.  But that will only come later.  In 1793 the new faith is still intact, and it will suffice, to take Saint-Just’s word, to govern according to the dictates of reason.  The art of ruling, according to him, has produced only monsters because, before his time, no one wished to govern according to nature.  The period of monsters has come to an end with the termination of the period of violence.  “The human heart advances from nature to violence, from violence to morality.”  Morality is, therefore, only nature finally restored after centuries of alienation.  Man only has to be given law “in accord with nature and with his heart,” and he will cease to be unhappy and corrupt.  Universal suffrage, the foundation of the new laws, must inevitably lead to a universal morality.  “Our aim is to create an order of things which establishes a universal tendency of things towards good.”

            The religion of reason quite naturally establishes the Republic of law and order.  The general will is expressed in laws codified by its representatives.  “The people make the revolution, the legislator makes the Republic.”  “Immortal, impassive” institutions, “sheltered from the temerity of man,” will govern in their turn the lives of all men by universal accord and without possibility of contradiction, since by obeying the laws all will only be obeying themselves.  “Outside the law,” says Saint-Just, “everything is sterile and dead.”  It is the formal and legalistic Republic of the Romans.  We know the passion of Saint-Just and his contemporaries for ancient Rome.  The decadent young man who, in Reims, spent hours in a room painted black and decorated with white teardrops, with the shutters closed, dreamed of the Spartan Republic.  The author of Organt, a long and licentious poem, was absolutely convinced of the necessity for frugality and virtue.  In the institutions that he invented, Saint-Just refused to allow children to eat meat until the age of sixteen, and he dreamed of a nation that was both vegetarian and revolutionary.  “The world has been empty since the Romans,” he exclaimed.  But heroic times were at hand.  Cato, Brutus, Scævola, had become possible once more.  The rhetoric of the Latin moralists flourished once again.  Vice, virtue, corruption, were terms that constantly recurred in the oratory of the times, and even more in the speeches of Saint-Just, of which they were the perpetual burden.  The reason for this is simple.  This perfect edifice, as Montesquieu had already seen, could not exist without virtue.  The French Revolution, by claiming to build history on the principle of absolute purity, inaugurates modern times simultaneously with the era of formal morality.

            What, in fact, is virtue?  For the bourgeois philosopher of the period it is conformity with nature [But nature itself, as we encounter it in the works Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, conforms to a pre-established virtue.  Nature is also an abstract principle.] and, in politics, conformity with the law, which expresses the general will.  “Morality,” says Saint-Just, “is stronger than tyrants.”  It has, in fact, just killed Louis XVI.  Every form of disobedience to law therefore comes, not from an imperfection of the law, which is presumed to be impossible, but from a lack of virtue in the refractory citizen.  That is why the Republic not only is an assembly, as Saint-Just forcibly says, but is also virtue itself.  Every form of moral corruption is at the same time political corruption, and vice versa.  A principle of infinite repression, derived from this very doctrine, is then established.  Undoubtedly Saint-Just was sincere in his desire for a universal idyll.  He really dreamed of a republic of ascetics, of humanity reconciled and dedicated to the chaste pursuits of the age of innocence, under the watchful eye of those wise old men whom he decked out in advance with a tricolour scarf and a white plume.  We also know that, at the beginning of the Revolution, Saint-Just declared himself, at the same time as Robespierre, against the death penalty.  He only demanded that murderers should be dressed in black for the rest of their lives.  He wanted to establish a form of justice which did not attempt “to find the culprit guilty, but to find him weak” – an admirable ambition.  He also dreamed of a republic of forgiveness which would recognize that though the fruits of crime are bitter, its roots are nevertheless tender.  One of his outbursts, at least, came from the heart and is not easily forgotten: “it is a frightful thing to torment the people.”  Yes indeed, it is a frightful thing.  But a man can realize this and yet submit to principles that imply, in the final analysis, the torment of the people.

            Morality, when it is formal, devours.  To paraphrase Saint-Just, no one is virtuous innocently.  From the moment that laws fail to make harmony reign, or when the unity which should be created by adherence to principles is destroyed, who is to blame?  Factions.  Who compose the factions?  Those who deny by their very actions the necessity of unity.  Factions divide the sovereign; therefore they are blasphemous and criminal.  They, and they alone, must be combated.  But what if there are many factions?  All shall be fought to the death.  Saint-Just exclaims: “Either the virtues or the Terror.”  Freedom must be guaranteed, and the draft constitution presented to the Convention already mentions the death penalty.  Absolute virtue is impossible, and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.  Montesquieu had already denounced this logic as one of the causes of the decadence of societies, saying that the abuse of power is greatest when laws do not anticipate it.  The pure law of Saint-Just did not take into account the truth, which is as old as history itself, that law, in its essence, is bound to be transgressed.

            The Terror

            Saint-Just, the contemporary of Sade, finally arrives at the justification of crime, though he starts from very different principles.  Saint-Just is, of course. The anti-Sade.  If Sade’s formula were “Open the prisons or prove your virtue,” the Saint-Just’s would be: “Prove your virtue or go to prison.”  Both, however, justify terrorism – the libertine justifies individual terrorism, the high priest of virtue State terrorism.  Absolute good and absolute evil, if the necessary logic is applied, both demand the same degree of passion.  Of course, there is a certain ambiguity in the case of Saint-Just.  The letter which he wrote to Vilain d’Aubigny in 1792 has something really insane about it.  It is a profession of faith by a persecuted persecutor which ends with a hysterical avowal: “If Brutus does not kill others, he will kill himself.”  A personality so obstinately serious, so voluntarily cold, logical, and imperturbable, leads one to imagine every kind of aberration and disorder.  Saint-Just invented the kind of seriousness which makes the history of the last two centuries so tedious and depressing.  “He who makes jokes at the head of a government,” he said, “has a tendency to tyranny.”  An astonishing maxim, above all if one thinks of the penalty for the mere accusation of tyranny, one which, in any case, prepared the way for the pedant Cæsars.  Saint-Just sets the example; even his tone is definitive.  That cascade of peremptory affirmatives, that axiomatic and sententious style, portrays him better than the most faithful painting.  His sentences drone on; his definitions follow one another with the coldness and precision of commandments.  “Principles should be moderate, laws implacable, principles without redress.”  It is the style of the guillotine.

            Such pertinacity in logic, however, implies a profound passion.  Here, as elsewhere, we again find the passion for unity.  Every rebellion implies some kind of unity.  The rebellion of 1789 demands the unity of the whole country.  Saint-Just dreams of an ideal city where manners and customs, in final agreement with the law, will proclaim the innocence of man and the identity of his nature with reason.  And if factions arise to interrupt this dream, passion will exaggerate its logic.  No one will dare to image that, since factions exist, the principles are perhaps wrong.  Factions will be condemned as criminal because principles remain intangible.  “It is time that everyone returned to morality and the aristocracy of the Terror.”  But the aristocratic factions are not the only ones to be reckoned with; there are the republicans, too, and anyone else who criticizes the actions of the legislature and of the Convention.  They, too, are guilty, since they threaten unity.  Saint-Just, then, proclaims the major principle of twentieth-century tyrannies.  “A patriot is he who supports the Republic in general; whoever opposes it in detail is a traitor.”  Whoever criticizes it is a traitor, whoever fails to give open support is a suspect.  When neither reason nor the free expression of individual opinion succeeds in systematically establishing unity, it must be decided to suppress all alien elements.  Thus the guillotine becomes a logician whose function is refutation.  “A rogue who has been condemned to death by the tribunal says he wants to resist oppression simply because he wants to resist the scaffold.!”  Saint-Just’s indignation is hard to understand in that, until his time, the scaffold was precisely nothing else but one of the most obvious symbols of oppression.  But at the heart of this logical delirium, at the logical conclusion of this morality of virtue, the scaffold represents freedom.  It assures rational unity, and harmony is the ideal city.  It purifies (the word is apt) the Republic and eliminates malpractices that arise to contradict the general will and universal reason.  “They question my right to the title of philanthropist,” Marat exclaims, in quite a different style.  “Ah, what injustice!  Who cannot see that I want to cut off a few heads to save a great number?”  A few – a faction?  Naturally – and all historic actions are performed at this price.  But Marat, making his final calculations, claimed two hundred and seventy-three thousand heads.  But he compromised the therapeutic aspect of the operation by screaming during the massacre: “Brand them with hot irons, cut off their thumbs, tear out their tongues.”  This philanthropist wrote day and night, in the most monotonous vocabulary imaginable, of the necessity of killing in order to create.  He wrote again, by candlelight deep down in his cellar, during the September nights while his henchmen were installing spectators benches in prison courtyards – men on the right, women on the left – to display to them, as a gracious example of philanthropy, the spectacle of the aristocrats having their heads cut off.

            Do not let us confuse, even for a moment, the imposing figure of Saint-Just with the sad spectacle of Marat – Rousseau’s monkey, as Michelet rightly calls him.  But the drama of Saint-Just lies in having at moments joined forces, for superior and much deeper reasons, with Marat.  Factions join with factions, and minorities with minorities, and in the end it is not even sure that the scaffold functions in the service of the will of all.  But at least Saint-Just will affirm, to the bitter end, that it functions in the service of the general will, since it functions in the service of virtue.  “A revolution such as ours is not a trial, but a clap of thunder for the wicked.”  Good strikes like a thunderbolt, innocence is a flash of lightning – a flash of lightning that brings justice.  Even the pleasure-seekers – in fact, they above all – are counterrevolutionaries.  Saint-Just, who said that the idea of happiness was new to Europe (actually it was mainly new for Saint-Just, for whom history stopped at Brutus), remarks that some people have an “appalling idea of what happiness is and confuse it with pleasure.”  They, too, must be dealt with firmly.  Finally, it is no longer a question of majority or minority.  Paradise, lost and always coveted by universal innocence, disappears into the distance; on the unhappy earth, racked with the cries of civil and national wars, Saint-Just decrees, against his nature and against his principles, that when the whole country suffers, then all are guilty.  The series of reports on the factions abroad, the law of the 22 Prairial, the speech of April 15, 1794 on the necessity of the police, mark the stages of this conversion.  The man who with such nobility held that it was infamous to lay down one’s arms while there remained, somewhere in the world, one master and one slave, is the same man who had to agree to suspend the Constitution of 1793 and to adopt arbitrary rule.  In the speech that he made to defend Robespierre, he rejects fame and posterity and only refers himself to an abstract providence.  At the same time, he recognized that virtue, of which he made a religion, has no other reward but history and the present, and that it must, at all costs, lay the foundations of its own reign.  He did not like power which he called “cruel and wicked’ and which, he said, “advanced toward repression, without any guiding principle.”  But the guiding principle was virtue and was derived from the people.  When the people failed, the guiding principle became obscured and oppression increased.  Therefore it was the people who were guilty and not power, which must remain, in principle, innocent.  Such an extreme and outrageous contradiction could only be resolved by an even more extreme logic and by the final acceptance of principles in silence and in death.  Saint-Just at least remained equal to this demand, and in this way was at last to find his greatness and that independent life in time and space of which he spoke with such emotion.

            For a long time he had, in fact, had a presentiment that the demands he made implied a total and unreserved sacrifice on his part and had said himself that those who make revolutions in this world – “those who do good” – can sleep only in the tomb.  Convinced that his principles, in order to triumph, must culminate in the virtue and happiness of his people, aware, perhaps, that he was asking the impossible, he cut off his own retreat in advance by declaring that he would stab himself in public on the day when he despaired of the people.  Nonetheless, he despairs, since he has doubts about the Terror.  “The revolution is frozen, every principle has been attenuated; all that remains are red caps worn by intriguers.  The exercise of terror has blunted crime as strong drink blunts the palate.”  Every virtue “unites with crime in times of anarchy.”  He said that all crime sprang from tyranny, which was the greatest crime of all, and yet, confronted with the unflagging obstinacy of crime, the Revolution itself resorted to tyranny and became criminal.  Thus crime cannot be obliterated, nor can factions, nor the despicable desire for enjoyment; the people must be despaired of and subjugated.  But neither is it possible to govern innocently.  Thus, evil must be either suffered or served, principles must be declared wrong or the people and mankind must be recognized as guilty.  Then Saint-Just averts his mysterious and handsome face: “It would be leaving very little to leave a life in which one must be either the accomplice or the silent witness of evil.”  Brutus, who must kill himself if he does not kill others, begins by killing others.  But the others are too many; they cannot all be killed.  In that case he must die and demonstrate, yet again, that rebellion, when it gets out of hand, swings from the annihilation of others to the destruction of the self.  This task, at any rate, is easy; once again it suffices to follow logic to the bitter end.  In his speech in defence of Robespierre, shortly before his death, Saint-Just reaffirms the guiding principle of his actions, which is the very same principle which leads to his condemnation: “I belong to no faction, I shall fight against them all.”  He accepted then, and in advance, the decision of the general will – in other words, of the Assembly.  He agreed to go to his death for love of principle and despite all the realities of the situation, since the opinion of the Assembly could only really be swayed by the eloquence and fanaticism of a faction.  But that is beside the point!  When principles fail, men have only one way to save them and to preserve their faith, which is to die for them.  In the stifling heat of Paris in July, Saint-Just, ostensibly rejecting reality and the world, confesses that he stakes his life on the decision of principles.  When this has been said, he seems to have a fleeting perception of another truth, and ends with a restrained denunciation of his colleagues Billaud-Varennes and Collot d’Herbois.  “I want them to justify themselves and I want us to become wiser.”  The style and the guillotine are here suspended for a moment.  But virtue, in that it has too much pride, is not wisdom.  The guillotine is going to fall again on that head as cold and beautiful as morality itself.  From the moment that the Assembly condemns him until the moment when he stretches his neck to the knife, Saint-Just keeps silent.  This long silence is more important than his death.  He complained that silence reigned around thrones and that is why he wanted to speak so much and so well.  But in the end, contemptuous of the tyranny and the enigma of a people who do not conform to pure reason, he resorts to silence himself.  His principles do not allow him to accept things as they are; and, things not being what they should be, his principles are therefore fixed, silent, and alone.  To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.  Saint-Just dies, and, with him, all hope of a new religion.

            “All the stones are cut to build the structure of freedom,” said Saint-Just; “you can build a palace or a tomb of the same stones.”  The very principles of The Social Contract presided at the erection of the tomb that Napoleon Bonaparte came to seal.  Rousseau, who was not wanting in common sense, understood very well that the society envisioned by The Social Contract was suitable only for gods.  His successors took him at his word and tried to establish the divinity of man.  The red flag -  a symbol of martial law and therefore of the executive under the ancient regime – became the revolutionary symbol on August 10, 1792.  A significant transfer about which Jaurès comments as follows: “It is we the people who are the law…. We are not rebels.  The rebels are in the Tuileries.”  But it is not so easy as that to become God.  Even the ancient gods did not die at the first blow, and the revolutions of the nineteenth century were intended to achieve the final liquidation of the principle of divinity.  Paris rose to place the King under the rule of the people and to prevent him from restoring an authority of principle.  The corpse which the rebels of 1830 dragged through the rooms of the Tuileries and installed on the throne in order to pay it derisory homage has no other significance.  The king could still be, at that period, a respected minister, but his authority is now derived from the nation, and his guiding principle is the Charter.  He is no longer Majesty.  Now that the ancient regime had definitely disappeared in France, the new regime must again, after 1848, reaffirm itself, and the history of the nineteenth century up to 1914 is the history of the restoration of popular sovereignties against ancient regime monarchies; in other words, the history of the principle of nations.  This principle finally triumphs in 1919, which witnesses the disappearance of all absolutist monarchies in Europe.  [With the exception of the Spanish monarchy.  But the German Empire collapsed, of which Wilhelm II said that it was “the proof that we Hohenzollerns derive our crown from heaven alone and that it is to heaven alone that we must give an accounting.”]  Everywhere, the sovereignty of the nation is substituted, in law and in fact, for the sovereign king.  Only then can the consequences of the principles of 1789 be seen.  We survivors are the first to be able to judge them clearly.

            The Jacobins reinforced the eternal moral principles to the extent to which they suppressed the things which, up to then, had supported these principles.  As preachers of a gospel, they wanted to base fraternity on the abstract law of the Romans.  They substituted the law for divine commandments on the supposition that it must be recognized by all because it was the expression of the general will.  The law found its justification in natural virtue and then proceeded to justify natural virtue.  But immediately a single faction manifests itself, this reasoning collapses and we perceive that virtue has need of justification in order not to be abstract.  In the same way, the bourgeois jurists of the eighteenth century, by burying under the weight of their principles the just and vital conquests of their people, prepared the way for the two contemporary forms of nihilism: individual nihilism and State nihilism.

            Law can reign, in fact, insofar as it is the law of universal reason.  [Hegel saw clearly that the philosophy of enlightenment wanted to deliver man from the irrational.  Reason reunites mankind while the irrational destroys unity.]  But it never is, and it loses its justification if man is not naturally good.  A day comes when ideology conflicts with psychology.  Then there is no more legitimate power.  Thus the law evolves to the point of becoming confused with the legislator and with a new form of arbitrariness.  Where turn then?  The law has gone completely off its course; and, losing its precision, it becomes more and more inaccurate, to the point of making everything a crime.  The law still reigns supreme, but it no longer has any fixed limits.  Saint-Just had foreseen that this form of tyranny might be exercised in the name of a silent people.  “Ingenious crime will be exalted into a kind of religion and criminals will be in the sacred hierarchy.”  But this is inevitable.  If major principles have no foundation, if the law expresses nothing but a provisional inclination, it is only made in order to be broken or to be imposed.  Sade or dictatorship, individual terrorism or State terrorism, both justified by the same absence of justification, are, from the moment that rebellion cuts itself off from its roots and abstains from any concrete morality, one of the alternatives of the twentieth century.

            The revolutionary movement that was born in 1789 could not, however, stop there.  God, for the Jacobins, is not completely dead, any more than he was dead for the romantics.  They still preserve the Supreme Being.  Reason, in a certain way, is still a mediator.  It implies a pre-existent order.  But God is at least dematerialized and reduced to the theoretical existence of a moral principle.  The bourgeoisie succeeded in reigning during the entire nineteenth century only be referring itself to abstract principles.  Less worthy than Saint-Just, it simply made use of this frame of reference as an alibi, while employing, on all occasions, the opposite values.  By its essential corruption and disheartening hypocrisy, it helped to discredit, for good and all, the principles it proclaimed.  Its culpability in this regard is infinite.  From the moment that eternal principles are put in doubt simultaneously with formal virtue, and when every value is discredited, reason will start to act without reference to anything but its own successes.  It would like to rule, denying everything that has been and affirming all that is to come.  One day it will conquer.  Russian Communism, by its violent criticism of every kind of formal virtue, puts the finishing touches to the revolutionary work of the nineteenth century by denying any superior principle.  The regicides of the nineteenth century are succeeded by the deicides of the twentieth century, who drawn the ultimate conclusions from the logic of rebellion and want to make the earth a kingdom where man is God.  The reign of history begins and, identifying himself only with his history, man, unfaithful to his real rebellion, will henceforth devote himself to the nihilistic revolution of the twentieth century, which denies all forms of morality and desperately attempts to achieve the unity of the human race by means of a ruinous series of crimes and wars.  The Jacobin Revolution, which tried to institute the religion of virtue in order to establish unity upon it, will be followed by the cynical revolutions, which can be either of the right or of the left and which will try to achieve the unity of the world so as to found, at last, the religion of man.  All that was God’s will henceforth be rendered to Cæsar.

The Deicides

*

            Justice, reason, truth still shone in the Jacobin heaven, performing the function of fixed stars, which could, at least, serve as guides.  German nineteenth-century thinkers, particularly Hegel, wanted to continue the work of the French Revolution [And of the Reformation – “the Germans’ Revolution,” according to Hegel.] while suppressing the causes of its failure.  Hegel thought that he discerned the seeds of the Terror contained in the abstract principles of the Jacobins.  According to him, absolute and abstract freedom must inevitably lead to terrorism; the rule of abstract law is identical with the rule of oppression.  For example, Hegel remarks that the period between the time of Augustus and Alexander Severus (A.D.  235) is the period of the greatest legal proficiency but also the period of the most ruthless tyranny.  To avoid this contradiction, it was therefore necessary to wish to construct a concrete society, invigorated by a principle that was not formal and in which freedom could be reconciled with necessity.  German philosophy therefore finished by substituting, for the universal but abstract reason of Saint-Just and Rousseau, a less artificial but more ambiguous idea: concrete universal reason.  Up to this point, reason had soared above the phenomena which were related to it.  Now reason is, henceforth, incorporated in the stream of historical events, which it explains while deriving its substance from them.

            It can certainly be said that Hegel rationalized to the point of being irrational.  But, at the same time, he gave reason an unreasonable shock by endowing it with a lack of moderation, the results of which are now before our eyes.  Into the fixed ideas of this period, German thought suddenly introduced an irresistible urge to movement.  Truth, reason, and justice were abruptly incarnated in the progress of the world.  But by committing them to perpetual acceleration, German ideology confused their existence with their impulse and fixed the conclusion of this existence at the final stage of the historical future – if there was to be one.  These values have ceased to be guides in order to become goals.  As for the means of attaining these goals, specifically life and history, no pre-existent value can point the way.  On the contrary, a large part of Hegelian demonstration is devoted to proving that moral conscience, by being so banal as to obey justice and truth, as though these values existed independently of the world, jeopardizes, precisely for this reason, the advent of these values.  The rule of action has thus become action itself – which must be performed in darkness while awaiting the final illumination.  Reason, annexed by this form of romanticism, is nothing more than an inflexible passion.

            The ends have remained the same, only ambition has increased; thought has become dynamic, reason has embraced the future and aspired to conquest.  Action is no more than a calculation based on results, not on principles.  Consequently it confounds itself with perpetual movement.  In the same way, all the disciplines that characterize eighteenth-century thought as rigid and addicted to classification were abandoned in the nineteenth century.  Just as Darwin replaced Linnæus, the philosophers who supported the doctrine of an incessant dialectic replaced the harmonious and strict constructors of reason.  From this moment dates the idea (hostile to every concept of ancient thought, which, on the contrary, reappeared to a certain extent in the mind of revolutionary France) that man has not been endowed with a definitive human nature, that he is not a finished creation but an experiment, of which he can be partly the creator.  With Napoleon and the Napoleonic philosopher Hegel, the period of efficacy begins.  Before Napoleon, men had discovered space and the universe; with Napoleon, they discovered time and the future in terms of this world; and by this discover the spirit of rebellion is going to be profoundly transformed.

            In any case, it is strange to find Hegel’s philosophy at this new stage in the development of the spirit of rebellion.  Actually, in one sense, his work exudes an absolute horror of dissidence: he wanted to be the very essence of reconciliation.  But this is only one aspect of a system which, by its very method, is the most ambiguous in all philosophic literature.  To the extent that, for him, what is real is rational, he justifies every ideological encroachment upon reality.  What has been called Hegel’s panlogism is a justification of the condition of fact.  But his philosophy also exalts destruction for its own sake.  Everything is reconciled, of course, in the dialectic, and one extreme cannot be stated without the other arising; there exists in Hegel, as in all great thinkers, the material for contradicting Hegel.  Philosophers, however, are rarely read with the head alone, but often with the heart and all its passions, which can accept no kind of reconciliation.

            Nevertheless, the revolutionaries of the twentieth century have borrowed from Hegel the weapons with which they definitively destroyed the formal principles of virtue.  All that they have preserved is the vision of a history without any kind of transcendence, dedicated to perpetual strife and to the struggle of wills bent on seizing power.  In its critical aspect, the revolutionary movement of our times is primarily a violent denunciation of the formal hypocrisy that provides over bourgeois society.  The partially justified pretension of modern Communism, like the more frivolous claims of Fascism, is to denounce the mystification that underlines the principles and virtues of the bourgeois type of democracy.  Divine transcendence, up to 1789, served to justify the arbitrary actions of the king.  After the French Revolution, the transcendence of the formal principles of reason or justice serves to justify a rule that is neither just nor reasonable.  This transcendence is therefore a mask that must be torn off.  God is dead, but as Stirner predicted, the morality of principles in which the memory of God is still preserved must also be killed.  The hatred of formal virtue – degraded witness to divinity and false witness in the service of injustice – has remained one of the principal themes of history today.  Nothing is pure: that is the cry which convulses our period.  Impurity, the equivalent of history, is going to become the rule, and the abandoned earth will be delivered to naked force, which will decide whether or not is divine.  Thus lies and violence are adopted in the same spirit in which a religion is adopted and on the same heartrending impulse.

            But the first fundamental criticism of the good conscience – the denunciation of the beautiful soul and of ineffectual attitudes – we owe to Hegel, for whom the ideology of the good, the true, and the beautiful is the religion of those possessed of none of them.  While the mere existence of factions surprises Saint-Just and contravenes the ideal order that he affirms, Hegel not only is not surprised, but even affirms that faction is the prelude to thought.  For the Jacobin, everyone is virtuous.  The movement which starts with Hegel, and which is triumphant today, presumes, on the contrary, that no one is virtuous, but that everyone will be.  At the beginning, everything, according to Saint-Just, is an idyll; according to Hegel, everything is a tragedy.  But in the end that amounts to the same thing.  Those who destroy the idyll must be destroyed or destruction must be embarked on in order to create the idyll.  Violence, in both cases, is the victor.  The repudiation of the Terror, undertaken by Hegel, only leads to an extension of the Terror.

            That is not all.  Apparently the world today can no longer be anything other than a world of masters and slaves because contemporary ideologies, those that are changing the face of the earth, have learned from Hegel to conceive of history in terms of the dialectic of master and slave.  If, on the first morning of the world, under the empty sky, there is only a master and a slave; even if there is only the bond of master and slave between a transcendent god and mankind, then there can be no other law in this world than the law of force.  Only a god, or a principle above the master and the salve, could intervene and make men’s history something more than a mere chronicle of their victories and defeats.  First Hegel and then the Hegelians have tried, on the contrary, to destroy, more and more thoroughly, all idea of transcendence and any nostalgia for transcendence.  Although there was infinitely more to Hegel than in the left-wing Hegelians who finally have triumphed over him, he nevertheless furnished, on the level of the dialectic of master and slave, the decisive justification of the spirit of power in the twentieth century.  The conqueror is always right; that is one of the lessons which can be learned from the most important German philosophical system of the nineteenth century.  Of course, there is to be found, in the prodigious Hegelian edifice, a means of partially contradicting those ideas.  But twentieth-century ideology is not connected with what is improperly called the idealism of the master of Jena.  Hegel’s face, which reappears in Russian Communism, has been successively remodelled by David Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, Marx, and the entire Hegelian left-wing.  We are only interested in him here because he alone has any real bearing on the history of our time.  If Nietzsche and Hegel serve as alibis to the masters of Dachau and Karaganda [They found less philosophic models in the Prussian, Napoleonic, and Czarist police and in the British concentration camps in South Africa.], that does not condemn their entire philosophy.  But it does lead to the suspicion that one aspect of their thought, or of their logic, can lead to these appalling conclusions.

            Nietzschean nihilism is methodical.  The Phenomenology of the Mind also has a didactic aspect.  At the meeting-point of two centuries, it depicts, in its successive stages, the education of the mind as it pursues its way toward absolute truth.  It is a metaphysical Émile. [In one sense there is a ground of comparison between Hegel and Rousseau.  The fortune of the Phenomenology has been, in its consequences, of the same kind as that of the Social Contract.  It shaped the political thought of its time.  Rousseau’s theory of the general will, besides, recurs in the Hegelian system.]  Each stage is an error and is, moreover, accompanied by historic sanctions which are almost always fatal, either to the mind or to the civilization in which it is reflected.  Hegel proposes to demonstrate the necessity of these painful stages.  The Phenomenology is, in one aspect, a meditation of despair and death.  The mission of despair is, simply, to be methodical in that it must be transfigured, at the end of history, into absolute satisfaction and absolute wisdom.  The book has the defect, however, of only imagining highly intelligent pupils and it has been taken literally, while, literally, it only wanted to proclaim the spirit.  It is the same with the celebrated analysis of mastery and slavery.

            Animals, according to Hegel, have an immediate knowledge of the exterior world, a perception of the self, but not the knowledge of self, which distinguishes man.  The latter is only really born at the moment when he becomes aware of himself as a rational being.  Therefore his essential characteristic is self-consciousness.  Consciousness of self, to be affirmed, must distinguish itself from what it is not.  Man is a creature who, to affirm his existence and his difference, denies.  What distinguishes consciousness of self from the world of nature is not the simple act of contemplation by which it identifies itself with the exterior world and finds oblivion, but the desire it can feel with regard to the world.  This desire re-establishes its identity when it demonstrates that the exterior world is something apart.  In its desire, the exterior world consists of what it does not possess, but which nevertheless exists, and of what it would like to exist but which no longer does.  Consciousness of self is therefore, of necessity, desire.  But in order to exist it must be satisfied, and it can only be satisfied by the gratification of its desire.  It therefore acts in order to gratify itself and, in so doing, it denies and suppresses its means of gratification.  It is the epitome of negation.  To act is to destroy in order to give birth to the spiritual reality of consciousness.  But to destroy an object unconsciously, as meat is destroyed, for example, in the act of eating, is a purely animal activity.  To consume is not yet to be conscious.  Desire for consciousness must be directed toward something other than unconscious nature.  The only thing in the world that is distinct from nature is, precisely, self-consciousness.  Therefore desire must be centred upon another form of desire; self-consciousness must be gratified by another form of self-consciousness.  In simple words, man is not recognized – and does not recognize himself – as a man as long as he limits himself to subsisting like an animal.  He must be acknowledged by other men.  All consciousness is, basically, the desire to be recognized and proclaimed as such by other consciousnesses.  It is others who beget us.  Only in association do we receive a human value, as distinct from an animal value.

            In that the supreme value for the animal is the preservation of life, consciousness should raise itself above the level of that instinct in order to achieve human value.  It should be capable of risking its life.  To be recognized by another consciousness, man should be ready to risk his life and to accept the chance of death.  Fundamental human relations are thus relations of pure prestige, a perpetual struggle, to the death, for recognition of one human being by another.

            At the first stage of his dialectic, Hegel affirms that insofar as death is the common ground of man and animal, it is by accepting death and even by inviting it that the former differentiates himself from the latter.  At the heart of this primordial struggle for recognition, man is thus identified with violent death. The mystic slogan “Die and become what you are” is taken up once more by Hegel.  But “become what you are” gives place to “Become what you so far are not.”  This primitive and passionate desire for recognition, which is confused with the will to exist, can be satisfied only by a recognition gradually extended until it embraces everyone.  In that everyone wants equally much to be recognized by everyone, the fight for life will cease only with the recognition of all by all, which will mark the termination of history.  The existence that Hegelian consciousness seeks to obtain is born in the hard-won glory of collective approval.  It is not beside the point to note that, in the thought which will inspire our revolutions, the supreme good does not, in reality, coincide with existence, but with an arbitrary facsimile. The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.  It is, in its essence, imperialist.  We are far from the gentle savage of the eighteenth century and from the Social Contract.  In the sound and fury of the passing centuries, each separate consciousness, to ensure its own existence, must henceforth desire the death of others.  Moreover, this relentless tragedy is absurd, since, in the event of one consciousness being destroyed, the victorious consciousness is not recognized as such, in that it cannot be victorious in the eyes of something that no longer exists.  In fact, it is here the philosophy of appearances reaches its limits.

            No human reality would therefore have been engendered if, thanks to a propensity that can be considered fortunate for Hegel’s system, there had not existed, from the beginning of time, two kinds of consciousness, one of which has not the courage to renounce life and is therefore willing to recognize the other kind of consciousness without being recognized itself in return.  Its consents, in short, to being considered as an object.  This type of consciousness, which, to preserve its animal existence, renounces independent life, is the consciousness of a slave.  The type of consciousness which by being recognized achieves independence is that of the master.  They are distinguished one from the other at the moment when they clash and when one submits to the other.  The dilemma at this stage is not to be free or to die, but to kill or to enslave.  This dilemma will resound throughout the course of history, though at this moment its absurdity has not yet been resolved.

            Undoubtedly the master enjoys total freedom first as regards the slave, since the latter recognizes him totally, and then as regards the natural world, since by his work the slave transforms it into objects of enjoyment which the master consumes in a perpetual affirmation of his own identity.  However, this autonomy is not absolute.  The master, to his misfortune, is recognized in his autonomy by a consciousness that he himself does not recognize as autonomous.  Therefore he cannot be satisfied and his autonomy is only negative.  Mastery is a blind alley.  Since, moreover, he cannot renounce mastery and become a slave again, the eternal destiny of masters is to live unsatisfied or to be killed.  The master serves no other purpose in history than to arouse servile consciousness, the only form of consciousness that really creates history.  The slave, in fact, is not bound to his condition, but wants to change it.  Thus, unlike his master, he can improve himself, and what is called history is nothing but the effects of his long efforts to obtain real freedom.  Already, by work, by his transformation of the natural world into a technical world, he manages to escape from the nature which was the basis of his slavery in that he did not know how to raise himself above it by accepting death.  [Actually, the ambiguity is profound, for the nature in question is not the same.  Does the advent of the technical world suppress death or the fear of death in the natural world?  That is the real question, which Hegel leaves in suspense.]  The very agony of death experienced in the humiliation of the entire being lifts the slave to the level of human totality.  He knows, henceforth, that his totality exists; now it only remains for him to conquer it through a long series of struggles against nature and against the masters.  History identifies itself, therefore, with the history of endeavour and rebellion.  It is hardly astonishing that Marxism-Leninism derived from this dialectic the contemporary ideal of the soldier worker.

            We shall leave aside the description of the various attitudes of the servile consciousness (stoicism, scepticism, guilty conscience) which then follows in the Phenomenology.  But, thanks to its consequences, another aspect of this dialectic cannot be neglected: namely, the assimilation of the master-slave relationship to the relationship between man and God.  One of Hegel’s commentators [Jean Hyppolite] remarks that if the master really existed, he would be God.  Hegel himself calls the master of the Master of the world the real God.  In his description of guilty conscience he shows how the Christian slave, wishing to deny everything that oppresses him, takes refuge in the world beyond and by doing so gives himself a new master in the person of God.  Elsewhere Hegel identifies the supreme master with absolute death.  And so the struggle begins again, on a higher level, between man in chains and the cruel God of Abraham.  The solution to this new conflict between the universal God and the human entity will be furnished by Christ, who reconciles in Himself the universal and the unique.  But, in one sense, Christ is a part of the palpable world.  He is visible, He lived and died.  He is therefore only a stage on the road to the universal; He too must be denied dialectically.  It is only necessary to recognize Him as the man-God to obtain a higher synthesis.  Skipping the intermediary stages, it suffices to say that this synthesis, after being incarnated in the Church and in Reason, culminates in the absolute State, founded by the soldier workers, where the spirit of the world will be finally reflected in the mutual recognition of each by all and in the universal reconciliation of everything that has ever existed under the sun.  At this moment, “when the eyes of the spirit coincide with the eyes of the body,” each individual consciousness will be nothing more than a mirror reflecting another mirror, itself reflected to infinity in infinitely recurring images.  The City of God will coincide with the city of humanity; and universal history, sitting in judgement on the world, will pass its sentence by which good and evil will be justified.  The State will play the part of Destiny and will proclaim its approval of every aspect of reality on “the sacred day of the Presence.”

            This sums up the essential ideas which in spite, or because, of the extreme ambiguity of their interpretation, have literally driven the revolutionary mind in apparently contradictory directions and which we are now learning to rediscover in the ideology of our times.  Amorality, scientific materialism, and atheism have definitely replaced the anti-theism of the rebels of former times and have made common cause, under Hegel’s paradoxical influence, with a revolutionary movement which, until his time, was never really separated from its moral, evangelical, and idealistic origins.  These tendencies, if they are sometimes very far from really originating with Hegel, found their source in the ambiguity of his thought and in his critique of transcendence.  Hegel’s undeniable originality lies in his definitive destruction of all vertical transcendence – particularly the transcendence of principles.  There is no doubt that he restores the immanence of the spirit to the evolution of the world.  But this immanence is not precisely defined and has nothing in common with the pantheism of the ancients.  The spirit is and is not part of the world; it creates itself and will finally prevail.  Values are thus only to be found at the end of history.  Until then there is no suitable criterion on which to base a judgement of value.  One must act and live in terms of the future.  All morality becomes provisional.  The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in their most profound manifestations, are centuries that have tried to live without transcendence.

            One of Hegel’s commentators, Alexandre Kojève, of left-wing tendencies it is true, but orthodox in his opinion on this particular point, notes Hegel’s hostility to the moralists and remarks that his only axiom is to live according to the manners and customs of one’s nation.  A maxim of social conformity of which Hegel, in fact, gave the most cynical proofs.  Kojève adds, however, that this conformity is legitimate only to the extent that the customs of the nation correspond to the spirit of the times – in other words, to the extent that they are solidly established and can resist revolutionary criticism and attacks.  But who will determine their solidity and who will judge their validity?  For a hundred years the capitalist regimes of the West have withstood violent assaults.  Should they for that reason be considered legitimate?  Inversely, should those who were faithful to the Weimar Republic have abandoned it and pledged themselves to Hitler in 1933 because the former collapsed when attacked by the latter?  Should the Spanish Republic have been betrayed at the exact moment when General Franco’s forces triumphed?  These are conclusions that traditional reactionary thought would have justified within its own perspectives.  The novelty, of which the consequences are incalculable, lies in the fact that revolutionary thought has assimilated them.  The suppression of every moral value and of all principles and their replacement by fact, as provisional but actual king, could only lead, as we have plainly seen, to political cynicism, whether it be fact as envisioned by the individual or, more serious still, as envisioned by the State.  The political movements, or ideologies, inspired by Hegel are all united in the ostensibly abandonment of virtue.

            Hegel could not, in fact, prevent those who had read him, with feelings of anguish which were far from methodical in a Europe that was already torn asunder by injustice, from finding themselves precipitated into a world without innocence and without principles – into the very world of which Hegel says that it is in itself a sin, since it is separated from the spirit.  Hegel, of course, permits the forgiveness of sins at the end of history.  Until then, however, every human activity is sinful.  “Therefore only the absence of activity is innocent, the existence of a stone and not even the existence of a child.”  Thus even the innocence of stones is unknown to us.  Without innocence there are no human relations and no reason.  Without reason, there is nothing but naked force, the master and slave waiting for reason one day to prevail.  Between master and slave, even suffering is solitary, joy is without foundation, and both are underserved.  Then how can one live, how endure life when friendship is reserved for the end of time?  The only escape is to create order with the use of weapons.  “Kill or enslave!” – those who have read Hegel with this single and terrible purpose have really considered only the first part of the dilemma.  From it they have derived a philosophy of scorn and despair and have deemed themselves slaves and nothing but slaves, bound by death to the absolute Master and by the whip to their terrestrial masters.  This philosophy of the guilty conscience has merely taught them that every slave is enslaved only by his own consent, and can be liberated only by an act of protest which coincides with death.  Answering the challenge, the most courageous among them have completely identified themselves with this act of protest and have dedicated themselves to death.  After all, to say that negation is in itself a positive act justified in advance every kind of negation and predicted the cry of Bakunin and Nechaiev: “Our mission is to destroy, not to construct.”  A nihilist for Hegel was only a sceptic who had no other escape but contradiction or philosophic suicide.  But he himself gave birth to another type of nihilist, who, making boredom into a principle of action, identified suicide with philosophic murder.  [This form of nihilism, despite appearances, is still nihilism in the Nietzschean sense, to the extent that it is a calumny of the present life to the advantage of a historical future in which one tries to believe.]  It was at this point that the terrorists were born who decided that it was necessary to kill and die in order to exist, because mankind and history could achieve their creation only by sacrifice and murder.  The magnificent idea that all idealism is chimerical if it is not paid for by risking one’s life was to be developed to the fullest possible extent by young men who were not engaged in expounding the concept from the safe distance of a university chair before dying in their beds, but among the tumult of falling bombs and even on the gallows.  By doing this and even by their errors they corrected their master and demonstrated, contrary to his teaching, that one kind of aristocracy, at least, is superior to the hideous aristocracy of success exalted by Hegel: the aristocracy of sacrifice.

            Another sort of follower, who read Hegel more seriously, chose the second term of the dilemma and made the pronouncement that the slave could only free himself by enslaving in his turn.  Post-Hegelian doctrines, unmindful of the mystic aspect of certain of the master’s tendencies, have led his followers to absolute atheism and to scientific materialism.  But this evolution is inconceivable without the absolute disappearance of every principle of transcendent explanation, and without the complete destruction of the Jacobin ideal.  Immanence, of course, is not atheism.  But immanence in the process of development is, if one can say so, provisional atheism.  [In any event, the criticism of Kierkegaard is valid.  To base divinity on history is, paradoxically, to base an absolute value on approximate knowledge.  Something “eternally historic” is a contradiction in terms.]  The indefinite face of God which, with Hegel, is still reflected in the spirit of the world will not be difficult to efface.  Hegel’s successors will draw decisive conclusions from his ambiguous formula: “God without man is no more than man without God.”  David Strauss in his Life of Jesus isolates the theory of Christ considered as the God-man.  Bruno Bauer (The Critique of Evangelist History) institutes a kind of materialist Christianity by insisting on the humanity of Jesus.  Finally, Ludwig Feuerbach (whom Marx considered as a great mind and of whom he acknowledges himself the critical disciple), in his Essence of Christianity, replaces all theology by a religion of man and the species, which has converted a large part of contemporary thought.  His task is to demonstrate that the distinction between human and divine is illusory, that it is nothing but the distinction between the essence of humanity – in other words, human nature – and the individual.  “The mystery of God is only the mystery of the love of man for himself.”  The accents of a strange new prophecy ring out: “Individuality has replaced faith, reason the Bible, politics religion and the Church, the earth heaven, work prayer, poverty hell, and man Christ.”  Thus there is only one hell and it is on this earth: and it is against this that the struggle must be waged.  Politics is religion, and transcendent Christianity – that of the hereafter – establishes the masters of the earth by means of the slave’s renunciation and creates one master more beneath the heavens.  That is why atheism and the revolutionary spirit are only two aspects of the same movement of liberation.  That is the answer to the question which is always being asked: why has the revolutionary movement identified itself with materialism rather than with idealism?  Because to conquer God, to make Him a slave, amounts to abolishing the transcendence that kept the former masters in power and to preparing, with the ascendancy of the new tyrants, the advent of the man-king.  When poverty is abolished, when the contradictions of history are resolved, “the real god, the human god, will be the State.”  Then homo homini lupus becomes homo homini deus.  This concept is at the root of the contemporary world.  With Feuerbach, we assist at the birth of a terrible form of optimism which we can still observe at work today and which seems to be the very antithesis of nihilist despair.  But that is only in appearance.  We must know Feuerbach’s final conclusion in this Theogony to perceive the profoundly nihilist derivation of his inflamed imagination.  In effect, Feuerbach affirms, in the face of Hegel, that man is only what he eats, and thus recapitulates his ideas and predicts the future in the following phrase: “The true philosophy is the negation of philosophy.  No religion is my religion.  No philosophy is my philosophy.”

            Cynicism, the deification of history and of matter, individual terror and State crime, these are the inordinate consequences that will now spring, armed to the teeth, from the equivocal conception of a world that entrusts to history alone the task of producing both values and truth.  If nothing can be clearly understood before truth has been brought to light, at the end of time, then every action is arbitrary, and force will finally rule supreme.  “If reality is inconceivable,” Hegel exclaims, “then we must contrive inconceivable concepts.”  A concept that cannot be conceived must, perforce, like error, be contrived.  But to be accepted it cannot rely on the persuasion innate in order and truth, but must finally be imposed.  Hegel’s attitude consists of saying: “This is truth, which appears to us, however, to be error, but which is true precisely because it happens to be error.  As for proof, it is not I, but history, at its conclusion, that will furnish it.”  Such pretensions can only entail two attitudes: either the suspension of all affirmation until the production of proof, or the affirmation of everything, in history, which seems dedicated to success – force in particular.  And both attitudes imply nihilism.  Moreover, it is impossible to understand twentieth-century revolutionary thought if we overlook the fact that unfortunately it derived a large part of its inspiration from a philosophy of conformity and opportunism.  True rebellion is not jeopardized on account of the distortion of these particular ideas.

            Nevertheless, the basis of Hegel’s claims is what renders them intellectually and forever suspect.  He believed that history in 1807, with the advent of Napoleon and of himself, had come to an end, and that affirmation was possible and nihilism conquered.  The Phenomenology, the Bible that was to have prophesied only the past, put a limit on time.  In 1807 all sins were forgiven, and time had stopped.  But history has continued.  Other sins, since then, have been hurled in the face of the world and have revived the scandal of the former crimes, which the German philosopher had already forgiven forever.  The deification of Hegel by himself, after the deification of Napoleon, who would henceforth be innocent since he had succeeded in stabilizing history, lasted only seven years.  Instead of total affirmation, nihilism once more covered the face of the earth.  Philosophy, even servile philosophy, has its Waterloos.

            But nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man.  Others have come and are still to come who, forgetting Waterloo, still claim to terminate history.  The divinity of man is still on the march, and will be worthy of adoration only at the end of time.  This apocalypse must be promoted and, despite the fact that there is no God, at least a Church must be built.  After all, history, which has not yet come to an end, allows us a glimpse of a perspective that might even be that of the Hegelian system but for the simple reason that it is provisionally dragged along, if not led, by the spiritual heirs of Hegel.  When cholera carries off the philosopher of the Battle of Jena at the height of his glory, everything is, in fact, in order for what is to follow.  The sky is empty, the earth delivered into the hands of power without principles.  Those who have chosen to kill and those who have chosen to enslave will successively occupy the front of the stage, in the name of a form of rebellion which has been diverted from the path of truth.

Individual Terrorism

*

            Pisarev, the theoretician of Russian nihilism, declares that the greatest fanatics are children and adolescents. That is also true of nations.  Russia, at this period, is an adolescent nation, delivered with forceps, barely a century ago, by a Czar who was still ingenuous enough to cut off the heads of rebels himself.  It is not astounding that she should have pushed Germanic ideology to extremes of sacrifice and destruction which German professors had only been capable of theorizing about.  Stendhal noticed an essential difference between Germans and other people in the fact that they are excited by meditation rather than soothed.  That is true, but it is even more true of Russia.  In that immature country, completely without philosophic tradition, [Pisarev remarks that civilization, in its ideological aspects, has always been imported into Russia.] some very young people, akin to Lautréamont’s tragic fellow students, enthusiastically embraced the concepts of German thought and incarnated the consequences in blood.  A “proletariat of undergraduates” [Dostoievsky] then took the lead in the great movement of human emancipation and gave it its most violent aspect.  Until the end of the nineteenth century these undergraduates never numbered more than a few thousand.  Entirely on their own, however, and in defiance of the most integrated absolutism of the time, they aspired to liberate and provisionally did contribute to the liberation of forty million muzhiks.  Almost all of them paid for this liberation by suicide, execution, prison, or madness.  The entire history of Russian terrorism can be summed up in the struggle of a handful of intellectuals to abolish tyranny, against a background of a silent populace.  Their debilitated victory was finally betrayed.  But by their sacrifice and even by their most extreme negations they gave substance to a new standard of values, a new virtue, which even today has not ceased to oppose tyranny and to give aid to the cause of true liberation.

            The Germanization of nineteenth-century Russia is not an isolated phenomenon.  The influence of German ideology at that moment was preponderant, and we are well aware, for example, that the nineteenth century in France, with Michelet and Quinet, is the century of Germanic thought.  But in Russia this ideology did not encounter an already established system, while in France it had to contend and compromise with libertarian socialism.  In Russia it was on conquered territory.  The first Russian university, the University of Moscow, founded in 1750, is German.  The slow colonization of Russia by German teachers, bureaucrats, and soldiers, which began under Peter the Great, was transformed at the instance of Nicholas I into systematic Germanization.  The intelligentsia developed a passion for Schelling (simultaneously with the passion for French writers) in the 1830’s, for Hegel in the 1840’s, and in the second half of the century for German socialism derived from Hegel.  [Das Kapital was translated in 1872.]  Russian youth then proceeded to pour into these abstract thoughts the inordinate violence of its passions and authentically experienced these already moribund ideas.  The religion of man already formulated by its German pastors was still missing its apostles and martyrs.  Russian Christians, led astray from their original vocation, played this role.  For this reason they had to accept life without transcendence and without virtue.

            The Renunciation of Virtue

            In the 1820’s among the first Russian revolutionaries, the Decembrists, virtue still existed.  Jacobin idealism had not yet been uprooted from the hearts of these gentlemen.  They even practised conscious virtue: “Our fathers were sybarites, we are Catos,” said one of them, Peter Viazemsky.  To this is only added the opinion, which will still be found in Bakunin and the revolutionary socialists of 1905, that suffering regenerates.  The Decembrists remind us of the French nobles who allied themselves with the third estate and renounced their privileges.  Patrician idealists, they deliberately chose to sacrifice themselves for the liberation of the people.  Despite the fact that their leader, Pestel, was a political and social theorist, their abortive conspiracy had no fixed programme; it is not even sure that they believed in the possibility of success.  “Yes, we shall die,” one of them said on the eve of the insurrection, “but it will be a fine death.”  It was, in fact, a fine death.  In December 1825 the rebels, arranged in formation, were mown down by cannon fire in the square in front of the Senate at St. Petersburg.  The survivors were deported, but not before five had been hanged, and so clumsily that it had to be done twice.  It is easy to understand why these ostensibly inefficacious victims have been venerated, with feelings of exaltation and horror, by all of revolutionary Russia.  They were exemplary, if not efficacious.  They indicated, at the beginning of this chapter of revolutionary history, the ambitions and the greatness of what Hegel ironically called the beautiful soul in relation to which Russian revolutionary ideas were, nevertheless, to be defined.

            In this atmosphere of exaltation, German thought came to combat French influence and impose its prestige on minds torn between their desire for vengeance and justice and the realization of their own impotent isolation.  It was first received, extolled, and commented upon as though it were revelation itself.  The best minds were inflamed with a passion for philosophy.  They even went so far as to put Hegel’s Logic into verse.  For the most part, Russian intellectuals at first inferred, from the Hegelian system, the justification of a form of social quietism.  To be aware of the rationality of the world sufficed; the Spirit would realize itself, in any case, at the end of time.  That is the first reaction of Stankevich, [“The world is ordered by the spirit of reason, this reassures me about everything else.”] Bakunin, and Bielinsky, for example. Then the Russian mind recoiled at this factual, if not intentional, complicity with absolutism and, immediately, jumped to the opposite extreme.

            Nothing is more revealing, in this respect, than the evolution of Bielinsky, one of the most remarkable and influential minds of the 1830’s and 40’s.  Beginning with a background of rather vague libertarian idealism, Bielinsky suddenly discovers Hegel.  In his room, at midnight, under the shock of revelation, he bursts into tears like Pascal and suddenly becomes a new man.  “Neither chance nor the absolute exists, I have made my adieux to the French.”  At the same time he is still a conservative and a partisan of social quietism.  He writes to that effect without a single hesitation and defends his position, as he perceives it, courageously.  But this essentially kind-hearted man then sees himself allied with what is most detestable in this world: injustice.  If everything is logical, then everything is justified.  One must consent to the whip, to serfdom, to Siberia.  To accept the world and its sufferings seemed to him, at one moment, the noble thing to do because he imagined that he would only have to bear his own sufferings and his own contradictions.  But if it also implied consent to the sufferings of others, he suddenly discovered that he had not the heart to continue.  He set out again in the opposite direction.  If one cannot accept the suffering of others, then something in the world cannot be justified, and history, at one point at least, no longer coincides with reason.  But history must be completely reasonable or it is not reasonable at all.  This man’s solitary protest, quieted for a moment by the idea that everything can be justified, bursts forth again in vehement terms.  Bielinsky addresses Hegel himself: “With all the esteem due to your philistine philosophy, I have the honour to inform you that even if I had the opportunity of climbing to the very top of the ladder of evolution, I should still ask you to account for all the victims of life and history.  I do not want happiness, even gratuitous happiness, if my mind is not at rest concerning all my blood brothers.”

            Bielinsky understood that what he wanted was not the absolute of reason but the fullness of life.  He refuses to identify them.  He wants the immortality of the entire man, clothed in his living body, not the abstract immortality of the species become Spirit.  He argues with equal passion against new adversaries, and draws, from this fierce interior debate, conclusions that he owes to Hegel, but which he turns against him.

            These are the conclusions of individualism in revolt.  The individual cannot accept history as it is.  He must destroy reality, not collaborate with it, in order to affirm his own existence.  “Negation is my god, as reality formerly was.  My heroes are the destroyers of the past: Luther, Voltaire, the Encyclopedists, the Terrorists, Byron in Cain.”  Thus we rediscover here, simultaneously, all the themes of metaphysical rebellion.  Certainly, the French tradition of individualistic socialism always remained alive in Russia.  Saint-Simon and Fourier, who were read in the 1830’s, and Proudhon, who was imported in the forties, inspired the great concepts of Herzen, and, very much later, those of Pierre Lavrov.  But this system, which remained attached to ethical values, finally succumbed, provisionally at any rate, during its great debate with cynical thought.  On the other hand, Bielinsky rediscovers both with and against Hegel the same tendencies to social individualism, but under the aspect of negation, in the rejection of transcendental values.  When he dies, in 1848, his thought will moreover be very close to that of Herzen.  But when he confronts Hegel, he defines, with precision, an attitude that will be adopted by the nihilists, and at least in part by the terrorists.  Thus he furnishes a type of transition between the idealist aristocrats of 1825 and the “nothingist” students of 1860.

            Three of the Possessed

            When Herzen, in making his apology for the nihilist movement – only to the extent, it is true, that he sees in it a still greater emancipation from ready-made ideas – writes: “The annihilation of the past is the procreation of the future,” he is using the language of Bielinsky.  Koteiarevsky, speaking of the so-called radicals of the period, defends them as apostles “who thought that the past must be completely renounced and the human personality must be constructed to quite another plan.”  Stirner’s claim reappears with the total rejection of history and the determination to construct the future, no longer with regard to the historical spirit, but so as to coincide with the man-king.  But the man-king cannot raise himself to power unaided.  He has need of others and therefore enters into a nihilist contradiction which Pisarev, Bakunin, and Nechaiev will try to resolve by slightly extending the area of destruction and negation, to the point where terrorism finally kills the contradiction itself, in a simultaneous act of sacrifice and murder.

            The nihilism of the 1860’s began, apparently, with the most radical negation imaginable: the rejection of any action that was not purely egoistic.  We know that the very term nihilism was invented by Turgeniev in his novel Fathers and Sons, whose hero, Bazarov, was an exact portrayal of this type of man.  Pisarev, when he wrote a criticism of this book, proclaimed that the nihilists recognized Bazarov as their model.  “We have nothing,” said Bazarov, “to boast about but the sterile knowledge of understanding, up to a certain point, the sterility of what exists.”  “Is that,” he was asked, “what is called nihilism?”  “Yes, that is what is called nihilism.”  Pisarev praises Bazarov’s attitude, which for the sake of clarity he defines thus: “I am a stranger to the order of existing things, I have nothing to do with it.”  Thus the only value resides in rational egoism.

            In denying everything that is not satisfaction of the self, Pisarev declares war on philosophy, on art, which he considers absurd, on erroneous ethics, on religion, and even on customs and on good manners.  He constructs a theory of intellectual terrorism which makes one think of the present-day surrealists.  Provocation is made into a doctrine, but on a level of which Raskolnikov provides the perfect example.  At the height of this fine transport, Pisarev asks himself, without even laughing, whether he is justified in killing his own mother and answers: “And why not, if I want to do so, and if I find it useful?”

            From that point on, it is surprising not to find the nihilists engaged in making a fortune or acquiring a title or in cynically taking advantage of every opportunity that offers itself.  It is true that there were nihilists to be found in advantageous positions on all levels of society.  But they did not construct a theory from their cynicism and preferred on all occasions to pay visible and quite inconsequential homage to virtue.  As for those we are discussing, they contradicted themselves by the defiance they hurled in the face of society, which in itself was the affirmation of a value.  They called themselves materialists; their bedside book was Buchner’s Force and Matter.  But one of them confessed: “Every one of us was ready to go to the scaffold and to give his head for Moleschott and Darwin,” thus putting doctrine well ahead of matter.  Doctrine, taken seriously in this degree, has an air of religion and fanaticism.  For Pisarev, Lamarck was a traitor because Darwin was right.  Whoever in this intellectual sphere began talking about the immortality of the soul was immediately excommunicated.  Vladimir Veidle is therefore right when he defines nihilism as rationalist obscurantism.  Reason among the nihilists, strangely enough, annexed the prejudices of faith; choosing the most popularized forms of science-worship for their prototype of reason was not the least of the contradictions accepted by these individualists.  They denied everything but the most debatable of values, the values of Flaubert’s Monsieur Homais.

            However, it was by choosing to make reason, in its most limited aspect, into an act of faith that the nihilists provided their successors with a model.  They believed in nothing but reason and self-interest.  But instead of scepticism, they chose to propagate a doctrine and became socialists.  Therein lies their basic contradiction.  Like all adolescent minds they simultaneously experienced doubt and the need to believe.  Their personal solution consists in endowing their negation with the intransigence and passion of faith.  What, after all, is astonishing about that?  Veidle quotes the scornful phrase used by Soloviev, the philosopher, in denouncing this contradiction: “Man is descended from monkeys, therefore let us love one another.”  Pisarev’s truth, however, is to be found in this dilemma.  If man is the image of God, then it does not matter that he is deprived of human love; the day will come when he will be satiated with it.  But if he is a blind creature, wandering in the darkness of a cruel and circumscribed condition, he has need of his equals and of their ephemeral love.  Where can charity take refuge, after all, if not in the world without God?  In the other, grace provides for all, even for the rich.  Those who deny everything at least understand that negation is a calamity.  They can then open their hearts to the misery of others and finally deny themselves.  Pisarev did not shrink from the idea of murdering his mother, and yet he managed to find the exact words to describe injustice.  He wanted to enjoy life egotistically, but he suffered imprisonment and finally went mad.  Such an ostentatious display of cynicism finally led him to an understanding of love, to be exiled from it and to suffer from it to the point of suicide, thus revealing, in place of the man-god he wanted to create, the unhappy, suffering old man whose greatness illuminates the pages of history.

            Bakunin embodies, but in a manner spectacular in a different way, the very same contradictions.  He died on the eve of the terrorist epic, in 1876.  Moreover, he rejected in advance individual outrages and denounced “the Brutuses of the period.”  He had a certain respect for them, however, since he reproached Herzen for having openly criticized Karakosov for his abortive attempt to assassinate Alexander II in 1866.  This feeling of respect had its reasons.  Bakunin influenced the course of events in the same manner as Bielinsky and the nihilists and directed them into the channel of individual revolt.  But he contributed something more: a germ of political cynicism, which will congeal, with Nechaiev, into a doctrine and will drive the revolutionary movement to extremes.

            Bakunin had hardly emerged from adolescence when he was overwhelmed and uprooted by Hegelian philosophy, as if by a gigantic earthquake.  He buries himself in it day and night “to the point of madness,” he says, and adds: “I saw absolutely nothing but Hegel’s categories.”  When he emerges from this initiation, it is with the exaltation of a neophyte.  “My personal self is dead forever, my life is the true life.”  He required very little time to see the dangers of that comfortable position.  He who has understood reality does not rebel against it, but rejoices in it; in other words, he becomes a conformist.  Nothing in Bakunin’s character predestined him to that watchdog philosophy.  It is possible, also, that his travels in Germany, and the unfortunate opinion he formed of the Germans, may have ill-prepared him to agree with the aged Hegel that the Prussian State was the privileged depository of the final fruits of the mind.  More Russian than the Czar himself, despite his dreams of universality, he could in no event subscribe to the apology of Prussia when it was founded on a logic brash enough to assert: “The will of other peoples has no rights, for it is the people who represent the will [of the Spirit] who dominate the world.”  In the 1840’s, moreover, Bakunin discovered French socialism and anarchism, from which he appropriated a few tendencies.  Bakunin rejects, with a magnificent gesture, any part of German ideology.  He approached the absolute in the same way as he approached total destruction, with the same passionate emotion, and with the blind enthusiasm for the “All or Nothing” which we again find in him in its purest form.

            After having extolled absolute Unity, Bakunin enthusiastically embraces the most elementary form of Manichæism.  What he wants, of course, is once and for all “the universal and authentically democratic Church of Freedom.”  That is his religion; he belongs to his times.  It is not sure, however, that his faith on this point has been perfect.  In his Confession to Czar Nicholas I, he seems to be sincere when he says that he has never been able to believe in the final revolution “except with a supernatural and painful effort to stifle forcibly the interior voice which whispered to me that my hopes were absurd.”  His theory of immorality, on the other hand, is much more firmly based and he is often to be seen plunging about in it with the ease and pleasure of a mettlesome horse.  History is governed by only two principles: the State and social revolution, revolution and counterrevolution, which can never be reconciled, and which are engaged in a death struggle.  The State is the incarnation of crime.  “The smallest and most inoffensive State is still criminal in its dreams.”  Therefore revolution is the incarnation of good.  This struggle, which surpasses politics, is also the struggle of Luciferian principles against the divine principles.  Bakunin explicitly reintroduces into rebellious action one of the themes of romantic rebellion.  Proudhon had already decreed that God is Evil and exclaimed: “Come, Satan, victim of the calumnies of kings and of the petty-minded!”  Bakunin also gives a glimpse of the broader implications of an apparently political rebellion: “Evil is satanic rebellion against divine authority, a rebellion in which we see, nevertheless, the fruitful seed of every form of human emancipation.”  Like the Fraticelli of fourteenth-century Bohemia, revolutionary socialists today use this phrase as a password: “In the name of him to whom a great wrong has been done.”

            The struggle against creation will therefore be without mercy and without ethics, and the only salvation lies in extermination.  “The passion for destruction is a creative passion.”  Bakunin’s burning words on the subject of the revolution of 1848 in his Confession vehemently proclaim this pleasure in destruction.  “A feast without beginning and without end,” he says.  In fact, for him as for all who are oppressed, the revolution is a feast, in the religious sense of the word.  Here we are reminded of the French anarchist Cœurderoy, who, in his book Hurrah, or the Cossack Revolution, summoned the hordes of the north to lay waste to the whole world.  He also wanted to “apply the torch to my father’s house” and proclaimed that the only hope lay in the human deluge and in chaos.  Rebellion is grasped, throughout these manifestations, in its pure state, in its biological truth.  That is why Bakunin with exceptional perspicacity was the only one of his period to declare war on science, the idol of his contemporaries.  Against every abstract idea he pleaded the cause of the complete man, completely identified with his rebellion.  If he glorifies the brigand leader of the peasant rising, if he chooses to model himself on Stenka Razin and Pugachev, it is because these men fought, without either doctrine or principle, for an ideal of pure freedom.  Bakunin introduces into the midst of revolution the naked principle of rebellion.  “The tempest and life, that is what we need.  A new world, without laws, and consequently free.”

            But is a world without laws a free world?  That is the question posed by every rebellion.  If the question were to be asked of Bakunin, the answer would not be in doubt.  Despite the fact that he was opposed in all circumstances, and with the most extreme lucidity, to authoritarian socialism, yet from the moment when he himself begins to define the society of the future, he does so – without being at all concerned with the contradiction – in terms of a dictatorship.  The statutes of the International Fraternity (1864-7), which he edited himself, already establish the absolute subordination of the individual to the central committee, during the period of action.  It is the same for the period that will follow the revolution.  He hopes to see in liberated Russia “a strong dictatorial power … a power supported by partisans, enlightened by their advice, justified by their free collaboration, but which would be limited to nothing and by no one.”  Bakunin contributed as much as his enemy Marx to Leninist doctrine.  The dream of the revolutionary Slav empire, moreover, as Bakunin conjures it up before the Czar, is exactly the same, down to the last detail of its frontiers, as that realized by Stalin.  Coming from a man who was wise enough to say that the essential driving-force of Czarist Russia was fear and who rejected the Marxist theory of party dictatorship, these conceptions may seem contradictory.  But this contradiction demonstrates that the origins of authoritarian doctrines are partially nihilistic.  Pisarev justifies Bakunin.  Certainly, the latter wanted total freedom; but he hoped to realize it through total destruction.  To destroy everything is to pledge oneself to building without foundations, and then to holding up the walls with one’s hands.  He who rejects the entire past, without keeping any part of it which could serve to breathe life into the revolution, condemns himself to finding justification only in the future and, in the meantime, to entrusting the police with the task of justifying the provisional state of affairs.  Bakunin proclaims dictatorship, not despite his desire for destruction, but in accordance with it.  Nothing, in fact, could turn him from this path since his ethical values had also been dissolved in the crucible of total negation.  In his openly obsequious Confession to the Czar, which he wrote in order to gain his freedom, he spectacularly introduces the double game into revolutionary politics.  With his Catechism of a Revolutionary, which he probably drafted in Switzerland, with the help of Nechaiev, he voices, even though he denies it later, the political cynicism that will never cease to weigh on the revolutionary movement and which Nechaiev himself has so provocatively illustrated.

            A less well-known figure than Bakunin, still more mysterious, but more significant for our purpose, Nechaiev pushed nihilism to the farthest coherent point.  His thought presents practically no contradiction.  He appeared, about 1866, in revolutionary intellectual circles, and died obscurely, in January 1882.  In this short space of time he never ceased to suborn the students around him, Bakunin himself, the revolutionary refugees, and finally the guard in his prison, whom he succeeded in persuading to take part in a crazy conspiracy.  When he first appears, he is already quite sure of what he thinks.  If Bakunin was fascinated by him to the point of  consenting to entrust him with imaginary authority, it is because he recognized in that implacable figure the type of human being that he recommended and what he himself, in a certain manner, would have been if he had been able to silence his heart.  Nechaiev was not content with saying that one must unite with “the savage world of bandits, the true and unique revolutionary environment of Russia,” nor with writing once more, like Bakunin, that henceforth politics would be religion and religion politics.  He made himself the cruel high priest of a desperate revolution; his most recurrent dream was to found a homicidal order that would permit him to propagate and finally enthrone the sinister divinity that he had decided to serve.

            He not only gave dissertations on universal destruction; his originality lay in coldly claiming, for those who dedicate themselves to the revolution, an “Everything is permitted” and in actually permitting himself everything, “The revolutionary man is condemned in advance.  He must have neither romantic relationships nor objects to engage his feelings.  He should even cast off his own name.  Every part of him should be concentrated in one single passion: the revolution.”  If history is, in fact, independent of all principles and composed only of a struggle between revolution and counterrevolution, there is no way out but to espouse wholeheartedly one of the two and either die or be resurrected.  Nechaiev pursues this logic to the bitter end.  With him, for the first time, revolution is going to be explicitly separated from love and friendship.

            The consequences of arbitrary psychology set in motion by Hegel’s method can be seen, for the first time, in Nechaiev.  Hegel had allowed that the mutual recognition of minds could be accomplished in love. [It could also be brought about by the kind of admiration in which the word master assumes its fullest meaning: he who creates without destroying.]  He would not, however, give a place in the foreground of his analysis to this “phenomenon,” which, according to him, he found “had not the strength, the patience, nor the application of the negative.”  He had chosen to demonstrate human minds in blind combat, dimly groping on the sands, like crabs that finally come to grips in a fight to the death, and voluntarily abandoned the equally legitimate image of beams of light painfully searching for one another in the night and finally focusing together in a blaze of illumination.  Those who love, friends or lovers, know that love is not only a blinding flash, but also a long and painful struggle in the darkness for the realization of definitive recognition and reconciliation.  After all, if virtue in the course of history is recognized by the extent to which it gives proof of patience, real love is as patient as hatred.  Moreover, the demand for justice is not the only justification throughout the centuries for revolutionary passion, which is sustained by a painful insistence on universal friendship, even – and above all – in defiance of an inimical heaven.  Those who die for justice, throughout history, have always been called “brothers.”  Violence, for every one of them, is directed only against the enemy, in the service of the community of the oppressed.  But if the revolution is the only positive value, it has a right to claim everything – even the denunciation and therefore the sacrifice of the friend.  Henceforth, violence will be directed against one and all, in the service of an abstract idea.  The accession to power of the possessed had to take place so that it could be said, once and for all, that the revolution, in itself, was more important than the people it wanted to save, and that friendship, which until then had transformed defeats into the semblance of victories, must be sacrificed and postponed until the still invisible day of victory.

            Nechaiev’s originality thus lies in justifying the violence done to one’s brothers.  He decided, with Bakunin, on the terms of the Catcheism.  But once the latter, in a fit of mental aberration, had given him the mission of representing in Russia a European Revolutionary Union, which existed only in his imagination, Nechaiev in effect came to Russia, founded his Society of the Ax, and himself defined its regulations.  There we find again the secret central committee, necessary no doubt to any military or political action, to whom everyone must swear absolute allegiance.  But Nechaiev does more than militarize the revolution from the moment when he admits that the leaders, in order to govern their subordinates, have the right to employ violence and lies.  Nechaiev lies, to begin with, when he claims to be a delegate of a central committee that is still nonexistent and when, to enlist certain sceptics in the action that he proposes to undertake, he describes the committee as disposing of unlimited resources.  He goes still farther by distinguishing between categories of revolutionaries, with those of the first category (by which he means the leaders) reserving the right to consider the rest as “expendable capital.”  All the leaders in history may have thought in these terms, but they never said so.  Until Nechaiev, at any rate, no revolutionary leader had dared to make this the guiding principle of his conduct.  Up to his time no revolution had put at the head of its table of laws the concept that man could be a chattel.  Traditionally, recruiting relied on its appeal to courage and to the spirit of self-sacrifice.  Nechaiev decided that the sceptics could be terrorized or blackmailed and the believers deceived.  Even pseudo-revolutionaries could still be used, if they were urged on systematically to perform the most dangerous deeds.  As for the oppressed, since they were going to be saved once and for all, they could be oppressed still more.  What they would lose, the oppressed of the future would gain.  Nechaiev states, in principle, that governments must be driven to take repressive measures, that the official representatives most hated by the population must never be touched, and that finally the secret society must employ all its resources to increase the suffering and misery of the masses.

            Although these beautiful thoughts have realized their full meaning today, Nechaiev did not live to see the triumph of his principles.  He tried to apply them, at all events, at the time of the student Ivanov’s murder, which so struck the popular imagination of the time that Dostoievsky made it one of the themes of The Possessed.  Ivanov, whose only fault seems to have been that he had doubts about the central committee of which Nechaiev claimed to be a delegate, was considered an enemy of the revolution because he was opposed to the man who was identified with the revolution.  Therefore he must die.  “What right have we to take a man’s life?” asks Uspensky, one of Nechaiev’s comrades. – “It is not a question of right, but of our duty to eliminate everything that may harm our cause.”  When revolution is the sole value, there are, in fact, no more rights, there are only duties.  But by an immediate inversion, every right is assumed in the name of duty.  For the sake of the cause, Nechaiev, who has never made an attempt on the life of any tyrant, ambushes and kills Ivanov.  Then he leaves Russia and returns to Bakunin, who turns his back on him and condemns his “repugnant tactics.”  “He has gradually come,” writes Bakunin, “to the conclusion that to found an indestructible society it must be based on the politics of Machiavelli and the methods of the Jesuits: for the body, only violence; for the soul, deception.”  That is well said.  But in the name of what value is it possible to decide that this tactic is repugnant if the revolution, as Bakunin believed, is the only good?  Nechaiev is really in the service of the revolution; it is not his own ends that he serves, but the cause.  Extradited, he yields not an inch to his judges.  Condemned to twenty-five years in jail, he still reigns over the prisoners, organizers the jailers into a secret society, plans the assassination of the Czar, and is again brought up for trial.  Death in the dungeon of a fortress, after twelve years’ confinement, brings an end to the life of this rebel who is the first of the contemporary aristocrats of the revolution.

            At this period, in the bosom of the revolution, everything is really permitted and murder can be elevated into a principle.  It was thought, however, with the renewal of Populism in 1870, that this revolutionary movement, sprung from the ethical and religious tendencies to be found in the Decembrists, and in the socialism of Lavrov and Herzen, would put a check on the evolution toward political cynicism that Nechaiev had illustrated.  This movement appealed to “living souls,” prompted them to turn to the people and educate them so that they would march forward to their own liberation.  “Repentant noblemen” left their families, dressed like the poor, and went into the villages to preach to the peasants.  But the peasants were suspicious and held their peace.  When they did not hold their peace, they denounced the apostle to the police.  This check to the noble souls had the result of throwing back the movement on the cynicism of a Nechaiev or, at any rate, on violence.  Insofar as the intelligentsia was unable to reclaim the allegiance of the people, it felt itself once more alone, face to face with autocracy; once more the world appeared to it in the aspect of master and slave.  The group known as the People’s Will was then to elevate individual terrorism into a principle and inaugurate the series of murders which continued until 1905 with the Socialist Revolutionary Party.  This is the point at which the terrorists were born, disillusioned with love, united against the crimes of their masters, but alone in their despair, and face to face with their contradictions, which they could only resolve in the double sacrifice of their innocence and their life.

            The Fastidious Assassins

            In the year 1878 Russian terrorism was born.  A very young girl, Vera Zassulich, on the day following the trial of one hundred and eighty-three Populists, the 24^th of January, shot down General Trepov, the Governor of St. Petersburg.  At her trial she was acquitted and then succeeded in escaping the police of the Czar. This revolutionary unleashed a whole series of repressive actions and attempted assassinations, which kept pace with one another and which, it was already evident, could only be terminated by mutual exhaustion.

            The same year a member of the People’s Will Party, Kravchinsky, stated the principles of terror in his pamphlet Death for Death.  Consequences always follow principles.  In Europe, attempts were made on the lives of the Emperor of Germany, the King of Italy, and the King of Spain.  Again in 1878  Alexander II created, in the shape of the Okhrana, the most efficient weapon of State terrorism the world has ever seen.  From then on, the nineteenth century abounds in murders, both in Russia and in the West.  In 1879 there is a new attack on the King of Spain and an abortive attempt on the life of the Czar.  In 1881 the Czar is murdered by terrorist members of the People’s Will.  Sofia Perovskaia, Jeliabov, and their friends are hanged.  In 1883 takes place the attempt on the life of the Emperor of Germany, whose assailant is beheaded with an axe.  In 1887 there are the executions of the Chicago martyrs and the congress of Spanish anarchists at Valencia, where they issue the terrorist proclamation: “If society does not capitulate, vice and evil must perish, even if we must all perish with them.”  In France the 1890s mark the culminating-point of what is called propaganda by action.  The exploits of Ravachol, Vaillant, and Henry are the prelude to Carnot’s assassination.  In the year 1892 alone there are more than a thousand dynamite outrages in Europe, and in America almost five hundred.  In 1898 the Empress Elisabeth of Austria is murdered.  In 1901 the President of the United States, McKinley, is assassinated.  In Russia, where the series of attempts against the lives of minor representatives of the regime had not ceased, the Organization for Combat of the Socialist Revolutionary Party comes into being in 1903 and unites the most outstanding personalities of Russian terrorism.  The murders of Plehve by Sazonov and of the Grand Duke Sergei by Kaliayev, in 1905, mark the culminating-point of the thirty years’ apostolate of blood and terminate, for revolutionary religion, the age of martyrs.

            Nihilism, intimately involved with a frustrated religious movement, thus culminates in terrorism.  In the universe of total negation, these young disciples try, with bombs and revolvers, and also with the courage with which they walk to the gallows, to escape from contradiction and to create the values they lack.  Until their time, men died for what they knew, or for what they thought they knew.  From their time on, it became the rather more difficult habit to sacrifice oneself for something about which one knew nothing, except that it was necessary to die so that it might exist.  Until then, those who had to die put themselves in the hand of God in defiance of the justice of man.  But on reading the declarations of the condemned victims of that period, we are amazed to see that all, without exception, entrusted themselves, in defiance of their judges, to the justice of other men who were not yet born.  These men of the future remained, in the absence of supreme values, their last recourse.  The future is the only transcendental value for men without God.  The terrorists no doubt wanted first of all to destroy – to make absolutism totter under the shock of exploding bombs.  But by their death, at any rate, they aimed at re-creating a community founded on love and justice, and thus to resume a mission that the Church had betrayed.  The terrorists’ real mission is to create a Church from whence will one day spring the new God.  But is that all?  If their voluntary assumption of guilt and death gave rise to nothing but the promise of a value still to come, the history of the world today would justify us in saying, for the moment at any rate, that they have died in vain and that they never have ceased to be nihilists.  A value to come is, moreover, a contradiction in terms, since it can neither explain an action nor furnish a principle of choice as long as it has not been formulated.  But the men of 1905, tortured by contradictions, really did give birth, by their very negation and death, to a value that will henceforth be imperative, which they brought to light in the belief that they were only announcing its advent.  They ostensibly placed, above themselves and their executioners, that supreme and painful good which we have already found at the origins of rebellion.  Let us stop and consider this value, at the moment when the spirit of rebellion encounters, for the last time in our history, the spirit of compassion.

            “How can we speak of terrorist activity without taking part in it?” exclaims the student Kaliayev.  His companions, united ever since 1903, in the Organization for Combat of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, under the direction of Aze and later of Boris Savinkov, all live up to the standard of this admirable statement.  They are men of the highest principles: the last, in the history of rebellion, to refuse no part of their condition or their drama.  If their lives were dedicated to the terror, “if they had faith in it,” as Pokotilov says, they never ceased to be torn asunder by it.  History offers few examples of fanatics who have suffered from scruples, even in action.  But the men of 1905 were always prey to doubts.  The greatest homage we can pay them is to say that we would not be able, in 1950, to ask them one question that they themselves had not already asked and that, in their life or by their death, they had not partially answered.

            They quickly passed into the realms of history, however.  When Kaliayev, for example, in 1903, decided to take part with Savinkov in terrorist activity, he was twenty-six years old.  Two years later the “Poet,” as he was called, was hanged.  It was a short career.  But to anyone who examines with a little feeling the history of that period, Kaliayev, in his breathtaking career, displays the most significant aspect of terrorism.  Sazonov, Schweitzer, Pokotilov, Voinarovsky, and most of the other anarchists likewise burst upon the scene of Russian history and poised there for a moment, dedicated to destruction, as the swift and unforgettable witnesses to an increasingly agonized protest.

            Almost all are atheists: “I remember,” wrote Boris Voinarovsky, who died in throwing a bomb at Admiral Dubassov, “that even before going to high school I preached atheism to one of my childhood friends.  Only one question embarrassed me.  Where did my ideas come from?  For I had not the least conception of eternity.”  Kaliayev himself believed in God.  A few moments before an attempted assassination, which failed, Savinkov saw him in the street, standing in front of an icon, holding the bomb in one hand and making the sign of the cross with the other.  But he repudiated religion.  In his cell, before his execution, he refused its consolations.

            The need for secrecy compelled them to live in solitude.  They did not know, except perhaps in the abstract, the profound joy experienced by the man of action in contract with a large section of humanity.  But the bond that united them replaced every other attachment in their minds.  “Chivalry!” writes Sazonov, and comments on it thus: “Our chivalry was permeated with such a degree of feeling that the word brother in no way conveyed with sufficient clarity the essence of our relations with one another.”  From prison Sazonov writes to his friends: “For my part, the indispensable condition of happiness is to keep forever the knowledge of my perfect solidarity with you.”  As for Voinarovsky, he confesses that to a woman he loved who wished to detain him he made the following remark, which he recognizes as “slightly comic” but which, according to him, proves his state of mind: “I should curse you if I arrived late for my comrades.”

            This little group of men and women, lost among the Russian masses, bound only to one another, chose the role of executioner, to which they were in no way destined.  They lived in the same paradox, combining in themselves respect for human life in general and contempt for their own lives – to the point of nostalgia for the supreme sacrifice.  For Dora Brilliant, the anarchist programme was of no importance; terrorist action was primarily embellished by the sacrifice it demanded from the terrorist.  “But,” says Savinkov, “terror weighed on her like a cross.”  Kaliayev himself is ready to sacrifice his life at any moment.  “Even better than that, he passionately desired to make this sacrifice.”  During the preparations for the attempt on Plehve, he stated his intention of throwing himself under the horses’ hoofs and perishing with the Minister.  With Voinarovsky also the desire for sacrifice coincides with the attraction of death.  After his arrest he writes to his parents: “How many times during my adolescence the idea came to me to kill myself!...”

            At this same time, these executioners who risked their own lives so completely, made attempts on the lives of others only after the most scrupulous examination of conscience.  The first attempt on the Grand Duke Sergei failed because Kaliayev, with the full approval of his comrades, refused to kill the children who were riding in the Grand Duke’s carriage.  Of Rachel Louriée, another terrorist, Savinkov writes: “She had faith in terrorist action, she considered it an honour and a duty to take part in it, but blood upset her no less than it did Dora.”  The same Savinkov was opposed to an attempt on Admiral Dubassov in the Petersburg-Moscow express because “if there were the least mistake, the explosion could take place in the car and kill strangers.”  Later Savinkov, “in the name of terrorist conscience,” will deny with indignation having made a child of sixteen take part in an attempted assassination.  At the moment of escaping from a Czarist prison, he decides to shoot any officers who might attempt to prevent his flight, but to kill himself rather than turn his revolver on an ordinary soldier.  It is the same with Voinarovsky, who does not hesitate to kill men, but who confesses that he has never hunted, “finding the occupation barbarous,” and who declares in his turn: “If Dubassov is accompanied by his wife, I shall not throw the bomb.”

            Such a degree of self-abnegation, accompanied by such profound consideration for the lives of others, allows the supposition that these fastidious assassins lived out the rebel destiny in its most contradictory form.  It is possible to believe that they too, while recognizing the inevitability of violence, nevertheless admitted to themselves that it is unjustifiable.  Necessary and inexcusable – that is how murder appeared to them.  Mediocre minds, confronted with this terrible problem, can take refuge by ignoring one of the terms of the dilemma.  They are content, in the name of formal principles, to find all direct violence inexcusable and then to sanction that diffuse form of violence which takes place on the scale of world history.  Or they will console themselves, in the name of history, with the thought that violence is necessary, and will add murder to murder, to the point of making of history nothing but a continuous violation of everything in man which protests against injustice.  This defines the two aspects of contemporary nihilism, the bourgeois and the revolutionary.

            But the extremists, with whom we are concerned, forgot nothing.  From their earliest days they were incapable of justifying what they nevertheless found necessary, and conceived the idea of offering themselves as a justification and of replying by personal sacrifices to the question they asked themselves.  For them, as for all rebels before them, murder is identified with suicide.  A life is paid for by another life, and from these two sacrifices springs the promise of a value.  Kaliayev, Voinarovsky, and the others believe in the equal value of human lives.  Therefore they do not value any idea above human life, though they kill for the sake of ideas.  To be precise, they live on the plane of their idea.  They justify it, finally, by incarnating it to the point of death.  We are again confronted with a concept of rebellion which, if not religious, is at least metaphysical.  Other men to come, consumed with the same devouring faith as these, will find their methods sentimental and refuse to admit that any one life is the equivalent of any other.  They will then put an abstract idea above human life, even if they call it history, to which they themselves have submitted in advance and to which they will also decide, quite arbitrarily, to submit everyone else.  The problem of rebellion will no longer be resolved by arithmetic, but by estimating probabilities.  Confronted with the possibility that the idea may be realized in the future, human life can be everything or nothing.  The greater the faith that the estimator places in this final realization, the less the value of human life.  At the ultimate limit, it is no longer worth anything at all.

            We shall have occasion to examine this limit – that is, the period of State terrorism and of the philosophical executioners.  But meanwhile the rebels of 1905, at the frontier on which they stand united, teach us, to the sound of exploding bombs, that rebellion cannot lead, without ceasing to be rebellion, to consolation and to the comforts of dogma.  Their only evident victory is to triumph at least over solitude and negation.  In the midst of a world which they deny and which rejects them, they try, man after man, like all the great-hearted ones, to reconstruct a brotherhood of man.  The love their bear for one another, which brings them happiness even in the desert of a prison, which extends to the great mass of their enslaved and silent fellow men, gives the measure of their distress and of their hopes.  To serve this love, they must first kill; to inaugurate the reign of innocence, they must accept a certain culpability.  This contradiction will be resolved for them only at the very last moment.  Solitude and chivalry, renunciation and hope will only be surmounted by the willing acceptance of death.  Already Jeliabov, who organized the attempt on Alexander II in 1881 and was arrested forty-eight hours before the murder, had asked to be executed at the same time as the real perpetrator of the attempt.  “Only the cowardice of the government,” he said, “could account for the erection of one gallows instead of two.”  Five were erected, one of which was for the woman he loved.  But Jeliabov died smiling, while Ryssakov, who had broken down during his interrogations, was dragged to the scaffold, half-mad with fear.

            Jeliabov did this because of a sort of guilt which he did not want to accept and from which he knew he would suffer, like Ryssakov, if he remained alone after having committed or been the cause of a murder.  At the foot of the gallows, Sofia Perovskaia kissed the man she loved and her two other friends, but turned away from Ryssakov, who died solitary and damned by the new religion.  For Jeliabov, death in the midst of his comrades coincided with his justification.  He who kills is guilty only if he consents to go on living or if, to remain alive, he betrays his comrades.  To die, on the other hand, cancels out both the guilt and the crime itself.  Thus Charlotte Corday shouts at Fouquier-Tinville: “Oh, the monster, he takes me for an assassin!”  It is the agonizing and fugitive discovery of a human value that stands halfway between innocence and guilt, between reason and irrationality, between history and eternity.  At the moment of this discovery, but only then, these desperate people experience a strange feeling of peace, the peace of definitive victory.  In his cell, Polivanov says that it would have been “easy and sweet” for him to die.  Voinarovsky writes that he has conquered the fear of death.  “Without a single muscle in my face twitching, without saying a word, I shall climb on the scaffold…. And this will not be an act of violence perpetrated on myself, it will be the perfectly natural result of all that I have lived through.”  Very much later Lieutenant Schmidt will write before being shot: “My death will consummate everything, and my cause, crowned by my death, will emerge irreproachable and perfect.”  Kaliayev, condemned to the gallows after having stood as prosecutor before the tribunal, declares firmly: “I consider my death as a supreme protest against a world of blood and tears,” and again writes: “From the moment when I found myself behind bars, I never for one moment wanted to stay alive in any way whatsoever.”  His wish is granted.  On May 10, at two o’clock in the morning, he walks toward the only justification he recognizes.  Entirely dressed in black, without an overcoat, and wearing a felt hat, he climbs the scaffold.  To Father Florinsky, who offers him the crucifix, the condemned man, turning from the figure of Christ, only answers: “I have already told you that I have finished with life and that I am prepared for death.”

            Yes, the ancient value lives once more, at the culmination of nihilism, at the very foot of the gallows.  It is the reflection, historic on this occasion, of the “we are” which we found at the termination of our analysis of the rebel mind.  It is privation and at the same time enlightened conviction.  It is this that shone with such mortal radiance on the agonized countenance of Dora Brilliant at the thought of him who died for himself and for tireless friendship; it is this that drives Sazonov to suicide in prison as a protest and “to earn respect for his comrades”; and this, again, which exonerates even Nechaiev on the day when he is asked to denounce his comrades by a general, whom he knocks to the ground with a single blow.  By means of this, the terrorists, while simultaneously affirming the world of men, places themselves above this world, thus demonstrating for the last time in our history that real rebellion is a creator of values.

            Thanks to them, 1905 marks the highest peak of revolutionary momentum.  But from then on, a decline sets in.  Martyrs do not build Churches; they are the mortar, or the alibi.  Then come the priests and the bigots.  The revolutionaries who follow will not demand an exchange of lives.  They accept the risk of death, but will also agree to preserve themselves as far as they can for the sake of serving the revolution.  Thus they will accept complete culpability for themselves.  Acquiescence in humiliation – that is the true characteristic of twentieth-century revolutionaries, who place the revolution and the Church of man above themselves.  Kaliayev proves, on the contrary, that though the revolution is a necessary means, it is not a sufficient end.  In this way he elevates man instead of degrading him.  It is Kaliayev and his Russian and German comrades who, in the history of the world, really oppose Hegel, [Two different species of men.  One kills only once and pays with his life.  The other justifies thousands of crimes and consents to be rewarded with honours.] who first recognizes universal recognition as necessary and then as insufficient.  Appearances did not suffice for him.  When the whole world would have been willing to recognize him, a doubt would still have remained in Kaliayev’s mind: he needed his own form of acquiescence, and the approbation of the whole world would not have sufficed to silence the doubt that a hundred enthusiastic acclamations give rise to in the mind of any honest man.  Kaliayev doubted to the end, but this doubt did not prevent him from acting; it is for that reason that he is the purest image of rebellion.  He who accepts death, to pay for a life with a life, no matter what his negations may be, affirms, by doing so, a value that surpasses him in his aspects of an individual in the historical sense.  Kaliayev dedicates himself to history until death and, at the moment of dying, places himself above history.  In a certain way, it is true, he prefers himself to history.  But what should his preference be?  Himself, whom he kills without hesitation, or the value he incarnates and makes immortal?  The answer is not difficult to guess.  Kaliayev and his comrades triumphed over nihilism.

            The Path of Chigalev

            But this triumph is to be short-lived: it coincides with death.  Nihilism, provisionally, survives its victors.  In the very bosom of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, political cynicism continues to wend its way to victory.  The party leader who sends Kaliayev to his death, Azev, plays a double game and denounces the revolutionaries to the Okhrana while planning the deaths of ministers and grand dukes.  The concept of provocation reinstates the “Everything is permitted,” and again identifies history and absolute values.  This particular form of nihilism, after having influenced individualistic socialism, goes on to contaminate so-called scientific socialism, which appears in Russia during the 1880’s.  [The first Social Democratic ground, Plekhanov’s, began in 1883.]  The joint legacy of Nechaiev and Marx will give birth to the totalitarian revolution of the twentieth century.  While individual terrorism hunted down the last representatives of divine right, State terrorism was getting ready to destroy divine right definitively, at the very root of human society.  The technique of the seizure of power for the realization of ultimate ends takes the first step toward the exemplary affirmation of these ends.

            Lenin, in fact, borrows from Tkachev, a friend and spiritual brother of Nechaiev, a concept of the seizure of power that he found “majestic” and that he himself recapitulated thus: “absolute secrecy, meticulous care in the choice of members, creation of professional revolutionaries.”  Tkachev, who died insane, makes the transition from nihilism to military socialism.  He claimed to have created a Russian Jacobinism and yet only borrowed from the Jacobins their technique of action, since he, too, denied every principle and every virtue.  An enemy of art and ethics, he reconciles the rational and the irrational only in tactics.  His aim is to achieve human equality by seizure of power of the State.  Secret organizations, revolutionary alliances, dictatorial powers of revolutionary leaders – these were the themes that defined the concept, if not the realization, of “the apparatus” which was to enjoy so great and efficacious a success.  As for the method itself, it is possible to form a fair idea of it when one learns that Tkachev proposes to suppress and eliminate all Russians over the age of twenty-five as incapable of assimilating the new ideas.  A really inspired method, and one that was to prevail in the techniques of the modern super-State, where the fanatical education of children is carried on in the midst of a terrorized adult population.  Cæsarian socialism undoubtedly condemns individual terrorism to the extent that it revives values incompatible with the domination of historic reason.  But it will restore terror on the level of the State – with the creation of an ultimately deified humanity as its sole justification.

            We have come full circle here, and rebellion, cut off from its real roots, unfaithful to man in having surrendered to history, now contemplates the subjection of the entire universe.  It is at this point that the era of Chigalevism begins – proclaimed, in The Possessed, by Verkhovensky, the nihilist who claims the right to choose dishonour.  His is an unhappy and implacable mind [“He represented himself as man after his fashion, and then he gave up the idea.”] and he chooses the will to power, which, in fact, alone is capable of reigning over a history that has no other significance but itself.  Chigalev, the philanthropist, is his guarantor; love of mankind will henceforth justify the enslavement of man.  Possessed by the idea of equality, [“Slander and assassination in extreme cases, but especially equality.”] Chigalev, after long consideration, arrived at the despairing conclusion that only one system is possible even though it is a system of despair.  “Beginning with the premise of unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.”  Complete freedom, which is the negation of everything, can only exist and justify itself by the creation of new values identified with the entire human race.  If the creation of these values is postponed, humanity will tear itself to pieces.  The shortest route to these new standards passes by way of total dictatorship.  “One tenth of humanity will have the right to individuality and will exercise unlimited authority over the other nine tenths.  The latter will lose their individuality and will become like a flock of sheep; compelled to passive obedience, they will be led back to original innocence and, so to speak, to the primitive paradise, where, nevertheless, they must work.”  It is the government by philosophers of which the Utopians dream; philosophers of this type, quite simply, believe in nothing.  The kingdom has come, but it negates real rebellion, and is only concerned with the reign of “the Christs of violence,” to use the expression of an enthusiastic writer extolling the life and death of Ravachol.  “The pope on high,” says Verkhovensky bitterly, “with us around him, and beneath us Chigalevism.”

            The totalitarian theocrats of the twentieth century and State terrorism are thus announced.  The new aristocracy and the grand inquisitors reign today, by making use of the rebellion of the oppressed, over one part of our history.  Their reign is cruel, but they excuse their cruelty, like the Satan of the romantics, by claiming that it is hard for them to bear.  “We reserve desire and suffering for ourselves; for the slaves there is Chigalevism.”  A new and somewhat hideous race of martyrs is now born.  Their martyrdom consists in consenting to inflict suffering on others; they become the slaves of their own domination.  For man to become god, the victim must abuse himself to the point of becoming the executioner.  That is why both victim and executioner are equally despairing.  Neither slavery nor power will any longer coincide with happiness; the masters will be morose and the slaves sullen.  Saint-Just was right: it is a terrible thing to torment the people.  But how can one avoid tormenting men if one has decided to make them gods?  Just as Kirilov, who kills himself in order to become God, accepts seeing his suicide made use of by Verkhovensky’s “conspiracy,” so man’s deification by man breaks the bounds which rebellion, nevertheless, reveals, and thereby irrevocably commits itself to the labyrinth of tactics and terror from which history has not yet emerged.

State Terrorism and Irrational Terror

*

            All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.  1789 brings Napoleon; 1848, Napoleon III; 1917, Stalin; the Italian disturbances of the twenties, Mussolini; the Weimar Republic, Hitler.  These revolutions, particularly after the First World War had liquidated the vestiges of divine right, still proposed, with increasing audacity, to build the city of humanity and of authentic freedom.  The growing omnipotence of the State sanctioned this ambition on each occasion.  It would be erroneous to say that this was bound to happen.  But it is possible to examine how it did happen; and perhaps the lesson will follow.

            Apart from a few explanations that are not the subject of this essay, the strange and terrifying growth of the modern State can be considered as the logical conclusion of inordinate technical and philosophical ambitions, foreign to the true spirit of rebellion, but which nevertheless gave birth to the revolutionary spirit of our time.  The prophetic dream of Marx and the over-inspired predictions of Hegel or of Nietzsche ended by conjuring up, after the city of God had been razed to the ground, a rational or irrational State, which in both cases, however, was founded on terror.

            In actual fact, the Fascist revolutions of the twentieth century do not merit the title of revolution.  They lacked the ambition of universality.  Mussolini and Hitler, of course, tried to build an empire, and the National Socialist ideologists were bent, explicitly, on world domination.  But the difference between them and the classic revolutionary movement is that, of the nihilist inheritance, they chose to deify the irrational, and the irrational alone, instead of deifying reason.  In this way they renounced their claim to universality.  And yet Mussolini makes use of Hegel, and Hitler of Nietzsche; and both illustrate, historically, some of the prophecies of German ideology.  In this respect they belong to the history of rebellion and of nihilism.  They were the first to construct a State on the concept that everything is meaningless and that history is only written in terms of the hazards of force.  The consequences were not long in appearing.

            As early as 1914, Mussolini proclaimed the “holy religion of anarchy,” and declares himself the enemy of every form of Christianity.  As for Hitler, his professed religion unhesitatingly juxtaposed the God-Providence and Valhalla.  Actually his god was a political argument and a manner of reaching an impressive climax at the end of his speeches.  As long as he was successful, he chose to believe that he was inspired.  In the hour of defeat, he considered himself betrayed by his people.  Between the two nothing intervened to announce to the world that he would ever have been capable of thinking himself guilty in relation to any principle. The only man of superior culture who gave Nazism an appearance of being a philosophy, Ernst Junger, even went so far as to choose the actual formulas of nihilism: “The best answer to the betrayal of life by the spirit is the betrayal of the spirit by the spirit, and one of the great and cruel pleasures of our times is to participate in the work of destruction.”

            Men of action, when they are without faith, have never believed in anything but action.  Hitler’s untenable paradox lay precisely in wanting to found a stable order on perpetual change and no negation.  Rauschning, in his Revolution of Nihilism, was right in saying that the Hitlerian revolution represented unadulterated dynamism.  In Germany, shaken to its foundations by a calamitous war, by defeat, and by economic distress, values no longer existed.  Although one must take into account what Goethe called “the German destiny of making everything difficult,” the epidemic of suicides that swept through the entire country between the two wars indicates a great deal about the state of mental confusion.  To those who despair of everything, not reason but only passion can provide a faith, and in this particular case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair – namely, humiliation and hatred.  These was no longer any standard of values, both common to and superior to all these men, in the name of which it would have been possible for them to judge one another.  The Germany of 1933 thus agreed to adopt the degraded values of a mere handful of men and tried to impose them on an entire civilization.  Deprived of the morality of Goethe, Germany chose, and submitted to, the ethics of the gang.

            Gangster morality is an inexhaustible round of triumph and revenge, defeat and resentment.  When Mussolini extolled “the elemental forces of the individual,” he announced the exaltation of the dark powers of blood and instinct, the biological justification of all the worst things produced by the instinct of domination.  At the Nuremberg trials, Frank emphasized “the hatred of form” which animated Hitler.  It is true that this man was nothing but an elemental force in motion, directed and rendered more effective by calculated cunning and by a relentless tactical clairvoyance.  Even his physical appearance, which was thoroughly mediocre and commonplace, was no limitation: it established him firmly with the masses.  Action alone kept him alive.  For him, to exist was to act.  That is why Hitler and his regime could not dispense with enemies.  They could only define themselves, psychopathic dandies [It is well known that Göring sometimes entertained dressed as Nero and with his face make up.] that they were, in relation to their enemies, and only assume their final form in the bloody battle that was to be their downfall.  The Jews, the Freemasons, the plutocrats, the Anglo-Saxons, the bestial Slavs succeeded one another in their propaganda and their history as a means of propping up, each time a little higher, the blind force that was stumbling headlong toward its end.  Perpetual strife demanded perpetual stimulants.

            Hitler was history in its purest form.  “Evolution,” said Junger, “is far more important than living.”  Thus he preached complete identification with the stream of life, on the lowest level and in defiance of all superior reality.  A regime which invented a biological foreign policy was obviously acting against its own best interests.  But at least it obeyed its own particular logic.  Rosenberg speaks pompously of life in the following terms: “Like a column on the march, and it is of little importance toward what destination and for what ends this column is marching.”  Though later the column will strew ruins over the pages of history and will devastate its own country, it will at least have had the gratification of living.  The real logic of this dynamism was either total defeat or a progress from conquest to conquest and from enemy to enemy, until the eventual establishment of the empire of blood and action.  It is very unlikely that Hitler ever had any conception, at least at the beginning, of this empire.  Neither by culture nor even by instinct or tactical intelligence was he equal to his destiny.  Germany collapsed as a result of having engaged in a struggle for empire with the concepts of provincial politics.  But Junger had grasped the import of this logic and had formulated it in definite terms.  He had a vision of “a technological world empire,” of which the faithful and the militants would have themselves been the priests because (and here Junger rejoins Marx), on account of his human form, the worker is universal.  “The statutes of a new authoritarian regime takes the place of a change in the social contract.  The worker is removed from the sphere of negotiation, from pity, and from literature and elevated to the sphere of action.  Legal obligations are transformed into military obligations.”  It can be seen that the empire is simultaneously the factory and the barracks of the world, where Hegel’s solider worker reigns as a slave.  Hitler was halted relatively soon on the way to the realization of this empire.  But even if he had gone still farther, we should only have witnessed the more and more extensive deployment of an irresistible dynamism and the increasingly violent enforcement of cynical principles which alone would be capable of serving this dynamism.

            Speaking of such a revolution, Rauschning says that it has nothing to do with liberation, justice, and inspiration: it is “the death of freedom, the triumph of violence, and the enslavement of the mind.”  Fascism is an act of contempt, in fact.  Inversely, every form of contempt, if it intervenes in politics, prepares the way for, or establishes, Fascism.  It must be added that Fascism cannot be anything else but an expression of contempt without denying itself.  Junger drew the conclusion, from his own principles, that it was better to be criminal than bourgeois.  Hitler, who was endowed with less literary talent but, on this occasion, with more coherence, knew that to be either one or the other was a matter of complete indifference, from the moment that one ceased to believe in anything but success.  Thus he authorized himself to be both at the same time.  “Fact is all,” said Mussolini.  And Hitler added: “When the race is in danger of being oppressed … the question of legality plays only a secondary role.”  Moreover, in that the race must always be menaced in order to exist, there is never any legality.  “I am ready to sign anything, to agree to anything…. As far as I am concerned, I am capable, in complete good faith, of signing treaties today and of dispassionately tearing them up tomorrow if the future of the German people is at stake.”  Before he declared war, moreover, Hitler made the statement to his generals that no one was going to ask the victor if he had told the truth or not.  The leitmotiv of Göring’s defence at the Nuremberg trials returned time and again to this theme: “The victor will always be the judge, and the vanquished will always be the accused.”  That is a point that can certainly be argued.  But then it is hard to understand Rosenberg when he said during the Nuremberg trials that he had not foreseen that the Nazi myth would lead to murder.  When the English prosecuting attorney observes that “from Mein Kampf the road led straight to the gas chambers of Maidenek,” he touches on the real subject of the trial, that of the historic responsibilities of Western nihilism and the only one which, nevertheless, was not really discussed at Nuremberg, for reasons only too evident.  A trial cannot be conducted by announcing the general culpability of a civilization.  Only the actual deeds which, at least, stank in the nostrils of the entire world were brought to judgement.

            Hitler, in any case, invented the perpetual motion of conquest, without which he would have been nothing at all.  But the perpetual enemy is perpetual terror, this time on the level of the State.  The State is identified with the “apparatus”; that is to say, with the sum total of mechanisms of conquest and repression.  Conquest directed toward the interior of the country is called repression or propaganda (“the first step on the road to hell,” according to Frank.)  Directed toward the exterior, it creates the army.  All problems are thus militarized and posed in terms of power and efficiency.  The supreme commander determines policy and also deals with all the main problems of administration.  This principle, axiomatic as far as strategy is concerned, is applied to civil life in general.  One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.  The political intermediaries who are, in all societies, the guarantors of freedom, disappear to make way for a booted and spurred Jehovah who rules over the silent masses or, which comes to the same thing, over masses who shout slogans at the top of their lungs.  There is no organ of conciliation or mediation interposed between the leader and the people, nothing in fact but the apparatus – in other words, the party – which is the emanation of the leader and the tool of his will to oppress.  In this way the first and sole principle of this degraded form of mysticism is born, the Führerprinzip, which restores idolatry and a debased deity to the world of nihilism.

            Mussolini, the Latin lawyer, contented himself with reasons of State, which he transformed, with a great deal of rhetoric, into the absolute.  “Nothing beyond the State, above the State, against the State.  Everything to the State, for the State, in the State.”  The Germany of Hitler gave his false reasoning its real expression, which was that of a religion.  “Our divine mission,” says a Nazi newspaper during a party congress, “was to lead everyone back to his origins, back to the common Mother.  It was truly a divine mission.”  These origins are thus to be found in primitive howls and shrieks.  Who is the god in question?  An official party declaration answers that: “All of us here below believe in Adolf Hitler, our Führer … and [we confess] that National Socialism is the only faith which can lead our people to salvation.”  The commandments of the leader, standing in the burning bush of spotlights, on a Sinai of planks and flags, therefore comprise both law and virtue.  If the superhuman microphones give orders only once for a crime to be committed, then the crime is handed down from chief to subchief until it reaches the slave who receives orders without being able to pass them on to anybody.  One of the Dachau executioners weeps in prison and says: “I only obeyed orders.  The Führer and the Reichsführer alone planned all this, and then they ran away.  Gluecks received orders from Kaltenbrunner and, finally, I received orders to carry out the shootings.  I have been left holding the bag because I was only a little Hauptsharführer and because I couldn’t hand it on any lower down the line.  Now they say that I am the assassin.”  Göring during the trial proclaimed his loyalty to the Führer and said that “there was still a code of honour in that accursed life.”  Honour lay in obedience, which was often confused with crime.  Military law punishes disobedience by death, and its honour is servitude.  When all the world has become military, then crime consists in not killing if orders insist on it.

            Orders, unfortunately, seldom insist on good deeds.  Pure doctrinal dynamism cannot be directed toward good, but only toward efficacy.  As long as enemies exist, terror will exist; and there will be enemies as long as dynamism exists to ensure that: “All the influences liable to undermine the sovereignty of the people, as exercised by the Führer with the assistance of the party … must be eliminated.”  Enemies are heretics and must be converted by preaching or propaganda, exterminated by inquisition or by the Gestapo.  The result is that man, if he is a member of the party, is no more than a tool in the hands of the Führer, a cog in the apparatus, or, if he is the enemy of the Führer, a waste product of the machine.  The impetus toward irrationality of this movement, born of rebellion, now even goes so far as to propose suppressing all that makes man more than a cog in the machine; in other words, rebellion itself.  The romantic individualism of the German revolutions finally satiated in the world of inanimate objects.  Irrational terror transforms men into objects, “planetary bacilli,” according to Hitler’s formula.  It proposes the destruction, not only of the individual, of reflection, solidarity, and the urge to absolute love.  Propaganda and torture are the direct means of bringing about disintegration; more destructive still are systematic degradation, identification with the cynical criminal, and forced complicity.  The triumph of the man who kills or tortures is marred by only one shadow: he is unable to feel that he is innocent.  Thus, he must create guilt in his victim so that, in a world that has no direction, universal guilt will authorize no other course of action than the use of force and give its blessing to nothing but success.  When the concept of innocence disappears from the mind of the innocent victim himself, the value of power establishes a definitive rule over a world in despair.  That is why an unworthy and cruel penitence reigns over this world where only the stones are innocent.  The condemned are compelled to hang one another.  Even the innocent cry of maternity is stifled, as in the case of the Greek mother who was forced by an officer to choose which of her three sons was to be shot.  This is the final realization of freedom: to power to kill and degrade saves the servile soul from utter emptiness.  The hymn of German freedom is sung, to the music of a prisoners’ orchestra, in the camps of death.

            The crimes of the Hitler regime, among them the massacre of the Jews, are without precedent in history because history gives no other example of a doctrine of such total destruction being able to seize the levers of the command of a civilized nation.  But above all, for the first time in history, the rulers of a country have used their immense power to establish a mystique beyond the bounds of any ethical considerations.  The first attempt to found a Church on nihilism was paid for by complete annihilation.  The destruction of Lidice demonstrates clearly that the systematic and scientific aspect of the Nazi movement really hides an irrational drive that can only be interpreted as a drive of despair and arrogance.  Until then, there were supposedly only two possible attitudes for a conqueror toward a village that was considered rebellious.  Either calculated repression and cold-blooded execution of hostages, or a savage and necessarily brief sack by enraged soldiers.  Lidice was destroyed by both methods simultaneously.  It illustrates the ravages of that irrational form of reason which is the only value that can be found in the whole story.  Not only were all the houses burned to the ground, the hundred and seventy-four men of the village shot, the two hundred and three women deported, and the three hundred children transferred elsewhere to be educated in the religion of the Führer, but special teams spent months at work levelling the terrain with dynamite, destroying the very stones, filling in the village pond, and finally diverting the course of the river.  After that, Lidice was really nothing more than a mere possibility, according to the logic of the movement.  To make assurance doubly sure, the cemetery was emptied of its dead, who might have been a perpetual reminder that once something existed in this place.  [It is striking to note that atrocities reminiscent of these excesses were committed in colonies (India, 1857; Algeria, 1945; etc.) by European nations that in reality obeyed the same irrational prejudice of racial superiority.]

            The nihilist revolution, which is expressed historically in the Hitlerian regime, thus only aroused an insensate passion for nothingness, which ended by turning against itself.  Negation, this time at any rate, and despite Hegel, has not been creative.  Hitler presents the example, perhaps unique in history, of a tyrant who left absolutely nothing to his credit.  For himself, for his people, and for the world, he was nothing but the epitome of suicide and murder.  Seven million Jews assassinated, seven million Europeans deported or killed, ten million war victims, are perhaps not sufficient to allow history to pass judgement: history is accustomed to murderers.  But the very destruction of Hitler’s final justification – that is, the German nation – henceforth makes this man, whose presence in history for years on end haunted the minds of millions of men, into an inconsistent and contemptible phantom.  Speer’s deposition at the Nuremberg trials showed that Hitler, though he could have stopped the war before the point of total disaster, really wanted universal suicide and the material and political destruction of the German nation.  The only value for him remained, until the bitter end, success.  Since Germany had lost the war, she was cowardly and treacherous and she deserved to die.  “If the German people are incapable of victory, they are unworthy to live.”  Hitler therefore decided to drag them with him to the grave and to make their destruction an apotheosis, when the Russian cannon were already splitting apart the walls of his palace in Berlin.  Hitler, Göring, who wanted to see his bones placed in a marble tomb, Goebbels, Himmler, Ley, killed themselves in dugouts or in cells.  But their deaths were deaths for nothing; they were like a bad dream, a puff of smoke that vanishes.  Neither efficacious nor exemplary, they consecrate the bloodthirsty vanity of nihilism.  “They thought they were free,” Frank cries hysterically; “didn’t they known that no one escapes from Hitlerism?”  They did not know; nor did they know that the negation of everything is in itself a form of servitude and that real freedom is an inner submission to a value which defies history and its successes.

            But the Fascist mystics, even though they aimed at gradually dominating the world, really never had pretensions to a universal empire.  At the very most, Hitler, astonished at his own victories, was diverted from the provincial origins of his movement toward the indefinite dream of an empire of the Germans that had nothing to do with the universal City.  Russian Communism, on the contrary, by its very origins, openly aspires to world empire.  That is its strength, its deliberate significance, and its importance in our history.  Despite appearances, the German revolution had no hope of a future.  It was only a primitive impulse whose ravages have been greater than its real ambitions.  Russian Communism, on the contrary, has appropriated the metaphysical ambition that this book describes, the erection, after the death of God, of a city of man finally deified.  The name revolution, to which Hitler’s adventure had no claim, was once deserved by Russian Communism, and although it apparently deserves it no longer, it claims that one day it will deserve it forever.  For the first time in history, a doctrine and a movement based on an Empire in arms has as its purpose definitive revolution and the final unification of the world.  It remains for us to examine this pretension in detail.  Hitler, at the height of his madness, wanted to fix the course of history for a thousand years.  He believed himself to be on the point of doing so, and the realist philosophers of the conquered nations were preparing to acknowledge this and to excuse it, when the Battle of Britain and Stalingrad threw him back on the path of death and set history once more on the march.  But, as indefatigable as history itself, the claim of the human race to divinity is once more brought to life, with more seriousness, more efficiency, and more reason, under the auspices of the rational State as it is to be found in Russia.

State Terrorism and Rational Terror

*

            Marx, in nineteenth-century England, in the midst of the terrible sufferings caused by the transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy, had plenty of material for constructing a striking analysis of primitive capitalism.  As for Socialism, apart from the lessons, which for the most part contradicted his doctrines, that he could draw from the French Revolution, he was obliged to speak in the future tense and in the abstract.  Thus it is not astonishing that he could blend in his doctrine the most valid critical method with a Utopian Messianism of highly dubious value.  The unfortunate thing is that his critical method, which, by definition, should have been adjusted to reality, has found itself further and further separated from facts to the exact extent that it wanted to remain faithful to the prophecy.  It was thought, and this is already an indication of the future, that what was conceded to truth could be taken for Messianism.  This contradiction is perceptible in Marx’s lifetime.  The doctrine of the Communist Manifesto is no longer strictly correct twenty years later, when Das Kapital appears.  Das Kapital, nevertheless, remained incomplete, because Marx was influenced at the end of his life by a new and prodigious mass of social and economic facts to which the system had to be adapted anew.  These facts concerned, in particular, Russia, which he had spurned until then.  We now know that the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow ceased, in 1935, the publication of the complete works of Marx while more than thirty volumes still remained unpublished; doubtless the content of these volumes was not “Marxist” enough.

            Since Marx’s death, in any case, only a minority of disciples have remained faithful to his method.  The Marxists who have made history have, on the contrary, appropriated the prophecy and the apocalyptic aspects of his doctrine in order to realize a Marxist revolution, in the exact circumstances under which Marx had foreseen that a revolution could not take place.  It can be said of Marx that the greater part of his predictions began to become an object of increasing faith.  The reason is simple: the predictions were short-term and could be controlled.  Prophecy functions on a very long-term basis and has as one of its properties a characteristic that is the very source of strength of all religions: the impossibility of proof.  When the predictions failed to come true, the prophecies remained the only hope; with the result that they alone rule over our history.  Marxism and its successors will be examined here from the angle of prophecy.

            The Bourgeois Prophecy

            Marx is simultaneously a bourgeois and a revolutionary prophet.  The latter is better known than the former.  But the former explains many things in the career of the latter.  A Messianism of Christian and bourgeois origin, which was both historical and scientific, influenced his revolutionary Messianism, which sprang from German ideology and the French rebellions.

            In contrast to the ancient world, the unity of the Christian and Marxist world is astonishing.  The two doctrines have in common a vision of the world which completely separates them from the Greek attitude.  Jaspers defines this very well: “It is a Christian way of thinking to consider that the history of man is strictly unique.”  The Christians were the first to consider human life and the course of events as a history that is unfolding from a fixed beginning toward a definite end, in the course of which man achieves his salvation or earns his punishment.  The philosophy of history springs from a Christian representation, which is surprising to a Greek mind.  The Greek idea of evolution has nothing in common with our idea of historical evolution.  The difference between the two is the difference between a circle and a straight line.  The Greeks imagined the history of the world as cyclical.  Aristotle, to give a definite example, did not believe that the time in which he was living was subsequent to the Trojan War.  Christianity was obliged, in order to penetrate the Mediterranean world, to Hellenize itself, and its doctrine then became more flexible.  But its originality lay in introducing into the ancient world two ideas that had never before been associated: the idea of history and the idea of punishment.  In its concept of mediation, Christianity is Greek.  In its idea of history, Christianity is Judaic and will be found again in German ideology.

            It is easier to understand this dissimilarity by understanding the hostility of historical methods of thought toward nature, which they considered as an object not for contemplation but for transformation.  For the Christian, as for the Marxist, nature must be subdued.  The Greeks are of the opinion that it is better to obey it.  The love of the ancients for the cosmos was completely unknown to the first Christians, who, moreover, awaited with impatience an imminent end of the world.  Hellenism, in association with Christianity, then produces the admirable efflorescence of the Albigensian heresy on the one hand, and on the other Saint Francis.  But with the Inquisition and the destruction of the Albigensian heresy, the Church again parts company with the world and with beauty, and gives back to history its pre-eminence over nature.  Jaspers is again right in saying: “It is the Christian attitude that gradually empties the world of its substance … since the substance resided in a conglomeration of symbols.”  These symbols are those of the drama of the divinity, which unfolds throughout time.  Nature is only the setting for this drama.  The delicate equilibrium between humanity and nature, man’s consent to the world, which gives ancient thought it distinction and its refulgence, was first shattered for the benefit of history by Christianity.  The entry into this history of the Nordic peoples, who have no tradition of friendship with the world, precipitated this trend.  From the moment that the divinity of Christ is denied, or that, thanks to the efforts of German ideology, He only symbolizes the man-god, the concept of mediation disappears and a Judaic world reappears.  The implacable god of war rules again; all beauty if insulated as the source of idle pleasures, nature itself is enslaved.  Marx, from this point of view, is the Jeremiah of the god of history and the Saint Augustine of the revolution.  That this explains the really revolutionary aspects of his doctrine can be demonstrated by a simple comparison with his one contemporary who was an intelligent theorist of reaction.

            Joseph de Maistre refutes Jacobinism and Calvinism, two doctrines which summed up for him “everything bad that has been thought for three centuries,” in the name of a Christian philosophy of history.  To counter schisms and heresies, he wanted to re-create “the robe without a seam” of a really catholic Church.  His aim – and this can be seen at the period of his Masonic adventures – is the universal Christian city.  Maistre dreams of the protoplastic Adam, or the Universal Man, of Fabre d’Olivet, who will be the rallying-point of individual souls, and of the Adam Kadmon of the cabalists, who preceded the Fall and who must now be brought to life again.  When the Church has reclaimed the world, she will endow this first and last Adam with a body.  In the Soirées in St. Petersburg there is a mass of formulas on this subject which bear a striking resemblance to the Messianic formulas of Hegel and Marx.  In both the terrestrial and the celestial Jerusalem that Maistre imagines, “all the inhabitants pervaded by the same spirit will pervade one another and will reflect one another’s happiness.”  Maistre does not go so far as to deny personal survival after death; he only dreams of a mysterious unity reconquered in which, “evil having been annihilated, there will be no more passion nor self-interest,” and where “man will be reunited with himself when his double standard will be obliterated and his two centres unified.”

            In the city of absolute knowledge, where the eyes of the mind and the eyes of the body became as one, Hegel also reconciled contradictions.  But Maistre’s vision again coincides with that of Marx, who proclaims “the end of the quarrel between essence and existence, between freedom and necessity.”  Evil, for Maistre, is nothing but the destruction of unity.  But humanity must rediscover its unity on earth and in heaven.  By what means?  Maistre, who is an ancient regime reactionary, is less explicit on this point than Marx.  Meanwhile he was waiting for a great religious revolution of which 1789 was only the “appalling preface.”  He quotes Saint John, who asks that we make truth, which is exactly the programme of the modern revolutionary mind, and Saint Paul, who announces that “the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.”  Humanity marches, by way of crimes, violence, and death, toward this final consummation, which will justify everything.  The earth for Maistre is nothing but “an immense altar on which all the living must be sacrificed, without end, without limit, without respite, until the end of time, until the extinction of evil, until the death of death.”  His fatalism, however, is active as well as passive.  “Man must act as if he were capable of all things and resign himself as if he were capable of nothing.”  We find in Marx the same sort of creative fatalism.  Maistre undoubtedly justifies the established order.  But Marx justifies the order that is established in his time.  The most eloquent eulogy of capitalism was made by its greatest enemy.  Marx is only anti-capitalist insofar as capitalism is out of date.  Another order must be established which will demand, in the name of history, a new conformity.  As for the means, they are the same for Marx as for Maistre: political realism, discipline, force.  When Maistre adopts Bossuet’s bold idea that “the heretic is who has personal ideas” – in other words, ideas that have no reference to either a social or a religious tradition – he provides the formula for the most ancient and the most modern of conformities.  The attorney general, pessimistic choirmaster of the executioner, announces our diplomatic prosecutors.

            It goes without saying that these resemblances do not make Maistre a Marxist, nor Marx a traditional Christian.  Marxist atheism is absolute.  But nevertheless it does reinstate the supreme being on the level of humanity.  “Criticism of religion leads to this doctrine that man is for man the supreme being.  From this angle, socialism is therefore an enterprise for the deification of man and has assumed some of the characteristics of traditional religions. [Saint Simon, who influences Marx, is, moreover, influenced himself by Maistre and Bonald.]  This reconciliation, in any case, is instructive as concerns the Christian origins of all types of historic Messianism, even revolutionary Messianism.  The only difference lies in a change of symbols.  With Maistre, as with Marx, the end of time realizes Vigny’s ambitious dream, the reconciliation of the wolf and the lamb, the procession of criminal and victim to the same altar, the reopening or opening of a terrestrial paradise.  For Marx, the laws of history reflect material reality; for Maistre, they reflect divine reality.  But for the former, matter is the substance; for the latter, the substance of his god is incarnate here below.  Eternity separates them at the beginning, but the doctrines of history end by reuniting them in a realistic conclusion.

            Maistre hated Greece (it also irked Marx, who found any form of beauty under the sun completely alien), of which he said that it had corrupted Europe by bequeathing it its spirit of division.  It would have been more appropriate to say that Greek thought was the spirit of unity, precisely because it could not do without intermediaries, and because it was, on the contrary, quite unaware of the historical spirit of totality, which was invented by Christianity and which, cut off from its religious origins, threatens the life of Europe today.  “Is there a fable, a form of madness, a vice which has not a Greek name, a Greek emblem, or a Greek mask?”  We can ignore the outraged Puritanism.  This passionate denunciation expresses the spirit of modernity at variance with the ancient world and in direct continuity with authoritarian socialism, which is about to deconsecrate Christianity and incorporate it in a Church bent on conquest.

            Marx’s scientific Messianism is itself of bourgeois origin.  Progress, the future of science, the cult of technology and of production, are bourgeois myths, which in the nineteenth century became dogma.  We note that the Communist Manifesto appeared in the same year as Renan’s Future of Science.  This profession of faith, which would cause considerable consternation to a contemporary reader, nevertheless gives the most accurate idea of the almost mystic hopes aroused in the nineteenth century by the expansion of industry and the surprising progress made by science.  This hope is the hope of bourgeois society itself – the final beneficiary of technical progress.

            The idea of progress is contemporary with the age of enlightenment and with the bourgeois revolution.  Of course, certain sources of its inspiration can be found in the seventeenth century; the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns already introduced into European ideology the perfectly absurd conception of an artistic form of progress.  In a more serious fashion, the idea of a science that steadily increases its conquests can also be derived from Cartesian philosophy.  But Turgot, in 1750, is the first person the give a clear definition of the new faith.  His treatise on the progress of the human mind basically recapitulates Bossuet’s universal history.  The idea of progress alone is substituted for the divine will.  “The total mass of the human race, by alternating stages of calm and agitation, of good and evil, always marches, though with dragging footsteps, toward greater and greater perfection.”  This optimistic statement will furnish the basic ingredient of the rhetorical observations of Condorcet, the official theorist of progress, which he linked with the progress of the State and of which he was also the official victim in that the enlightened State forced him to poison himself.  Sorel [Les Illusions du progress] was perfectly correct in saying that the philosophy of progress was exactly the philosophy to suit a society eager to enjoy the material prosperity derived from technical progress.  When we are assured that tomorrow, in the natural order of events, will be better than today, we can enjoy ourselves in peace.  Progress, paradoxically, can be used to justify conservatism.  A draft drawn on confidence in the future, it allows the master to have a clear conscience.  The slave and those whose present life is miserable and who can find no consolation in the heavens are assured that at least the future belongs to them.  The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.

            These reflections are not, as we can see, out of date.  But they are not out of date because the revolutionary spirit has resumed the ambiguous and convenient theme of progress.  Of course, it is not the same kind of progress; Marx cannot pour enough scorn on bourgeois rational optimism.  His concept of reason, as we shall see, is different.  But arduous progress toward a future of reconciliation nevertheless defines Marx’s thought.  Hegel and Marxism destroyed the formal values that lighted for the Jacobins the straight road of this optimistic version of history.  In this way they preserved the idea of the forward march of history, which was simply confounded by them with social progress and declared necessary. Thus they continued on the path of nineteenth-century bourgeois thought.  Tocqueville, enthusiastically succeeded by Pecqueur (who influenced Marx), had solemnly proclaimed that: “The gradual and progressive development of equality is both the past and the future of the history of man.”  To obtain Marxism, substitute the term level of production for equality and imagine that in the final stage of production a transformation takes place and a reconciled society is achieved.

            As for the necessity of evolution, Auguste Comte, with the law of three stages of man, which he formulates in 1822, gives the most systematic definition of it.  Comte’s conclusions are curiously like those finally accepted by scientific socialism.  [The last volume of Cours de philosophie positive appeared in the same year as Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity.]  Positivism demonstrates with considerable clarity the repercussions of the ideological revolution of the nineteenth century, of which Marx is one of the representatives, and which consisted in relegating to the end of history the Garden of Eden and the Revelation, which tradition had always placed at the beginning.  The positivist era, which was bound to follow the metaphysical era and the theological era, was to mark the advent of a religion of humanity.  Henri Gouhier gives an exact definition of Comte’s enterprise when he says that his concern was to discover a man without any traces of God.  Comte’s primary aim, which was to substitute everywhere the relative for the absolute, was quickly transformed, by force of circumstances, into the deification of the relative and into preaching a religion that is both universal and without transcendence.  Comte saw in the Jacobin cult of Reason an anticipation of positivism and considered himself, with perfect justification, as the real successor of the revolutionaries of 1789.  He continued and enlarged the scope of this revolution by suppressing the transcendence of principles and by systematically founding the religion of the species.  His formula: “Set aside God in the name of religion,” meant nothing else but this.  Inaugurating a mania that has since enjoyed a great vogue, he wanted to be the Saint Paul of this new religion and replace the Catholicism of Rome by the Catholicism of Paris.  We know that he wanted to see in all the cathedrals “the statue of deified humanity on the former altar of God.”  He calculated with considerable accuracy that positivism would be preached in Notre-Dame before 1860.  This calculation was not so ridiculous as it seems.  Notre-Dame, in a state of siege, still resists: but the religion of humanity was effectively preached toward the end of the nineteenth century, and Marx, despite the fact that he had not read Comte, was one of its prophets.  Marx only understood that a religion which did not embrace transcendence should properly be called politics.  Comte knew it too, after all, or at least he understood that his religion was primarily a form of social idolatry and that it implied political realism, [“Everything that develops spontaneously is necessarily legitimate, for a certain time.”] the negation of individual rights, and the establishment of despotism.  A society whose experts would be priests, two thousand bankers and technicians ruling over a Europe of one hundred and twenty million inhabitants where private life would be absolutely identified with public life, where absolute obedience “of action, of thought, and of feeling” would be given to the high priest who would reign over everything, such was Comte’s Utopia, which announces what might be called the horizontal religions of our times.  It is true that it is Utopian because, convinced of the enlightening powers of science, Comte forgot to provide a police force.  Others will be more practical; the religions of humanity will be effectively founded on the blood and suffering of humanity.

            Finally, if we add to these observations the remark that Marx owes to the bourgeois economists the idea which he claims exclusively as his own, of the part played by industrial production in the development of humanity, and that he took the essentials of his theory of work-value from Ricardo, an economist of the bourgeois industrial revolution, our right to say that his prophecy is bourgeois in content will doubtless be recognized.  These comparisons only aim to show that Marx, instead of being, as the fanatical Marxists of our day would have it, the beginning and the end of the prophecy, [According to Zhdanov, Marxism is “a philosophy that is qualitatively different from any previous system.”  This means, for example, either that Marxism is not Cartesianism, which no one would dream of denying, or that Marxism owes essentially nothing to Cartesianism, which is absurd.] participates on the contrary in human nature: he is an heir before he is a pioneer.  His doctrine, which he wanted to be a realist doctrine, actually was realistic during the period of the religion of science, of Darwinian evolutionism, of the steam engine and the textile industry.  A hundred years later, science encounters relativity, uncertainty, and chance; the economy must take into account electricity, metallurgy, and atomic production.  The inability of pure Marxism to assimilate these successive discoveries was shared by the bourgeois optimism of Marx’s time.  It renders ridiculous the Marxist pretension of maintaining that truths one hundred years old are unalterable without ceasing to be scientific.  Nineteenth-century Messianism, whether it is revolutionary or bourgeois, has not restated the successive developments of this science and this history, which to different degrees they have deified.

            The Revolutionary Prophecy

            Marx’s prophecy is also revolutionary in principle.  In that all human reality has its origins in the fruits of production, historical evolution is revolutionary because the economy is revolutionary.  At each level of production the economy arouses the antagonisms that destroy, to the profit of a superior level of production, the corresponding society.  Capitalism is the last of these stages of production because it produces the conditions in which every antagonism will be resolved and where there will be no more economy.  On that day our history will become pre-history.  This representation is the same as Hegel’s, but in another perspective.  The dialectic is considered from the angle of production and work instead of from the angle of the spirit.  Marx, of course, never spoke himself about dialectical materialism.  He left to his heirs the task of extolling this logical monstrosity.  But he says, at the same time, that reality is dialectic and that it is economic.  Reality is a perpetual process of evolution, propelled by the fertile impact of antagonisms which are resolved each time into a superior synthesis which, itself, creates its opposite and again causes history to advance.  What Hegel affirmed concerning reality advancing toward the spirit, Marx affirms concerning economy on the march toward the classless society; everything is both itself and its opposite, and this contradiction compels it to become something else.  Capitalism, because it is bourgeois, reveals itself as revolutionary and prepares the way for communism.

            Marx’s originality lies in affirming that history is simultaneously dialectic and economic.  Hegel, more extreme, affirmed that it was both matter and spirit.  Moreover, it could only be matter to the extent that it was spirit and vice versa.  Marx denies the spirit as the definitive substance and affirms historical materialism.  We can immediately remark, with Berdyaev, on the impossibility of reconciling the dialectic with materialism.  There can be a dialectic only of the mind.  But even materialism itself is an ambiguous idea.  Only to form this word, it must be admitted that there is something more in the world than matter alone.  For even stronger reasons, this criticism applies to historical materialism.  History is distinguished from nature precisely by the fact that it transforms science and passion by means of will.  Marx, then, is not a pure materialist, for the obvious reason that there is neither a pure nor an absolute materialism.  So far is it from being pure or absolute that it recognizes that if weapons can secure the triumph of theory, theory can equally well give birth to weapons.  Marx’s position would be more properly called historical determinism.  He does not deny thought; he imagines it absolutely determined by exterior reality.  “For me, the process of thought is only the reflection of the process of reality transported and transposed to the mind of man.”  This particularly clumsy definition has no meaning.  How and by what means can an exterior process by “transported to the mind,” and this difficulty is as nothing compared to that of then defining “the transposition” of this process.  But Marx used the abbreviated philosophy of his time.  What he wishes to say can be defined on other planes.

            For him, man is only history, and in particular the history of the means of production.  Marx, in fact, remarks that man differs from animals in that he produces his own means of subsistence.  If he does not first eat, if he does not clothe himself or take shelter, he does not exist.  This primum vivere is his first determination.  The little that he thinks at this moment is in direct relation to these inevitable necessities.  Marx then demonstrates that his dependence is both invariable and inevitable.  “The history of industry is the open book of man’s essential faculties.”  His personal generalization consists in inferring from this affirmation, which is on the whole acceptable, that economic dependence is unique and suffices to explain everything, a concept that still remains to be demonstrated.  We can admit that economic determination plays a highly important role in the genesis of human thoughts and actions without drawing the conclusion, as Marx does, that the German rebellion against Napoleon is explained only by the lack of sugar and coffee.  Moreover, pure determination is absurd in itself.  If it were not, then one single affirmation would suffice to lead, from consequence to consequence, to the entire truth.  If this is not so, then either we have never made a single true affirmation – not even the one stated by determinism – or we simply happen occasionally to say the truth, but without any consequences, and determinism is then false.  Marx had his reasons, however, which are foreign to pure logic, for resorting to so arbitrary a simplification.

            To put economic determinism at the root of all human action is to sum man up in terms of his social relations.  There is no such thing as a solitary man; that is the indisputable discovery of the nineteenth century.  An arbitrary deduction then leads to the statement that man only feels solitary in society for social reasons.  If, in fact, the solitary mind must be explained by something outside man, then man is on the road to some form of transcendence.  On the other hand, society has only man as its source of origin; if, in addition, it can be affirmed that society is the creator of man, it would seem as though one had achieved the total explanation that would allow the final banishment of transcendence.  Man would then be, as Marx wanted, “author and actor of his own history.”  Marx’s prophecy is revolutionary because he completes the movement of negation begun by the philosophy of illumination.  The Jacobins destroyed the transcendence of a personal god, but replaced it by the transcendence of principles.  Marx institutes contemporary atheism by also destroying the transcendence of principles.  Faith is replaced in 1789 by reason.  But this reason itself, in its fixity, is transcendent.  Marx destroys, even more radically than Hegel, the transcendence of reason and hurls it into the stream of history.  Even before their time, history was a regulating principle; now it is triumphant.  Marx goes farther than Hegel and pretends to consider him as an idealist (which he is not, at least no more than Marx is a materialist) to the precise extent that the reign of the mind restores in a certain way a supra-historical value.  Das Kapital returns to the dialect of mystery and servitude, but replaces a consciousness of self by economic autonomy and the final reign of the absolute Spirit through the advent of communism.  “Atheism is humanism mediated by the suppression of religion, communism is humanism mediated by the suppression of private property.”  Religious alienation has the same origin as economic alienation.  Religion can be disposed of only by achieving the absolute liberty of man in regard to his material determinations.  The revolution is identified with atheism and with the reign of man.

            That is why Marx is brought to the point of putting the emphasis on economic and social determination.  His most profitable undertaking has been to reveal the reality that is hidden behind the formal values of which the bourgeois of his time made a great show.  His theory of mystification is still valid, because it is in fact universally true, and is equally applicable to revolutionary mystifications.  The freedom of which Monsieur Thiers dreamed was the freedom of privilege consolidated by the police; the family, extolled by the conservative newspapers, was supported by social conditions in which men and women were sent down into the mines, half-naked, attached to a communal rope; morality prospered on the prostitution of the working classes.  That the demands of honesty and intelligence were put to egoistic ends by the hypocrisy of a mediocre and grasping society was a misfortune that Marx, the incomparable eye-opener, denounced with a vehemence quite unknown before him.  This indignant denunciation brought other excesses in its train which require quite another denunciation.  But, above all, we must recognize and state that the denunciation was born in the blood of the abortive Lyon rebellion of 1834 and in the despicable cruelty of the Versailles moralists in 1871.  “The man who has nothing is nothing.”  If this affirmation is actually false, it was very nearly true in the optimist society of the nineteenth century.  The extreme decadence brought about by the economy of prosperity was to compel Marx to give first place to social and economic relationships and to magnify still more his prophecy of the reign of man.

            It is now easier to understand the purely economic explanation of history offered by Marx.  If principles are deceptive, only the reality of poverty and work is true.  If it is then possible to demonstrate that this suffices to explain the past and the future of mankind, then principles will be destroyed forever and with them the society that profits by them.  This in fact is Marx’s ambition.

            Man is born into a world of production and social relations.  The unequal opportunities of different lands, the more or less rapid improvements in the means of production, and the struggle for life have rapidly created social inequalities that have been crystallized into antagonisms between production and distribution; and consequently into class struggles.  These struggles and antagonisms are the motive power of history.  Slavery in ancient times and feudal bondage were stages on a long road that led to the artisanship of the classical centuries when the producer was master of the means of production.  At this moment the opening of world trade routes and the discovery of new outlets demanded a less provincial form of production.  The contradiction between the method of production and the new demands of distribution already announces the end of the regime of small-scale agricultural and industrial production.  The industrial revolution, the invention of steam appliances, and competition for outlets inevitably led to the expropriation of the small proprietor and to the introduction of large-scale production.  The means of production are then concentrated in the hands of those who are able to buy them; the real producers, the workers, now only dispose of the strength of their arms, which can be sold to the “man with the money.”  Thus bourgeois capitalism is defined by the separation of the producer from the means of production.  From this conflict a series of inevitable consequences are going to spring which allow Marx to predicate the end of social antagonisms.

            At first sight there is no reason why the firmly established principle of a dialectical class struggle should suddenly cease to be true.  It is always true or it has never been true.  Marx says plainly that there will be no more classes after the revolution than there were Estates after 1789.  But Estates disappeared without classes disappearing, and there is nothing to prove that classes will not give way to some other form of social antagonism.  The essential point of the Marxist prophecy lies, nevertheless, in this affirmation.

            We know the Marxist scheme.  Marx, following in the footsteps of Adam Smith and Ricardo, defines the value of all commodities in terms of the amount of work necessary to produce them.  The amount of work is itself a commodity, sold by the proletarian to the capitalist, of which the value is defined by the quantity of work that produces it; in other words, by the value of the consumer’s goods necessary for his subsistence.  The capitalist, in buying this commodity, thereby undertakes to pay for it adequately so that he who sells it, the worker, may feed and perpetuate himself.  But at the same time he acquires the right to make the latter work as long as he can.  He can work for a long time, very much longer than is necessary to pay for his subsistence.  In a twelve-hour day, if half the time suffices to produce a value equivalent to the value of the products of subsistence, the other six hours are hours not paid for, a plus-value, which constitutes the capitalist’s own profit.  Thus the capitalist’s interest lies in prolonging to the maximum the hours of work or, when he can do so no longer, of increasing the worker’s output to the maximum.  The first type of coercion is a matter of oppression and cruelty.  The second is a question of the organization of labour.  It leads first to the division of labour, and then to the utilization of the machine, which dehumanizes the worker.  Moreover, competition for foreign markets and the necessity for larger and larger investments in raw materials, produce phenomena of concentration and accumulation.  First, small capitalists are absorbed by big capitalists who can maintain, for example, unprofitable prices for a longer period.  A larger and larger part of the profits is finally invested in new machines and accumulated in the fixed assets of capital.  This double movement first of all hastens the ruin of the middle classes, who are absorbed into the proletariat, and then proceeds to concentrate, in an increasingly small number of hands, the riches produced uniquely by the proletariat.  Thus the proletariat increases in size in proportion to its increasing ruin.  Capital is now concentrated in the hands of only a very few masters, whose growing power is based on robbery.  Moreover, these masters are shaken to their foundations by successive crises, overwhelmed by the contradictions of the system, and can no longer assure even mere subsistence to their slaves, who then come to depend on private or public charity.  A day comes, inevitably, when a huge army of oppressed slaves find themselves face to face with a handful of despicable masters.  That day is the day of revolution.  “The ruin of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”

            This henceforth famous description does not yet give an account of the end of all antagonisms.  After the victory of the proletariat, the struggle for life might well give birth to new antagonisms.  Two ideas then intervene, one of which is economic, the identity of the development of production and the development of society, and the other, purely systematic, the mission of the proletariat.  These two ideas reunite in what might be called Marx’s activist fatalism.

            The same economic evolution which in effect concentrates capital in a very few hands, makes the antagonism both more violent and, to a certain extent, unreal.  It seems that, at the highest point of development of the productive forces, the slightest stimulus would lead to the proletariat finding itself alone in possession of the means of production, already snatched from the grasp of private ownership and concentrated in one enormous mass which, henceforth, would be held in common.  When private property is concentrated in the hands of one single owner, it is only separated from collective ownership by the existence of one single man.  The inevitable result of private capitalism is a kind of State capitalism which will then only have to be put to the service of the community to give birth to a society where capital and labour, henceforth indistinguishable, will produce, in one identical advance toward progress, both justice and abundance.  It is in consideration of this happy outcome that Marx always extolled the revolutionary role played, unconsciously it is true, by the bourgeoisie.  He spoke of the “historic rights” of capitalism, which he called a source both of progress and of misery.  The historical mission and the justification of capitalism are, in his eyes, to prepare the conditions for a superior mode of production. This mode of production is not in itself revolutionary; it will only be the consummation of the revolution.  Only the fundamental principles of bourgeois production are revolutionary.  When Marx affirms that humanity only sets itself problems it can solve, he is simultaneously demonstrating that the germ of the solution of the revolutionary problem is to be found in the capitalist system itself.  Therefore he recommends tolerating the bourgeois State, and even helping to build it, rather than returning to a less industrialized form of production.  The proletariat “can and must accept the bourgeois revolution as a condition of the working-class revolution.”

            Thus Marx is the prophet of production and we are justified in thinking that on this precise point, and on no other, he ignored reality in favour of the system.  He never ceased defending Ricardo, the economist of production in the manner of Manchester, against those who accused him of wanting production for production’s sake.  (“He was absolutely right!” Marx exclaims) and of wanting it without any consideration for mankind.  “That is precisely his merit,” Marx replies, with the same airy indifference as Hegel.  What in fact does the sacrifice of individual men matter as long as it contributes to the salvation of all mankind!  Progress resembles “that horrible pagan god who wished to drink nectar from the skulls of his fallen enemies.”  But at least it is progress, and it will cease to inflict torture after the industrial apocalypse when the day of reconciliation comes.

            But if the proletariat cannot avoid this revolution nor avoid being put in possession of the means of production, will it at least know how to use them for the benefit of all?  Where is the guarantee that, in the very bosom of the revolution, Estates, classes, and antagonisms will not arise?  The guarantee lies in Hegel.  The proletariat is forced to use its wealth for the universal good.  It is not the proletariat, it is the universal in opposition to the particular – in other words, to capitalism.  The antagonism between capital and the proletariat is the last phase of the struggle between the particular and the universal, the same struggle that animated the historical tragedy of master and slave.  At the end of the visionary design constructed by Marx, the proletariat will unite all classes and discard only a handful of masters, perpetrators of “notorious crime,” who will be justly destroyed by the revolution.  What is more, capitalism, by driving the proletariat to the final point of degradation, gradually delivers it from every decision that might separate it from other men.  It has nothing, neither property nor morality nor country.  Therefore it clings to nothing but the species of which it is henceforth the naked and implacable representative.  In affirming itself it affirms everything and everyone.  Not because members of the proletariat are gods, but precisely because they have been reduced to the most abjectly inhuman condition.  “Only the proletariat, totally excluded from this affirmation of their personality, are capable of realizing the complete affirmation of self.”

            That is the mission of the proletariat: to bring forth supreme dignity from supreme humiliation.  Through its suffering and its struggles, it is Christ in human form redeeming the collective sin of alienation.  It is, first of all, the multiform bearer of total negation and then the herald of definitive affirmation.  “Philosophy cannot realize itself without the disappearance of the proletariat, the proletariat cannot liberate itself without the realization of philosophy,” and again: “The proletariat can exist only on the basis of world history…. Communist action can exist only as historical reality on the planetary scale.”  But this Christ is, at the same time, an avenger.  According to Marx, he carries out the sentence that private property passes on itself.  “All the houses, in our times, are marked with a mysterious red cross. The judge is history, the executioner is the proletariat.”  Thus the fulfilment is inevitable.  Crisis will succeed crisis, [Every ten or eleven years, Marx predicted.  But the period between the recurrence of the cycles “will gradually shorten.”] the degradation of the proletariat will become more and more profound, it will increase in numbers until the time of the universal crisis when the world of change will vanish and when history, by a supreme act of violence, will cease to be violent any longer.  The kingdom of ends will have come.

            We can see that this fatalism could be driven (as happened to Hegelian thought) to a sort of political quietism by Marxists, like Kautsky, for whom it was as little within the power of the proletariat to create the revolution as within the power of the bourgeois to prevent it.  Even Lenin, who was to choose the activist aspect of the doctrine, wrote in 1905, in the style of an act of excommunication: “It is a reactionary way of thinking to try to find salvation in the working class in any other way than in the top-heavy development of capitalism.”  It is not in the nature of economics, according to Marx, to make leaps in the dark and it must not be encouraged to gallop ahead.  It is completely false to say that the socialist reformers remained faithful to Marx on this point.  On the contrary, fatalism excludes all reforms, in that there would be a risk of mitigating the catastrophic aspect of the outcome and, consequently, delaying the inevitable result.  The logic of such an attitude leads to the approval of everything that tends to increase working-class poverty.  The worker must be given nothing so that one day he can have everything.

            And yet Marx saw the danger of this particular form of quietism.  Power cannot be looked forward to or else it is looked forward to indefinitely.  A day comes when it must be seized, and it is the exact definition of this day that remains of doubtful clarity to all readers of Marx.  On this point he never stops contradicting himself.  He remarked that society was “historically compelled to pass through a period of dictatorship by the working classes.”  As for the nature of this dictatorship, he definitions are contradictory.  [Michel Collinet in The Tragedy of Marxism points out in Marx three forms of the seizure of power by the proletariat: Jacobin republic in the Communist Manifesto, authoritarian dictatorship in the 18 Brumaire, and federal and libertarian government in the Civil War in France.]  We are sure that he condemned the State in no uncertain terms, saying that its existence and the existence of servitude are inseparable.  But he protested against Bakunin’s nevertheless judicious observation of finding the idea of provisional dictatorship contrary to what is known as human nature.  Marx thought, it is true, that the dialectical truths were superior to psychological truths.  What does the dialectic say?  That “the abolition of the State has no meaning except among communists, where it is an inevitable result of the suppression of classes, the disappearance of which necessarily leads to the disappearance of the need for a power organized by one class for the oppression of another.”  According to the sacred formula, the government of people was then to be replaced by the administration of affairs.  The dialectic was therefore explicit and justified the existence of the proletarian State only for the period necessary for the destruction or integration of the bourgeois class.  But, unfortunately, the prophecy and its attitude of fatalism allowed other interpretations.  If it is certain that the kingdom will come, what does time matter?  Suffering is never provisional for the man who does not believe in the future.  But one hundred years of suffering are fleeting in the eyes of the man who prophesies, for the hundred and first year, the definitive city.  In the perspective of the Marxist prophecy, nothing matters.  In any event, when the bourgeois class has disappeared, the proletariat will establish the rule of the universal man at the summit of production, by the very logic of productive development.  What does it matter that this should be accomplished by dictatorship and violence?  In this New Jerusalem, echoing with the roar of miraculous machinery, who will still remember the cry of the victims?

            The golden age, postponed until the end of history and coincident, to add to its attractions, with an apocalypse, therefore justifies everything.  The prodigious ambitions of Marxism must be considered and its inordinate doctrines evaluated, in order to understand that hope on such a scale leads to the inevitable neglect of problems that therefore appear to be secondary.  “Communism insofar as it is the real appropriation of the human essence by man and for man, insofar as it is the return of man to himself as a social being – in other words, as a human being – a complete conscious return which preserves all the values of the inner movement, this communism, being absolute naturalism, coincides with humanism: it is the real end of the quarrel between man and nature, between man and man, between essence and existence, between externalization and the affirmation of self, between liberty and necessity, between the individual and the species.  It solves the mystery of history and is aware of having solved it.”  It is only the language here that attempts to be scientific.  Basically, where is the difference from Fourier, who announces “fertile deserts, sea water made drinkable and tasting of violets, eternal spring …”?  The eternal springtime of mankind is foretold to us in the language of an encyclical.  What can man without God want and hope for, if not the kingdom of man?  This explains the exaltation of Marxist disciples.  “In a society without anguish, it is easy to ignore death,” says one of them.  However, and this is the real condemnation of our society, the anguish of death is a luxury that is felt far more by the idler than by the worker, who is stifled by his own occupation.  But every kind of socialism is Utopian, most of all scientific socialism.  Utopia replaces God by the future. Then it proceeds to identify the future with ethics; the only values are those which serve this particular future.  For that reason Utopias have almost always been coercive and authoritarian.  [Morelly, Babeuf, and Godwin in reality describe societies based on an inquisition.]  Marx, insofar as he is a Utopian, does not differ from his frightening predecessors, and one part of his teaching more than justifies his successors.

            It has undoubtedly been correct to emphasize the ethical demands that form the basis of the Marxist dream.  It must, in all fairness, be said, before examining the check to Marxism, that in them lies the real greatness of Marx.  The very core of his theory was that work is profoundly dignified and unjustly despised.  He rebelled against the degradation of work to the level of a commodity and of the worker to the level of an object.  He reminded the privileged that their privileges were not divine and that property was not an eternal right.  He gave a bad conscience to those who had no right to a clear conscience, and denounced with unparalleled profundity a class whose crime is not so much having had power as having used it to advance the ends of a mediocre society deprived of any real nobility.  To him we owe the idea which is the despair of our times – but here despair is worth more than any hope – that when work is a degradation, it is not life, even though it occupies every moment of a life.  Who, despite the pretensions of this society, can sleep in it in peace when they know that it derives its mediocre pleasures from the work of millions of dead souls?  By demanding for the worker real riches, which are not the riches of money but of leisure and creation, he has reclaimed, despite all appearance to the contrary, the dignity of man.  In doing so, and this can be said with conviction, he never wanted the additional degradation that has been imposed on man in his name.  One of his phrases, which for once is clear and trenchant, forever withholds from his triumphant disciples the greatness and the humanity which once were his: “An end that requires unjust means is not a just end.”

            But Nietzsche’s tragedy is found here once again.  The aims, the prophecies are generous and universal, but the doctrine is restrictive, and the reduction of every value to historical terms leads to the direst consequences.  Marx thought that the ends of history, at least, would prove to be moral and rational.  That was his Utopia.  But Utopia, at least in the form he knew it, is destined to serve cynicism, of which he wanted no part.  Marx destroys all transcendence, then carries out, by himself, the transition from fact to duty.  But his concept of duty has no other origin but fact.  The demands for justice ends in injustice if it is not primarily based on an ethical justification of justice; without this, crime itself one day becomes a duty.  When good and evil are reintegrated in time and confused with events, nothing is any longer good or bad, but only either premature or out of date.  Who will decide on the opportunity, if not the opportunist?  Later, say the disciples, you shall judge.  But the victims will not be there to judge.  For the victim, the present is the only value, rebellion the only action.  Messianism, in order to exist, must construct a defence against the victims.  It is possible that Marx did not want this, but in this lies his responsibility which must be examined, that he incurred by justifying, in the name of the revolution, the henceforth bloody struggle against all forms of rebellion.

            The Failing of the Prophecy

            Hegel haughtily brings history to an end in 1807; the disciples of Saint-Simon believe that the revolutionary convulsions of 1830 and 1848 are the last; Comte dies in 1857 preparing to climb into the pulpit and preach positivism to a humanity returned at last from the path of error. With the same blind romanticism, Marx, in his turn, prophesies the classless society and the solution of the historical mystery.  Slightly more circumspect, however, he does not fix the date.  Unfortunately, his prophecy also described the march of history up to the hour of fulfilment; it predicted the trend of events.  The events and the facts, of course, have forgotten to arrange themselves according to the synthesis; and this already explains why it has been necessary to rally them by force.  But above all, the prophecies, from the moment that they begin to betray the living hopes of millions of men, cannot with impunity remain indeterminate.  A time comes when deception transforms patient hope into furious disillusionment and when the ends, affirmed with the mania of obstinacy, demanded with ever-increasing cruelty, make obligatory the search for other means.

            The revolutionary movement at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth lived, like the early Christians, in the expectation of the end of the world and the advent of the proletarian Christ.  We know how persistent this sentiment was among primitive Christian communities.  Even at the end of the fourth century a bishop in proconsular Africa calculated that the world would only exist for another one hundred and one years.  At the end of this period would come the kingdom of heaven, which must be merited without further delay.  This sentiment is prevalent in the first century [On the imminence of this event, see Mark ix, 1: xiii,30; Matthew x, 23; xvi, 27-8; xxiv, 34; Luke ix, 26-7; xxi, 22, etc.] and explains the indifference of the early Christians toward purely theological questions.  If the advent is near, everything must be consecrated to a burning faith rather than to works and to dogma.  Until Clement and Tertullian during more than a century, Christian literature ignored theological problems and did not elaborate on the subject of works.  But from the moment the advent no longer seems imminent, man must live with his faith - in other words, compromise.  Then piety and the catechism appear on the scene.  The evangelical advent fades into the distance; Saint Paul has come to establish dogma.  The Church has incorporated the faith that has only an ardent desire for the kingdom to come.  Everything had to be organized in the period, even martyrdom, of which the temporal witnesses are the monastic orders, and even the preaching, which was to be found again in the guise of the Inquisition.

            A similar movement was born of the check to the revolutionary advent.  The passages from Marx already cited give a fair idea of the burning hope that inspired the revolutionary spirit of the time.  Despite partial setbacks, this faith never ceased to increase up to the moment when it found itself, in 1917, face to face with the partial realization of its dreams.  “We are fighting for the gates of heaven,” cried Liebknecht.  In 1917 the revolutionary world really believed that it had arrived before those gates.  Rosa Luxemburg’s prophecy was being realized.  “The revolution will rise resoundingly tomorrow to its full height and, to your consternation, will announce with the sound of all its trumpets: I was, I am, I shall be.”  The Spartakus movement believed that it had achieved the definitive revolution because, according to Marx himself, the latter would come to pass after the Russian Revolution had been consummated by a Western revolution.  After the revolution of 1917, a Soviet Germany would, in fact, have opened the gates of heaven.  But the Spartakus movement is crushed, the French general strike of 1920 fails, the Italian revolutionary movement is strangled.  Liebknecht then recognizes that the time is not ripe for revolution.  “The period has not yet drawn to a close.”  But also, and now we grasp how defeat can excite vanquished faith to the point of religious ecstasy: “At the crash of economic collapse whose rumblings can already be heard, the sleeping soldiers of the proletariat will awake as at the fanfare of the Last Judgement, and the corpses of the victims of the struggle will arise and demand an accounting from those who are bowed down with curses.”  While awaiting these events, Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg are assassinated, and Germany rushes towards servitude.  The Russian Revolution remains isolated, living in defiance of its own system, still far from the celestial gates, with an apocalypse to organize.  The advent is again postponed.  Faith is intact, but it totters beneath an enormous load of problems and discoveries which Marxism had not foreseen.  The new religion is once more confronted with Galilee: to preserve its faith, it must deny the sun and humiliate free man.

            What does Galilee say, in fact, at this moment?  What are the errors, demonstrated by history itself, of the prophecy?  We know that the economic evolution of the contemporary world refutes a certain number of the postulates of Marx.  If the revolution is to occur at the end of two parallel movements, the unlimited shrinking of capital and the unlimited expansion of the proletariat, it will not occur or ought not to have occurred.  Capital and proletariat have both been equally unfaithful to Marx.  The tendency observed in industrial England of the nineteenth century has, in certain cases, changed its course, and in others become more complex.  Economic crises, which should have occurred with increasing frequency, have, on the contrary, become more sporadic: capitalism has learned the secrets of planned production and has contributed on its own part to the growth of the Moloch State.  Moreover, with the introduction of companies in which stock could be held, capital, instead of becoming increasingly concentrated, has given rise to a new category of smallholders whose very last desire would certainly be to encourage strikes.  Small enterprises have been, in many cases, destroyed by competition as Marx foresaw.  But the complexity of modern production has generated a multitude of small factories around great enterprises.  In 1938 Ford was able to announce that five thousand two hundred independent workshops supplied him with their products.  Of course, large industries inevitably assimilated these enterprises to a certain extent.  But the essential thing is that these small industrialists form an intermediary social layer which complicates the scheme that Marx imagined.  Finally, the law of concentration has proved absolutely false in agricultural economy, which was treated with considerable frivolity by Marx.  The hiatus is important here.  In one of its aspects, the history of socialism in our times can be considered as the struggle between the proletarian movement and the peasant class.  This struggle continues, on the historical plane, the nineteenth-century ideological struggle between authoritarian socialism and libertarian socialism, of which the peasant and artisan origins are quite evident.  Thus Marx had, in the ideological material of his time, the elements for a study of the peasant problem.  But his desire to systematize made him oversimplify everything.  This particular simplification was to prove expensive for the kulaks who constituted more than five million historic exceptions to be brought, by death and deportation, within the Marxist pattern.

            The same desire for simplification diverted Marx from the phenomenon of the nation in the very century of nationalism.  He believed that through commerce and exchange, through the very victory of the proletariat, the barriers would fall.  But it was national barriers that brought about the fall of the proletarian ideal.  As a means of explaining history, the struggle between nations has been proved at least as important as the class struggle.  But nations cannot be entirely explained by economics; therefore the system ignored them.

            The proletariat, on its part, did not toe the line.  First of all, Marx’s fear is confirmed: reforms and trade unions brought about a rise in the standard of living and an amelioration in working conditions.  These improvements are very far from constituting an equitable settlement of the social problem; but the miserable condition of the English textile workers in Marx’s time, far from becoming general and even deteriorating, as he would have liked, has on the contrary been alleviated.  Marx would not complain about this today, the equilibrium having been re-established by another error in his predictions.  It has, in fact, been possible to prove that the most efficacious revolutionary or trade-union asset has always been the existence of a working-class elite who have not been sterilized by hunger.  Poverty and degeneration have never ceased to be what they were before Marx’s time, and what he did not want to admit they were despite all his observations: factors contributing to servitude, not to revolution.  One third of working-class Germany was unemployed in 1933.  Bourgeois society was then obliged to provide a means of livelihood for these unemployed, thus bringing about the situation that Marx said was essential for revolution.  But it is not a good thing that future revolutionaries should be put in the situation of expecting to be fed by the State.  Thus unnatural habit leads to others, which are even less good, and which Hitler made into doctrine.

            Finally, the proletariat did not increase in numbers indefinitely.  The very condition of industrial production, which every Marxist is called upon to encourage, improved, to a considerable extent, the conditions of the middle class [From 1920 to1930, in a period of intense productivity, the number of metallurgical workers decreased in the United States, while the number of salesmen working for the same industry almost doubled.] and even created a new social stratum, the technicians.  The ideal, so dear to Lenin, of a society in which the engineer would at the same time be a manual labourer is in conflict with the facts.  The principal fact is that technology, like science, has reached such a degree of complication that it is not possible for a single man to understand the totality of its principles and applications.  It is almost impossible, for instance, for a physicist today to have a complete understanding of the biological science of his times.  Even within the realms of physics he cannot claim to be equally familiar with every branch of the subject.  It is the same in technology.  From the moment that productivity, which is considered by both bourgeois and Marxist as a benefit in itself, is developed to enormous proportions, the division of labour, which Marx thought could have been avoided, became inevitable.  Every worker has been brought to the point of performing a particular function without knowing the overall plan into which his work will fit.  Those who co-ordinate individual work have formed, by their very function, a class whose social importance is decisive.

            It is only fair to point out that this era of technocracy announced by Burnham was described, about twenty years ago, by Simone Weil in a form that can be considered complete, without drawing Burnham’s unacceptable conclusions.  To the two traditional forms of oppression known to humanity – oppression by armed force and by wealth – Simone Weil adds a third – oppression by occupation.  “One can abolish the opposition between the buyer and the seller of work,” she wrote, “without abolishing the opposition between those who dispose of the machine and those of whom the machine disposes.”  The Marxist plan to abolish the degrading opposition of intellectual work to manual work has come into conflict with the demands of production, which elsewhere Marx exalted.  Marx undoubtedly foresaw, in Das Kapital, the importance of the “manager” on the level of maximum concentration of capital.  But he did not believe that this concentration of capital could survive the abolition of private property.  Division of labour and private property, he said, are identical expressions.  History has demonstrated the contrary.  The ideal regime based on collective property could be defined, according to Lenin, as justice plus electricity.  In the final analysis it is only electricity, without justice.

            The idea of a mission of the proletariat has not, so far, been able to formulate itself in history: this sums up the failing of the Marxist prophecy.  The failure of the Second International has proved that the proletariat was influenced by other things as well as its economic condition and that, contrary to the famous formula, it had a fatherland.  The majority of the proletariat accepted or submitted to the war and collaborated, willy-nilly, in the nationalist excesses of the times.  Marx intended that the working classes before they triumphed should have acquired legal and political acumen.  His error lay only in believing that extreme poverty, and particularly industrial poverty, could lead to political maturity.  Moreover, it is quite certain that the revolutionary capacity of the masses was curtailed by the decapitation of the libertarian revolution, during and after the Commune.  After all, Marxism easily dominated the working-class movement from 1872 on, undoubtedly because of its own strength, but also because the only socialist tradition that could have opposed it had been drowned in blood; there were practically no Marxists among the insurgents of 1871.  This automatic purification of revolution has been continued, thanks to the activities of police states, until our times.  More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other. When the revolutionary elite are guillotined and when Talleyrand is left alive, who will oppose Bonaparte?  But to these historical reasons are added economic necessities.  The passages by Simone Weil on the condition of the factory worker [La Condition ouvrière (Paris: Gallimard.)] must be read in order to realize to what degree of moral exhaustion and silent despair the rationalization of labour can lead.  Simone Weil is right in saying that the worker’s condition is doubly inhumane in that he is first deprived of money and then of dignity.  Work in which one can have an interest, creative work, even though it is badly paid, does not degrade life.  Industrial socialism has done nothing essential to alleviate the condition of the workers because it has not touched on the very principle of production and the organization of labour, which, on the contrary, it has extolled.  It even went so far as to offer the worker a historic justification of his lot of much the same value as a promise of celestial joys to one who works himself to death; never did it attempt to give him the joy of creation.  The political form of society is no longer in question at this level, but the beliefs of a technical civilization on which capitalism and socialism are equally dependent.  Any ideas that do not advance the solution of this problem hardly touch on the misfortunes of the worker.

            Only through the interplay of economic forces, so much admired by Marx, has the proletariat been able to reject the historical mission with which Marx had rightly charged it.  His error can be excused because, confronted with the debasement of the ruling classes, a man who has the future of civilization at heart instinctively looks for an elite as a replacement.  But this instinctive search is not, in itself alone, creative.  The revolutionary bourgeoisie seized power in 1789 because they already had it.  At this period legality, as Jules Monnerot says, was lagging behind the facts.  The facts were that the bourgeoisie were already in possession of the posts of command and of the new power: money. The proletariat were not at all in the same position, having only their poverty and their hopes and being kept in their condition of misery by the bourgeoisie.  The bourgeois class debased itself by a mania for production and material power, while the very organization of this mania made the creation of an elite impossible. [Lenin was the first to record this truth, but without any apparent bitterness.  If his words are terrible for revolutionary hopes, they are no less so for Lenin himself.  He dared to say, in fact, that the masses would more easily accept bureaucratic and dictatorial centralism because “discipline and organization are assimilated more easily by the proletariat, thanks to the hard school of the factory.”]  But criticism of this organization and the development of rebel conscience could, on the contrary, forge a reserve elite.  Only revolutionary trade unionism, with Pelloutier and Sorel, embarked on this course and wanted to create, by professional and cultural education, new cadres for which a world without honour was calling and still calls.  But that could not be accomplished in a day and the new masters were already on the scene, interested in making immediate use of human unhappiness for the sake of happiness in the distant future, rather than relieving as much and as soon as possible the suffering of millions of men.  The authoritarian socialists deemed that history was going too slowly and that it was necessary, in order to hurry it on, to entrust the mission of the proletariat to a handful of doctrinaires.  For that very reason they have been the first to deny this mission.  Nevertheless it exists, not in the exclusive sense that Marx gives it, but in the sense that a mission exists for any human group which knows how to derive pride and fecundity from its labours and its sufferings.  So that it can manifest itself, however, a risk must be taken and confidence put in working-class freedom and spontaneity.  Authoritarian socialism, on the contrary, has confiscated this living freedom for the for the benefit of an ideal freedom, which is yet to come.  In so doing, whether it wished to or not, it reinforced the attempt at enslavement begun by industrial capitalism.  By the combined action of these two factors and during a hundred and fifty years, except in the Paris of the Commune, which was the last refuge of rebel revolution, the proletariat has had no other historical mission but to be betrayed.  The workers fought and died to give power to the military or to intellectuals who dreamed of becoming military and who would enslave them in their turn.  This struggle, however, has been the source of their dignity, a fact that is recognized by all who have chosen to share their aspirations and their misfortunes.  But this dignity has been acquired in opposition to the whole clan of old and new masters.  At the very moment when they dare to make use of it, it denies them.  In one sense, it announces their eclipse.

            The economic predictions of Marx have, therefore, been at least called in question by reality.  What remains true in his vision of the economic world is the establishment of a society more and more defined by the rhythm of production.  But he shared this concept, in the enthusiasm of his period, with bourgeois ideology.  The bourgeois illusions concerning science and technical progress, shared by the authoritarian socialists, gave birth to the civilization of the machine-tamers, which can, through the stresses of competition and the desire for domination, be separated into enemy blocs, but which on the economic plane is subject to identical laws: the accumulation of capital and rationalized and continually increasing production.  The political difference, which concerns the degree of omnipotence of the State, is appreciable, but can be reduced by economic evolution.  Only the difference in ethical concepts – formal virtue as opposed to historical cynicism – seems substantial.  But the imperative of production dominates both universes and makes them, on the economic plane, one world. [It is worth specifying that productivity is only injurious when it is considered as an end, not as a means, in which case it could have a liberating effect.]

                In any event, if the economic imperative can no longer be denied, [Although it was deniable – until the eighteenth century – during all the period in which Marx thought he had discovered it.  Historical examples in which the conflict between forms of civilization did not end in progress in methods of production: destruction of the Mycenæan civilization, invasion of Rome by the barbarians, expulsion of the Moors from Spain, extermination of the Albigenses.] its consequences are not what Marx imagined.  Economically speaking, capitalism becomes oppressive through the phenomenon of accumulation.  It is oppressive through being what it is, it accumulates in order to increase what it is, to exploit it all the more, and accordingly to accumulate still more.  At that moment accumulation would be necessary only to a very small extent in order to guarantee social benefits.  But the revolution, in its turn, becomes industrialized and realizes that, when accumulation is an attribute of technology itself, and not of capitalism, the machine finally conjures up the machine.  Every form of collectivity, fighting for survival, is forced to accumulate instead of distributing its revenues.  It accumulates in order to increase in size and so to increase in power.  Whether bourgeois or socialist, it postpones justice for a later date, in the interests of power alone.  But power opposes other forms of power.  It arms and rearms because others are arming and rearming.  It does not stop accumulating and will never cease to do so until the day when perhaps it will reign alone on earth.  Moreover, for that to happen, it must pass through a war.  Until that day the proletariat will receive only the bare minimum for its subsistence.  The revolution compels itself to construct, at a great expenditure in human lives, the industrialist and capitalist intermediary that its own system demands.  Revenue is replaced by human labour.  Slavery then becomes the general condition, and the gates of heaven remain locked.  Such is the economic law governing a world that lives by the cult of production, and the reality is even more bloody than the law.  Revolution, in the dilemma into which it has been led by its bourgeois opponents and its nihilist supporters, is nothing but slavery.  Unless it changes its principles and its path, it can have no other final result than servile rebellions, obliterated in blood or the hideous prospect of atomic suicide.  The will to power, the nihilist struggle for domination and authority, have done considerably more than sweep away the Marxist Utopia.  This has become in its turn a historic fact destined to be put to use like all the other historic facts.  This idea, which was supposed to dominate history, has become lost in history; the concept of abolishing means has been reduced to a means in itself and cynically manipulated for the most banal and bloody ends.  The uninterrupted development of production has not ruined the capitalist regime to the benefit of the revolution.  It has equally been the ruin of both bourgeois and revolutionary society to the benefit of an idol that has the snout of power.

            How could a so-called scientific socialism conflict to such a point with facts?  The answer is easy: it was not scientific.  On the contrary, its defeat resulted from a method ambiguous enough to wish to be simultaneously determinist and prophetic, dialectic and dogmatic.  If the mind is only the reflection of events, it cannot anticipate their progress, except by hypothesis.  If Marxist theory is determined by economics, it can describe the past history of production, not its future, which remains in the realms of probability.  The task of historical materialism can only be to establish a method of criticism of contemporary society; it is only capable of making suppositions, unless it abandons its scientific attitude, about the society of the future.  Moreover, is it not for this reason that its most important work is called Capital and not Revolution?  Marx and the Marxists allowed themselves to prophesy the future and the triumph of communism to the detriment of their postulates and of scientific method.

            Then predictions could be scientific, on the contrary, only by ceasing to prophesy definitively.  Marxism is not scientific; at the best, it has scientific prejudices.  It brought out into the open the profound difference between scientific reasoning, that fruitful instrument of research, of thought, and even of rebellion, and historical reasoning, which German ideology invented by its negation of all principles.  Historical reasoning is not a type of reasoning that, within the framework of its own functions, can pass judgement on the world.  While pretending to judge it, it really tries to determine its course.  Essentially a part of events, it directs them and is simultaneously pedagogic and all-conquering.  Moreover, its most abstruse descriptions conceal the most simple truths.  If man is reduced to nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.  Therefore the history of contemporary nihilism is nothing but a prolonged endeavour to give order, by human forces alone and simply by force, to a history no longer endowed with order.  The pseudo-reasoning ends by identifying itself with cunning and strategy, while waiting to culminate in the ideological Empire.  What part could science play in this concept?  Nothing is less determined on conquest than reason.  History is not made with scientific scruples; we are even condemned to not making history from the moment when we claim to act with scientific objectivity.  Reason does not preach, or if it does, it is no longer reason.  That is why historical reason is an irrational and romantic form of reason, which sometimes recalls the false logic of the insane and at other times the mystic affirmation of the word.

            The only really scientific aspect of Marxism is to be found in its preliminary rejections of myths and in its exposure of the crudest kind of interests.  But in this respect Marx is not more scientific in his attitude than La Rochefoucauld; and that is just the attitude that he abandons when he embarks on prophecy.  Therefore it is not surprising that, to make Marxism scientific and to preserve this fiction, which is very useful in this century of science, it has been a necessary first step to render science Marxist through terror.  The progress of science, since Marx, has roughly consisted in replacing determinism and the rather crude mechanism of its period by a doctrine of provisional probability.  Marx wrote to Engels that the Darwinian theory constituted the very foundation of their method.  For Marxism to remain infallible, it has therefore been necessary to deny all biological discoveries made since Darwin.  As it happens that all discoveries since the unexpected mutations established by De Vries have consisted in introducing, contrary to the doctrines of determinism, the idea of chance into biology, it has been necessary to entrust to Lyssenko with the task of disciplining chromosomes and of demonstrating once again the truth of the most elementary determinism.  That is ridiculous: but put a police force under Flaubert’s Monsieur Homais and he would no longer be ridiculous, and there we have the twentieth century.  As far as that is concerned, the twentieth century has also witnessed the denial of the principle of indeterminism in science, of limited relativity, of the quantum theory, [Roger Callois, in Critique du Marxisme (Paris: Gallimard), remarks that Stalinism objects to the quantum theory, but makes use of atomic science, which is derived from it.] and, finally, of every general tendency of contemporary science.  Marxism is only scientific today in defiance of Heisenberg, Bohr, Einstein, and all the greatest minds of our time.  After all, there is really nothing mysterious about the principle that consists in using scientific reasoning to the advantage of a prophecy.  This has already been named the principle of authority, and it is this that guides the Churches when they wish to subject living reason to dead faith and freedom of the intellect to the maintenance of temporal power.

            Finally, there remains of Marx’s prophecy – henceforth in conflict with its two principles, economy and science – only the passionate annunciation of an event that will take place in the very far future.  The only recourse of the Marxists consists in saying that the delays are simply longer than was imagined and that one day, far away in the future, the end will justify all.  In other words, we are in purgatory and we are promised that there will be no hell.  And so the problem that is posed is of another order.  If the struggle waged by one or two generations throughout a period of economic evolution which is, perforce, beneficial suffices to bring about a classless society, then the necessary sacrifice becomes comprehensible to the man with a militant turn of mind; the future for him has a concrete aspect – the aspect of his child, for instance.  But if, when the sacrifice of several generations has proved insufficient, we must then embark on an infinite period of universal strife one thousand times more destructive than before, then the conviction of faith in needed in order to accept the necessity of killing and dying.  This new faith is no more founded on pure reason than were the ancient faiths.

            In what terms is it possible to imagine this end of history?  Marx did not fall back on Hegel’s terms.  He said, rather obscurely, that communism was only a necessary aspect of the future of humanity, and did not comprise the entire future.  But either communism does not terminate the history of contradictions and suffering, and then it is no longer possible to see how one can justify so much effort and sacrifice; or it does terminate it, and it is no longer possible to image the continuation of history except as an advance toward this perfected form of society.  Thus a mystic idea is arbitrarily introduced into a description that claims to be scientific.  The final disappearance of political economy – the favourite theme of Marx and Engels – signifies the end of all suffering.  Economics, in fact, coincides with pain and suffering in history.  We arrive at last in the Garden of Eden.

            We come no nearer to solving the problem by declaring that it is not a question of the end of history, but of a leap into the midst of a different history.  We can only imagine this other history in terms of our own history; for man they are both one and the same thing.  Moreover, this other history poses the same dilemma.  Either it is not the solution of all contradictions and we suffer, die, and kill for almost nothing, or it is the solution of contradictions and therefore, to all intents and purposes, terminates our history.  Marxism, at this stage, is only justified by the definitive city.

            Can it be said, therefore, that this city of ends has a meaning?  It has, in terms of the sacred universe, once the religious postulate has been admitted.  The world was created, it will have an end; Adam left Eden, humanity must return there.  It has no meaning, in the historical universe, if the dialectical postulate is admitted.  The dialectic correctly applied cannot and must not come to an end. [See the excellent discussion by Jules Mournrot in Sociologie du communisme, Part III.]  The antagonistic terms of a historical situation can negate one another and then be surmounted in a new synthesis.  But there is no reason why this new synthesis should be better than the original.  Or rather there is only a reason for this supposition, if one arbitrarily imposes an end to the dialectic, and if one then applies a judgement based on outside values.  If the classless society is going to terminate history, then capitalist society is, in effect, superior to feudal society to the extent that it brings the advent of this classless society still nearer.  But if the dialectic postulate is admitted at all, it must be admitted entirely.  Just as aristocratic society has been succeeded by a society without an aristocracy but with classes, it must be concluded that the society of classes will be succeeded by a classless society, but animated by a new antagonism still to be defined.  A movement that is refused a beginning cannot have an end. “If socialism,” says an anarchist essayist, [Ernestan: Socialism and Freedom.] “is an eternal evolution, its means are its end.”  More precisely, it has no ends; it has only means which are guaranteed by nothing unless by a value foreign to evolution.  In this sense, it is correct to remark that the dialectic is not and cannot be revolutionary.  From our point of view, it is only nihilism – pure movement which aims at denying everything which is not itself.

            There is in this universe no reason, therefore, to imagine the end of history.  That is the only justification, however, for the sacrifices demanded of humanity in the name of Marxism.  But it has no other reasonable basis but a petitio principii, which introduces into history – a kingdom that was meant to be unique and self-sufficient -  a value foreign to history.  Since that value is, at the same time, foreign to ethics, it is not, properly speaking, a value on which one can base one’s conduct; it is a dogma without foundation that can be adopted only as the desperate effort to escape of a mind which is being stifled by solitude or by nihilism, or a value which is going to be imposed by those whom dogma profits.  The end of history is not an exemplary or a perfectionist value; it is an arbitrary and terroristic principle.

            Marx recognized that all revolutions before his time had failed.  But he claimed that the revolution announced by him must succeed definitively.  Up to now, the workers’ movement has lived on this affirmation which has been continually belied by facts and of which it is high time that the falsehood should be dispassionately denounced.  In proportion as the prophecy was postponed, the affirmation of the coming of the final kingdom, which could only find the most feeble support in reason, became an article of faith.  The sole value of the Marxist world henceforth resides, despite Marx, in a dogma imposed on an entire ideological empire.  The kingdom of ends is used, like the ethics of eternity and the kingdom of heaven, for purposes of social mystification.  Élie Halévy declared himself unqualified to say if socialism was going to lead to the universalization of the Swiss Republic or to European Cæsarism.  Nowadays we are better informed.  The prophecies of Nietzsche, on this point at least, are justified.  Marxism is henceforth to win fame, in defiance of its own teachings and, by an inevitable process of logic, by intellectual Cæsarism, which we must now finally describe.  The last representative of the struggle of justice against grace, it takes over, without having wanted to do so, the struggle of justice against truth.  How to live without grace - that is the question that dominates the nineteenth century.  “By justice,” answered all those who did not want to accept absolute nihilism.  To the people who despaired of the kingdom of heaven, they promised the kingdom of men.  The preaching of the City of Humanity increased in fervour up to the end of the nineteenth century, when it became really visionary in tone and placed scientific certainties in the service of Utopia.  But the kingdom has retreated into the distance, gigantic wars have ravaged the oldest countries of Europe, the blood of rebels has bespattered walls, and total justice has approached not a step nearer.  The question of the twentieth century – for which the terrorists of 1905 died and which tortures the contemporary world – has gradually been specified: how to live without grace and without justice?

            Only nihilism, and not rebellion, has answered that question.  Up to now, only nihilism has spoken, returning once more to the theme of the romantic rebels: “Frenzy.”  Frenzy in terms of history is called power.  The will to power came to take the place of the will to justice, pretending at first to be identified with it and then relegating it to a place somewhere at the end of history, waiting until such time as nothing remains on earth to dominate.  Thus the ideological consequence has triumphed over the economic consequence: the history of Russian Communism gives the lie to every one of its principles.  Once more we find, at the end of this long journey, metaphysical rebellion, which, this time, advances to the clash of arms and the whispering of passwords, but forgetful of its real principles, burying its solitude in the bosom of armed masses, covering the emptiness of its negations with obstinate scholasticism, still directed toward the future, which it has made its only god, but separated from it by a multitude of nations that must be overthrown and continents that must be dominated.  With action as its unique principle, and with the kingdom of man as an alibi, it has already begun, in the east of Europe, to construct its own armed camp, face to face with other armed camps.

            The Kingdom of Ends

            Marx never dreamed of such a terrifying apotheosis.  Nor, indeed, did Lenin, though he took a decisive step toward establishing a military Empire.  As good a strategist as he was a mediocre philosopher, he first of all posed himself the problem of the seizure of power.  Let us note immediately that it is absolutely false to talk, as if often done, of Lenin’s Jacobinism.  Only his idea of units of agitators and revolutionaries is Jacobin.  The Jacobins believed in principles and in virtue; they died because they had to deny them.  Lenin believes only in the revolution and in the virtue of expediency.  “One must be prepared for every sacrifice, to use if necessary every stratagem, ruse, illegal method, to be determined to conceal the truth, for the sole purpose of penetrating the labour unions … and of accomplishing, despite everything, the Communist task.”  The struggle against formal morality, inaugurated by Hegel and Marx, is found again in Lenin with his criticism of inefficacious revolutionary attitudes.  Complete dominion was the aim of this movement.

            It we examine the two works written at the beginning [What to Do? (1902)] and at the end [The State and the Revolution (1917)] of his career as an agitator, one is struck by the fact that he never ceased to fight mercilessly against the sentimental forms of revolutionary action.  He wanted to abolish the morality of revolutionary action because he believed, correctly, that revolutionary power could not be established while still respecting the Ten Commandments.  When he appears, after his first experiments on the stage of history, where he was to play such an important role, to see him take the world so freely and so naturally as it had been shaped by the ideology and the economy of the preceding century, one would imagine him to be the first man of a new era.  Completely impervious to anxiety, to nostalgia, to ethics, he takes command, looks for the best method of making the machine run, and decides that certain virtues are suitable for the driver of history’s chariot and that others are not.  He gropes a little at first and hesitates as to whether Russia should first pass through the capitalist and industrial phase.  But this comes to the same as doubting whether the revolution can take place in Russia.  He himself is Russian and his task is to make the Russian Revolution.  He jettisons economic fatalism and embarks on action.  He roundly declares, from 1902 on, that the workers will never elaborate an independent ideology by themselves.  He denies the spontaneity of the masses.  Socialist doctrine supposes a scientific basis that only the intellectuals can give it.  When he says that all distinctions between workers and intellectuals must be effaced, what he really means is that it is possible not to be proletarian and know better than the proletariat what its interests are.  He then congratulates Lassalle for having carried on a tenacious struggle against the spontaneity of the masses.  “Theory,” he says, “should subordinate spontaneity.” [Marx said much the same: “What certain proletarians, or even the entire proletariat, imagine to be their goal is of no importance.”]  In plain language, that means that revolution needs leaders and theorists.

            He attacks both reformism, which he considers guilty of dissipating revolutionary strength, and terrorism, [We know that his elder brother, who had chosen terrorism, was hanged.] which he thinks an exemplary and inefficacious attitude.  The revolution, before being either economic or sentimental, is military.  Until the day that the revolution breaks out, revolutionary action is identified with strategy.  Autocracy is its enemy, whose main source of strength is the police force, which is nothing but a corps of professional political soldiers.  The conclusion is simple: “The struggle against the political police demands special qualities, demands professional revolutionaries.”  The revolution will have its professional army as well as the masses, which can be conscripted when needed.  This corps of agitators must be organized before the mass is organized.  A network of agents is the expression that Lenin uses, thus announcing the reign of the secret society and of the realist monks of the revolution: “We are the Young Turks of the revolution,” he said, “with something of the Jesuit added.”  From that moment the proletariat no longer has a mission.  It is only one powerful means, among others, in the hands of the revolutionary ascetics. [Heine already called the socialists “the new puritans.”  Puritanism and revolution go, historically, together.]

            The problem of the seizure of power brings in its train the problem of the State.  The State and the Revolution (1917), which deals with this subject, is the strangest and the most contradictory of pamphlets.  Lenin employs in it his favourite method, which is the method of authority. With the help of Marx and Engels, he begins by taking a stand against any kind of reformism which would claim to utilize the bourgeois State – that organism of domination of one class over another.  The bourgeois State owes its survival to the police and to the army because it is primarily an instrument of oppression.  It reflects both the irreconcilable antagonism of the classes and the forcible subjugation of this antagonism.  This authority of fact is only worthy of contempt.  “Even the head of the military power of a civilized State must envy the head of the clan whom patriarchal society surrounded with voluntary respect, not with respect imposed by the club.”  Moreover, Engels has firmly established that the concept of the State and the concept of a free society are irreconcilable.  “Classes will disappear as ineluctably as they appeared.  With the disappearance of classes, the State will inevitably disappear.  The society that reorganizes production on the basis of the free and equal association of the producers will relegate the machine of State to the place it deserves: to the museum of antiquities, side by side with the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe.”

            Doubtless this explains why inattentive readers have ascribed the reason for writing The State and the Revolution to Lenin’s anarchistic tendencies and have regretted the peculiar posterity of a doctrine so severe about the army, the police, club, and bureaucracy.  But Lenin’s points of view, in order to be understood, must always be considered in terms of strategy.  If he defends so very energetically Engels’ thesis about the disappearance of the bourgeois State, it is because he wants, on the one hand, to put an obstacle in the way of the pure “economism” of Plekhanov and Kautsky and, on the other, to demonstrate that Kerensky’s government is a bourgeois government, which must be destroyed.  One month later, moreover, he destroys it.

            It was also necessary to answer those who objected to the fact that the revolution itself had need of an administrative and repressive apparatus.  There again Marx and Engels are largely used to prove, authoritatively, that the proletarian State is not a State organized on the lines of other states, but a State which, by definition, is in the process of withering away.  “As soon as there is no longer a social class which must be kept oppressed …. a State ceases to be necessary.  The first act by which the [proletarian] State really establishes itself as the representative of an entire society – the seizure of the society’s means of production – is, at the same time, the last real act of the State.  For the government of people is substituted the administration of things…. The State is not abolished, it perishes.”  The bourgeois State is first suppressed by the proletariat.  Then, but only then, the proletarian State fades away.  The dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary – first, to crush or suppress what remains of the bourgeois class; secondly, to bring about the socialization of the means of production.  Once these two tasks are accomplished, it immediately begins to wither away.

            Lenin, therefore, begins from the firm and definite principle that the State dies as soon as the socialization of the means of production is achieved and the exploiting class has consequently been suppressed.  Yet, in the same pamphlet, he ends by justifying the preservation, even after the socialization of the means of production and, without any predictable end, of the dictatorship of a revolutionary faction over the rest of the people.  The pamphlet, which makes continual reference to the experiences of the Commune, flatly contradicts the contemporary federalist and anti-authoritarian ideas that produced the Commune; and it is equally opposed to the optimistic forecasts of Marx and Engels.  The reason for this is clear; Lenin had not forgotten that the Commune failed.  As for the means of such a surprising demonstration, they were even more simple: with each new difficulty encountered by the revolution, the State as described by Marx is endowed with a supplementary prerogative.  Ten pages farther on, without any kind of transition, Lenin in effect affirms that power is necessary to crush the resistance of the exploiters “and also to direct the great mass of the population, peasantry, lower middle classes, and semi-proletariat, in the management of the socialist economy.”  The shift here is undeniable; the provisional State of Marx and Engels is charged with a new mission, which risks prolonging its life indefinitely.  Already we can perceive the contradiction of the Stalinist regime in conflict with its official philosophy.  Either this regime has realized the classless socialist society, and the maintenance of a formidable apparatus of repression is not justified in Marxist terms, or it has not realized the classless society and has therefore proved that Marxist doctrine is erroneous and, in particular, that the socialization of the means of production does not mean the disappearance of classes.  Confronted with its official doctrine, the regime is forced to choose: the doctrine is false, or the regime has betrayed it.  In fact, together with Nechaiev and Tkachev, it is Lassalle, the inventor of State socialism, whom Lenin has caused to triumph in Russia, to the detriment of Marx.  From this moment on, the history of the interior struggles of the party, from Lenin to Stalin, is summed up in the struggle between the workers’ democracy and military and bureaucratic dictatorship; in other words, between justice and expediency.

            There is a moment’s doubt about whether Lenin is not going to find a kind of means of conciliation when we hear him praising the measures adopted by the Commune: elected, revocable functionaries, remunerated like workers, and replacement of industrial bureaucracy by direct workers’ management.  We even catch a glimpse of a federalist Lenin who praises the institution and representation of the communes.  But it becomes rapidly clear that this federalism is only extolled to the extent that it signifies the abolition of parliamentarianism.  Lenin, in defiance of every historical truth, calls it centralism and immediately puts the accent on the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, while reproaching the anarchists for their intransigence concerning the State.  At this point a new affirmation, based on Engels, is introduced which justifies the continuation of the dictatorship of the proletariat after socialization, after the disappearance of the bourgeois class, and even after control of the masses has finally been achieved.  The preservation of authority will now have as limits those that are prescribed for it by the very conditions of production.  For example, the final withering away of the State will coincide with the moment when accommodation can be provided for all, free of charge.  It is the higher phase of Communism: “To each according to his needs.”  Until then, the State will continue.

            How rapid will be the development toward this higher phase of Communism when each shall receive according to his needs?  “That we do not and cannot know…. We have no data that allow us to solve these questions.”  “For the sake of greater clarity,” Lenin affirms with his customary arbitrariness, “it has never been vouchsafed to any socialist to guarantee the advent of the higher phase of Communism.”  It can be said that at this point freedom definitely dies.  From the rule of the masses and the concept of the proletarian revolution we first pass on to the idea of a revolution made and directed by professional agents.  The relentless criticism of the State is then reconciled with the necessary, but provisional, dictatorship of the proletariat, embodied in its leaders.  Finally, it is announced that the end of this provisional condition cannot be foreseen and that, what is more, no one has ever presumed to promise that there will be an end.  After that it is logical that the autonomy of the soviets should be contested.  Makhno betrayed, and the sailors of Kronstadt crushed by the party.

            Undoubtedly, many of the affirmations of Lenin, who was a passionate lover of justice, can still be opposed to the Stalinist regime; mainly the notion of the withering away of the State.  Even if it is admitted that the proletarian State cannot disappear before many years have passed, it is still necessary, according to Marxist doctrine, that it should tend to disappear and become less and less restrictive in order that it should be able to call itself proletarian.  It is certain that Lenin believed this trend to be inevitable and that, in this particular sense, he has been ignored.  For more than thirty years the proletarian State has shown no signs of progressive anaemia.  On the contrary, it seems to be enjoying increasing prosperity.  Meanwhile, in a lecture at the Sverdlov University two years later, under the pressure of outside events and interior realities, Lenin spoke with a precision which left little doubt about the indefinite continuation of the proletarian super-State.  “With this machine, or rather this weapon [the State], we shall crush every form of exploitation, and when there are no longer any possibilities of exploitation left on earth, no more people owning land or factories, no more people gorging themselves under the eyes of others who are starving, when such things become impossible, then and only then shall we cast this machine aside.  Then there will be neither State nor exploitation.”  Therefore as long as there exists on earth, and no longer in a specific society, one single oppressed person and one proprietor, so long the State will continue to exist.  It also will be obliged to increase in strength during this period so as to vanquish one by one the injustices, the governments responsible for injustice, the obstinately bourgeois nations, and the people who are blind to their own interests.  And when, on an earth that has finally been subdued and purged of enemies, the final iniquity shall have been drowned in the blood of the just and the unjust, then the State, which has reached the limit of all power, a monstrous idol covering the entire earth, will be discreetly absorbed into the silent city of Justice.

            Under the easily predictable pressure of adverse imperialism, the imperialism of justice was born, in reality, with Lenin.  But imperialism, even the imperialism of justice, has no other end but defeat or world empire.  Until then it has no other means but injustice.  From now on, the doctrine is definitively identified with the prophecy.  For the sake of justice in the far-away future, it authorizes injustice throughout the entire course of history and becomes the type of mystification which Lenin detested more than anything else in the world.  It contrives the acceptance of injustice, crime, and falsehood by the promise of a miracle.  Still greater production, still more power, uninterrupted labour, incessant suffering, permanent war, and then a moment will come when universal bondage in the totalitarian empire will be miraculously changed into its opposite: free leisure in a universal republic.  Pseudo-revolutionary mystification has now acquired a formula: all freedom must be crushed in order to conquer the empire, and one day the empire will be the equivalent of freedom.  And so the way to unity passes through totality.

            Totality and Trials

            Totality is, in effect, nothing more than the ancient dream of unity common to both believers and rebels, but projected horizontally onto an earth deprived of God.  To renounce every value, therefore, amounts to renouncing rebellion in order to escape the Empire and slavery.  Criticism of formal values cannot pass over the concept of freedom.  Once the impossibility has been recognized of creating, by means of the forces of rebellion alone, the free individual of whom the romantics dreamed, freedom itself has also been incorporated in the movement of history.  It has become freedom fighting for existence, which, in order to exist, must create itself.  Identified with the dynamism of history, it cannot play its proper role until history comes to a stop, in the realization of the Universal City.  Until then, every one of its victories will lead to an antithesis that will render it pointless.  The German nation frees itself from its oppressors, but at the price of the freedom of every German.  The individuals under a totalitarian regime are not free, even though man in the collective sense is free.  Finally, when the Empire delivers the entire human species, freedom will reign over herds of slaves, who at least will be free in relation to God and, in general, in relation to every kind of transcendence.  The dialectic miracle, the transformation of quantity into quality, is explained here: it is the decision to call total servitude freedom.  Moreover, as in all the examples cited by Hegel and Marx, there is no objective transformation, but only a subjective change of denomination.  In other words, there is no miracle.  If the only hope of nihilism lies in thinking that millions of slaves can one day constitute a humanity which will be freed forever, then history is nothing but a desperate dream.  Historical thought was to deliver man from subjection to a divinity; but this liberation demanded of him the most absolute subjection to historical evolution.  Then man takes refuge in the permanence of the party in the same way that he formerly prostrated himself before the altar.  That is why the era which dares to claim that it is the most rebellious that has ever existed only offers a choice of various types of conformity.  The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

            But total freedom is no more easy to conquer than individual freedom.  To ensure man’s empire over the world, it is necessary to suppress in the world and in man everything that escapes the Empire, everything that does not come under the reign of quantity: and this is an endless undertaking.  The Empire must embrace time, space, and people, which compose the three dimensions of history.  It is simultaneously war, obscurantism, and tyranny, desperately affirming that one day it will be liberty, fraternity, and truth; the logic of its postulates obliges it to do so.  There is undoubtedly in Russia today, even in its Communist doctrines, a truth that denies Stalanist ideology.  But this ideology has its logic, which must be isolated and exposed if we wish the revolutionary spirit to escape final disgrace.

            The cynical intervention of the armies of the Western powers against the Soviet Revolution demonstrated, among other things, to the Russian revolutionaries that war and nationalism were realities in the same category as the class struggle.  Without an international solidarity of the working classes, a solidarity that would come into play automatically, no interior revolution could be considered likely to survive unless an international order was created.  From then on, it was necessary to admit that the Universal City could only be built on two conditions: either by almost simultaneous revolutions in every big country, or by the liquidation, through war, of the bourgeois nations; permanent revolution or permanent war.  We know that the first point of view almost triumphed.  The revolutionary movements in Germany, Italy, and France marked the high point in revolutionary hopes and aspirations.  But the crushing of these revolutions and the ensuing reinforcement of capitalist regimes have made war the reality of the revolution.  Thus the philosophy of enlightenment finally led to the Europe of the black-out.  By the logic of history and of doctrine, the Universal City, which was to have been realized by the spontaneous insurrection of the oppressed, has been little by little replaced by the Empire, imposed by means of power.  Engels, with the approval of Marx, dispassionately accepted this prospect when he wrote in answer to Bakunin’s Appeal to the Slavs: “The next world war will cause the disappearance from the surface of the globe, not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but of whole races of reactionaries.  That also is part of progress.”  That particular form of progress, in Engels’ mind, was destined to eliminate the Russia of the czars.  Today the Russian nation has reversed the direction of progress.  War, cold and lukewarm, is the slavery imposed by world Empire.  But now that it has become imperialist, the revolution is in an impasse.  If it does not renounce its false principles in order to return to the origins of rebellion, it only means the continuation, for several generations and until capitalism spontaneously decomposes, of a total dictatorship over hundreds of millions of men; or, if it wants to precipitate the advent of the Universal City, it only signifies the atomic war, which it does not want and after which any city whatsoever will only be able to contemplate complete destruction.  World revolution, by the very laws of the history it so imprudently deified, is condemned to the police or to the bomb.  At the same time, it finds itself confronted with yet another contradiction.  The sacrifice of ethics and virtue, the acceptance of all the means that it constantly justified by the end it pursued, can only be accepted, if absolutely necessary, in terms of an end that is reasonably likely to be realized.  The cold war supposes, by the indefinite prolongation of dictatorship, the indefinite negation of this end.  The danger of war, moreover, makes this end highly unlikely.  The extension of the Empire over the face of the earth is an inevitable necessity for twentieth-century revolution.  But this necessity confronts it with a final dilemma: to construct new principles for itself or to renounce justice and peace, whose definitive reign it always wanted.

            While waiting to dominate space, the Empire sees itself also compelled to reign over time.  In denying every stable truth, it is compelled to go to the point of denying the very lowest form of truth – the truth of history.  It has transported revolution, which is still impossible on a worldwide scale, back into a past that it is determined to deny.  Even that, too, is logical.  Any kind of coherence that is not purely economic between the past and the future of humanity supposes a constant which, in its turn, can lead to a belief in a human nature.  The profound coherence that Marx, who was a man of culture, had perceived as existing between all civilizations, threatened to swamp his thesis and to bring to light a natural continuity, far broader in scope that economic continuity.  Little by little, Russian Communism has been forced to burn its bridges, to introduce a solution of continuity into the problem of historical evolution.  The negation of every genius who proves to be a heretic (and almost all of them do), the denial of the benefits of civilization, of art – to the infinite degree in which it escapes from history – and the renunciation of vital traditions, have gradually forced contemporary Marxism within narrower and narrower limits.  It has not sufficed for Marxism to deny or to silence the things in the history of the world which cannot be assimilated by its doctrine, or to reject the discoveries of modern science.  It has also had to rewrite history, even the most recent and the best-known, even the history of the party and of the Revolution.  Year by year, sometimes month by month, Pravda corrects itself, and rewritten editions of the official history books follow one another off the presses.  Lenin is censored, Marx is not published.  At this point comparison with religious obscurantism is no longer even fair.  The Church never went so far as to decide that the divine manifestation was embodied in two, then in four, or in three, and then again in two, persons.  The acceleration of events that is part of our times also affects the fabrication of truth, which, accomplished at this speed, becomes pure fantasy.  As in the fairy story, in which all the looms of an entire town wove the empty air to provide clothes for the king, thousands of men, whose strange profession it is, rewrite a presumptuous version of history, which is destroyed the same evening while waiting for the calm voice of a child to proclaim suddenly that the king is naked.  This small voice, the voice of rebellion, will then be saying, what all the world can already see, that a revolution which, in order to last, is condemned to deny its universal vocation, or to renounce itself in order to be universal, is living by false principles.

            Meanwhile, these principles continue to dominate the lives of millions of men.  The dream of Empire, held in check by the realities of time and space, gratifies its desires on humanity.  People are not only hostile to the Empire as individuals: in that case the traditional methods of terror would suffice.  They are hostile to it insofar as human nature, to date, has never been able to live by history alone and has always escaped from it by some means.  The Empire supposes a negation and a certainty: the certainty of the infinite malleability of man and the negation of human nature.  Propaganda techniques serve to measure the degree of this malleability and try to make reflection and conditioned reflex coincide.  Propaganda makes it possible to sign a pact with those who for years have been designated as the mortal enemy.  Even more, it allows the psychological effect thus obtained to be reversed and the people, once again, to be aligned against this same enemy.  The experiment has not yet been brought to an end, but its principle is logical.  If there is no human nature, then the malleability of man is, in fact, infinite.  Political realism, on this level, is nothing but unbridled romanticism, a romanticism of expediency.

            In this way it is possible to explain why Russian Marxism rejects, in its entirety and even though it knows very well how to make use of it, the world of the irrational.  The irrational can serve the Empire as well as refute it.  The irrational escapes calculation, and calculation alone must reign in the Empire.  Man is only an interplay of forces that can be rationally influenced.  A few inconsiderate Marxists were rash enough to imagine that they could reconcile their doctrine with Freud’s, for example.  Their eyes were opened for them quickly enough.  Freud is a heretic thinker and a “petit bourgeois” because he brought to light the unconscious and bestowed on it at least as much reality as on the super or social ego.  This unconscious mind can therefore define the originality of a human nature opposed to the historic ego.  Man, on the contrary, must be explained in terms of the social and rational ego and as an object of calculation.  Therefore it has been necessary to enslave not only each individual life, but also the most irrational and the most solitary event of all, the expectancy of which accompanies man throughout his entire life.  The Empire, in its convulsive effort to found a definitive kingdom, strives to integrate death.

            A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object.  But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.  That is why the accursed is never produced and killed before the eyes of the world unless he consents to say that his death is just and unless he conforms to the Empire of objects.  One must die dishonoured or no longer exist – neither in life nor in death.  In the latter event, the victim does not die, he disappears.  If he is punished, his punishment would be a silent protest and might cause a fissure in the totality.  But the culprit is not punished, he is simply replaced in the totality and thus helps to construct the machine of Empire.  He is transformed into a cog in the machinery of production, so indispensable that in the long run he will not be used in production because he is guilty, but considered guilty because production has need of him.  The concentration-camp system of the Russians has, in fact, accomplished the dialectical transition from the government of people to the administration of objects, but by identifying people with objects.

            Even the enemy must collaborate in the common endeavour.  Beyond the confines of the Empire there is no salvation.  This is, or will be, the Empire of friendship.  But this friendship is the befriending of objects, for the friend cannot be preferred to the Empire.  The friendship of people – and there is no other definition of it – is specific solidarity, to the point of death, against everything that is not part of the kingdom of friendship.  The friendship of objects is friendship in general, friendship with everything, which supposes – when it is a question of self-preservation – mutual denunciation.  He who loves his friend loves him in the present, and the revolution wants to love only a man who has not yet appeared.  To love is, in a certain way, to kill the perfect man who is going to be born of the revolution.  In order that one day he may live, he should from now on be preferred to anyone else.  In the kingdom of humanity, men are bound by ties of affection; in the Empire of objects, men are united by mutual accusation.  The city that planned to be the city of fraternity becomes an ant-heap of solitary men.

            On another plane, only a brute in a state of irrational fury can imagine that men should be sadistically tortured in order to obtain their consent.  Such an act only accomplishes the subjugation of one man by another, in an outrageous relationship between persons.  The representative of rational totality is content, on the contrary, to allow the object to subdue the person in the soul of man.  The highest mind is first of all reduced to the level of the lowest by the police technique of joint accusation.  Then five, ten, twenty nights of insomnia will culminate an illusory conviction and will bring yet another dead soul into the world.  From this point of view, the only psychological revolution known to our times since Freud’s has been brought about by the NKVD and the political police in general.  Guided by a determinist hypothesis that calculates the weak points and the degree of elasticity of the soul, these new techniques have once again thrust aside one of man’s limits and have attempted to demonstrate that no individual psychology is original and that the common measure of all human character is matter.  They have literally created the physics of the soul.

            From that point on, traditional human relations have been transformed.  These progressive transformations characterize the world of rational terror in which, in different degrees, Europe lives.  Dialogue and personal relations have been replaced by propaganda or polemic, which are two kinds of monologue.  Abstraction, which belongs to the world of power and calculation, has replaced the real passions, which are in the domain of the flesh and of the irrational.  The ration coupon substituted for bread; love and friendship submitted to a doctrine, and destiny to a plan; punishment considered the norm, and production substituted for living creation, quite satisfactorily describe this disembodied Europe, peopled with positive or negative symbols of power.  “How miserable,” Marx exclaims, “is a society that knows no better means of defence than the executioner!”  But in Marx’s day the executioner had not yet become a philosopher and at least made no pretence of universal philanthropy.

            The ultimate contradiction of the greatest revolution that history ever knew does not, after all, lie entirely in the fact that it lays claim to justice despite an uninterrupted procession of violence and injustice.  This is an evil common to all times and a product of servitude or mystification.  The tragedy of this revolution is the tragedy of nihilism – it confounds itself with the drama of contemporary intelligence, which, while claiming to be universal, is only responsible for a series of mutilations of men’s minds.  Totality is not unity.  The state of siege, even when it is extended to the very boundaries of the earth, is not reconciliation.  The claim to a universal city is supported in this revolution only by rejecting two thirds of the world and the magnificent heritage of the centuries, and by denying, to the advantage of history, both nature and beauty and by depriving man of the power of passion, doubt, happiness, and imaginative invention – in a word, of his greatness.  The principles that men give to themselves end by overwhelming their noblest intentions.  By dint of argument, incessant struggle, polemics, excommunications, persecutions conducted and suffered, the universal city of free and fraternal man is slowly diverted and gives way to the only universe in which history and expediency can in fact be elevated to the position of supreme judges: the universe of the trial.

            Every religion revolves around the concepts of innocence and guilt.  Prometheus, the first rebel, however, denies the right to punish.  Zeus himself, Zeus above all, is not innocent enough to exercise this right.  Thus rebellion, in its very first manifestation, refuses to recognize punishment as legitimate.  But in his last incarnation, at the end of his exhausting journey, the rebel once more adopts the religious concept of punishment and places it at the centre of his universe.  The supreme judge is no longer in the heavens; history itself acts as an implacable divinity.  History, in one sense, is nothing but a protracted punishment, for the real reward will be reaped only at the end of time.  We are far, it would seem, from Marxism and from Hegel, and even farther from the first rebels.  Nevertheless, all purely historical thought leads to the brink of this abyss.  To the extent to which Marx predicted the inevitable establishment of the classless city and to the extent to which he thus establishes the good will of history, every check to the advance toward freedom must be imputed to the ill will of mankind.  Marx reintroduced crime and punishment into the unchristian world, but only in relation to history.  Marxism in one of its aspects is a doctrine of culpability on man’s part and innocence on history’s.  His interpretation of history is that when it is deprived of power, it expresses itself in revolutionary violence; at the height of its power it risked becoming legal violence – in other words, terror and trial.

            In the universe of religion, moreover, the final judgement is postponed; it is not necessary for crime to be punished without delay or for innocence to be rewarded.  In the new universe, on the other hand, the judgement pronounced by history must be pronounced immediately, for culpability coincides with the check to progress and with punishment.  History has judged Bukarin in that it condemned him to death.  It proclaims the innocence of Stalin: he is the most powerful man on earth.  It is the same with Tito, about whom we do not know, so we are told, whether he is guilty or not.  He is on trial, as was Trotsky, whose guilt only became clear at the moment when the murderer’s axe cracked his skull.  Tito has been denounced, but not yet struck down.  When he has been struck down, his guilt will be certain.  Besides, Trotsky’s and Tito’s provisional innocence depended and depends to a large extent on geography; they were far removed from the arm of secular power.  That is why those who can be reached by that arm must be judged without delay.  The definitive judgement of history depends on an infinite number of judgements which will have been pronounced between now and then and which will finally be confirmed or invalidated.  Thus there is the promise of mysterious rehabilitations on the day when the tribunal of the world will be established by the world itself.  Some, who will proclaim themselves contemptible traitors, will enter the Pantheon of mankind; others who maintain their innocence will be condemned to the hell of history.  But who, then, will be the judge?  Man himself, finally fulfilled in his divinity.  Meanwhile, those who conceived the prophecy, and who alone are capable of reading in history the meaning with which they previously endowed it, will pronounce sentence – definitive for the guilty, provisional sentences for the judges.  But it sometimes happens that those who judge, like Rajk, are judged in their turn.  Must we believe that he no longer interpreted history correctly?  His defeat and death in fact prove it.  Then who guarantees that those who judge him today will not be traitors tomorrow, hurled down from the height of their judgement seat to the concrete caves where history’s damned are dying?  The guarantee lies in their infallible clairvoyance.  What proof is there of that?  Their uninterrupted success.  The world of trial is a spherical world in which success and innocence authenticate each other and where every mirror reflects the same mystification.

            Thus there will be a historic grace, [“The rise of reason,” in the historical universe, presents the problem of evil in a new form.] whose power alone can interpret events and which favours or excommunicates the subject of the Empire.  To guard against its caprices, the latter has only faith at his disposal – faith as defined in the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius: “We should always be prepared, so as never to err, to believe that what I see as white is black, if the hierarchic Church defines it thus.”  Only this active faith held by the representatives of truth can save the subject from the mysterious ravages of history.  He is not yet free of the universe of trial to which he is bound by the historic sentiment of fear.  But without this faith he runs a perpetual risk of becoming, without having wished to do so and with the best intentions in the world, an objective criminal.

            The universe of trial finally culminates in this concept, at which point we have come full circle.  At the end of this long insurrection in the name of human innocence, there arises, by an inevitable perversion of fact, the affirmation of general culpability.  Every man is a criminal who is unaware of being so.  The objective criminal is, precisely, he who believed himself innocent.  His actions he considered subjectively inoffensive, or even advantageous for the future of justice.  But it is demonstrated to him that objectively his actions have been harmful to that future.  Are we dealing with scientific objectivity?  No, but with historical objectivity.  How is it possible to know, for example, if the future of justice is compromised by the unconsidered denunciation of present injustice?  Real objectivity would consist in judging by those results which can be scientifically observed and by facts and their general tendencies.  But the concept of objective culpability proves that this curious kind of objectivity is only based on results and facts which will only become accessible to science in the year 2000, at the very earliest.  Meanwhile, it is embodied in an interminable subjectivity which is imposed on others as objectivity: and that is the philosophic definition of terror.  This type of objectivity has no definable meaning, but power will give it a content by decreeing that everything of which it does not approve is guilty.  It will consent to say, or allow to be said, to philosophers who live outside the Empire, that in this way it is taking a risk in regard to history, just as the objective culprit took a risk, though without knowing it.  When victim and executioner have disappeared, the matter will be judged.  But this consolation is of any value only to the executioner, who has really no need of it.  Meanwhile, the faithful are regularly bidden to attend strange feasts where, according to scrupulous rites, victims overwhelmed with contrition are offered as sacrifice to the god of history.

            The express object of this idea is to prevent indifference to matters of faith.  It is compulsory evangelization.  The law, whose function it is to pursue suspects, fabricates them.  By fabricating them, it converts them.  In bourgeois society, for example, every citizen is supposed to approve the law.  In objective society every citizen will be presumed to disapprove of it.  Or at least he should always be ready to prove that he does not disapprove of it.  Culpability no longer has any factual basis; it simply consists of absence of faith, which explains the apparent contradiction of the objective system.  Under a capitalist regime, the man who says he is neutral is considered objectively to be favourable to the regime.  Under the regime of the Empire, the man who is neutral is considered hostile objectively to the regime.  There is nothing astonishing about that.  If a subject of the Empire does not believe in the Empire, he is, of his own choice, nothing, historically speaking; therefore he takes sides against history and is, in other words, a blasphemer.  Even lip service paid to faith will not suffice; it must be lived and acted upon in order to be served properly and the citizen must be always on the alert to consent in time to the changes in dogma.  At the slightest error potential culpability becomes in its turn objective culpability.  Consummating its history in this manner, the revolution is not content with killing all rebellion.  It insists in holding every man, even the most servile, responsible for the fact that rebellion ever existed and still exists under the sun.  In the universe of the trial, conquered and completed at last, a race of culprits will endlessly shuffle toward an impossible innocence, under the grim regard of the grand inquisitors.  In the twentieth century power wears the mask of tragedy.

            Here ends Prometheus’ surprising itinerary.  Proclaiming his hatred of the gods and his love of mankind, he turns away from Zeus with scorn and approaches mortal men in order to lead them in an assault against the heavens.  But men are weak and cowardly; they must be organized.  They love pleasure and immediate happiness; they must be taught to refuse, in order to grow up, immediate rewards.  Thus Prometheus, in his turn, becomes a master who first teaches and then commands.  Men doubt that they can safely attack the city of light and are even uncertain whether the city exists.  They must be saved from themselves.  The hero then tells them that he, and he alone, knows the city.  Those who doubt his word will be thrown into the desert, chained to a rock, offered to the vultures.  The others will march henceforth in darkness, behind the pensive and solitary master.  Prometheus alone has become god and reigns over the solitude of men.  But from Zeus he has gained only solitude and cruelty; he is no longer Prometheus, he is Cæsar.  The real, the eternal Prometheus has now assumed the aspect of one of his victims.  The same cry, springing from the depths of the past, rings forever through the Scythian desert.

Rebellion and Revolution

*

            The revolution based on principles kills God in the person of His representative on earth.  The revolution of the twentieth century kills what remains of God in the principles themselves and consecrates historical nihilism.  Whatever paths nihilism may proceed to take, from the moment that it decides to be the creative force of its period and ignores every moral precept, it begins to build the temple of Cæsar.  To choose history, and history alone, is to choose nihilism, in defiance of the teachings of rebellion itself.  Those who rush blindly to history in the name of the irrational, proclaiming that it is meaningless, encounter servitude and terror and finally emerge into the universe of concentration camps.  Those who launch themselves into it preaching its absolute rationality encounter servitude and terror and emerge into the universe of the concentration camps.  Fascism wants to establish the advent of the Nietzschean superman.  It immediately discovers that God, if He exists, may well be this or that, but He is primarily the master of death.  If man wants to become God, he arrogates to himself the power of life or death over others.  Manufacturer of corpses and of submen, he is a sub-man himself and not God, but the ignoble servant of death.  The rational revolution, on its part, wants to realize the total man described by Marx.  The logic of history, from the moment that it is totally accepted, gradually leads it, against its most passionate convictions, to mutilate man more and more and to transform itself into objective crime.  It is not legitimate to identify the ends of Fascism with the ends of Russian Communism.  The first represents the exaltation of the executioner by the executioner; the second, more dramatic in concept, the exaltation of the executioner by the victims.  The former never dreamed of liberating all men, but only of liberating a few by subjugating the rest.  The latter, in its most profound principle, aims at liberating all men by provisionally enslaving them all.  It must be granted the grandeur of its intentions.  But, on the other hand, it is legitimate to identify the means employed by both with the political cynicism that they have drawn from the same source, moral nihilism.  Everything has taken place as though the descendants of Stirner and of Nechaiev were making use of the descendants of Kaliayev and Proudhon.  The nihilists today are seated on thrones.  Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution has become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.  That is why our period is the period of private and public techniques of annihilation.

            The revolution, obedient to the dictates of nihilism, has in fact turned against its rebel origins.  Man, who hated death and the god of death, who despaired of personal survival, wanted to free himself in the immortality of the species.  But as long as the group does not dominate the world, as long as the species does not reign, it is still necessary to die.  Time is pressing, therefore; persuasion demands leisure, and friendship a structure that will never be completed; thus terror remains the shortest route to immortality.  But these extremes simultaneously proclaim a longing for the primitive values of rebellion.  The contemporary revolution that claims to deny every value is already, in itself, a standard for judging values.  Man wants to reign supreme through the revolution.  But why reign supreme if nothing has any meaning?  Why wish for immortality if the aspect of life is so hideous?  There is no method of thought which is absolutely nihilist except, perhaps, the method that leads to suicide, any more than there is absolute materialism.  The destruction of man once more affirms man.  Terror and concentration camps are the drastic means used by man to escape solitude.  The thirst for unity must be assuaged, even in the common grave.  If men kill one another, it is because they reject mortality and desire immortality for all men.  Therefore, in one sense, they commit suicide.  But they prove, at the same time, that they cannot dispense with mankind; they satisfy a terrible hunger for fraternity.  “The human being needs happiness, and when he is unhappy, he needs another human being.”  Those who reject the agony of living and dying wish to dominate.  “Solitude is power,” says Sade.  Power, today, because for thousands of solitary people it signifies the suffering of others, bears witness to the need for others.  Terror is the homage that the malignant recluse finally pays to the brotherhood of man.

            But nihilism, if it does not exist, tries to do so; and that is enough to make the world a desert.  This particular form of madness is what has given our times their forbidding aspect.  The land of humanism has become the Europe of today, the land of inhumanity.  But the times are ours and how can we disown them?  If our history is our hell, still we cannot avert our faces.  This horror cannot be escaped, but is assumed in order to be ignored, by the very people who accepted it with lucidity and not by those who, having provoked it, think that they have a right to pronounce judgement.  Such a plant could, in fact, thrive only in the fertile soil of accumulated iniquities.  In the last throes of a death struggle in which men are indiscriminately involved by the insanity of the times, the enemy remains the fraternal enemy.  Even when he has been denounced for his errors, he can be neither despised nor hated; misfortune is today the common fatherland, and the only earthly kingdom that has fulfilled the promise.

            The longing for rest and peace must itself be thrust aside; it coincides with the acceptance of iniquity.  Those who weep for the happy periods they encounter in history acknowledge what they want: not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.  But let us, on the contrary, sing the praises of the times when misery cries aloud and disturbs the sleep of the surfeited rich!  Maistre has already spoken of the “terrible sermon that the revolution preached to kings.”  It preaches the same sermon today, and in a still more urgent fashion, to the dishonoured elite of the times.  This sermon must be heard.  In every word and in every act, even though it be criminal, lies the promise of a value that we must seek out and bring to light.  The future cannot be foreseen and it may be that the renaissance is impossible.  Even though the historical dialectic is false and criminal, the world, after all, can very well realize itself in crime and in pursuit of a false concept.  This kind of resignation is, quite simply, rejected here: we must stake everything on the renaissance.

            Nothing remains for us, moreover, but to be reborn or to die.  If we are at the moment in history when rebellion has reached the point of its most extreme contradiction by denying itself, then it must either perish with the world it has created or find a new object of faith and a new impetus.  Before going any farther, this contradiction must at least be stated in plain language.  It is not a clear definition to say like the existentialists, for example (who are also subjected for the moment to the cult of history and its contradictions), [Atheist existentialism at least wishes to create a morality.  This morality is still to be defined.  But the real difficulty lies in creating it without reintroducing into historical existence a value foreign to history.]  that there is progress in the transition from rebellion to revolution and that the rebel is nothing if he is not revolutionary.  The contradiction is, in reality, considerably more restricted.  The revolutionary is simultaneously a rebel or he is not a revolutionary, but a policeman and a bureaucrat who turns against rebellion.  But if he is a rebel, he ends by taking sides against the revolution.  So much so that there is absolutely no progress from one attitude to the other, but coexistence and endlessly increasing contradiction.  Every revolutionary ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic.  In the purely historical universe that they have chosen, rebellion and revolution end in the same dilemma: either police rule or insanity.

            On this level, therefore, history alone offers no hope.  It is not a source of values, but is still a source of nihilism.  Can one, at least, create values in defiance of history, on the single level of a philosophy based on eternity?  That comes to the same as ratifying historical injustice and the sufferings of man.  To slander the world leads to the nihilism defined by Nietzsche.  Thought that is derived from history alone, like thought that rejects history completely, deprives man of the means and the reason for living.  The former drives him to the extreme decadence of “why live?” the latter to “how live?”  History, necessary but not sufficient, is therefore only an occasional cause.  It is not absence of values, nor values themselves, nor even the source of values.  It is one occasion, among others, for man to prove the still confused existence of a value that allows him to judge history.  Rebellion itself makes us the promise of us a value.

            Absolute revolution, in fact, supposes the absolute malleability of human nature and its possible reduction to the condition of a historical force.  But rebellion, in man, is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historical terms.  It is the affirmation of a nature common to all men, which eludes the world of power.  History, undoubtedly, is one of the limits of man’s experience; in this sense the revolutionaries are right.  But man, by rebelling, imposes in his turn a limit to history, and at this limit the promise of a value is born.  It is the birth of this value that the Cæsarian revolution implacably combats today because it presages its final defeat and the obligation to renounce its principles.  The fate of the world is not being played out at present, as it seemed it would be, in the struggle between bourgeois production and revolutionary production; their end results will be the same.  It is being played out between the forces of rebellion and those of the Cæsarian revolution.  The triumphant revolution must prove by means of its police, its trials, and its excommunications that there is no such thing as human nature.  Humiliated rebellion, by its contradictions, its sufferings, its continuous defeats, and its inexhaustible pride, must give its content of hope and suffering to this nature.

            “I rebel, therefore we exist,” said the slave.  Metaphysical rebellion then added: “we are alone,” by which we still live today.  But if we are alone beneath the empty heavens, if we must die forever, how can we really exist?  Metaphysical rebellion, then, tried to construct existence with appearances.  After which purely historical thought came to say that to be was to act.  We did not exist, but we should exist by every possible means.  Our revolution is an attempt to conquer a new existence, by action that recognizes no moral strictures.  That is why it is condemned to live only for history and in a reign of terror.  Man is nothing, according to the revolution, if he does not obtain from history, willingly and by force, unanimous approval.  At this exact point the limit is exceeded, rebellion is first betrayed and then logically assassinated, for it has never affirmed, in its purest form, anything but the existence of a limit and the divided existence that we represent: it is not, originally, the total negation of all existence.  Quite the contrary, it says yes and no simultaneously.  It is the rejection of one part of existence in the name of another part, which it exalts.  The more profound the exaltation, the more implacable is the rejection.  Then, when rebellion, in rage or intoxication, adopts the attitude of “all or nothing” and the negation of all existence and all human nature, it is at this point that it denies itself.  Only total negation justifies the concept of a totality that must be conquered.  But the affirmation of a limit, a dignity, and a beauty common to all men only entails the necessity of extending this value to embrace everything and everyone and of advancing toward unity without denying the origins of rebellion.  In this sense rebellion, in its original authenticity, does not justify any purely historical concept.  Rebellion’s demand is unity; historical revolution’s demand is totality.  The former starts from a negative supported by an affirmative, the latter from absolute negation and is condemned to every aspect of slavery in order to fabricate an affirmative that is dismissed until the end of time.  One is creative, the other nihilist.  The first is dedicated to creation so as to exist more and more completely; the second is forced to produce results in order to negate more and more completely.  The historical revolution is always obliged to act in the hope, which is invariably disappointed, of one day really existing.  Even unanimous consent will not suffice to create its existence.  “Obey,” said Frederick the Great to his subjects; but when he died, his words were: “I am tired of ruling slaves.”  To escape this absurd destiny, the revolution is and will be condemned to renounce, not only its own principles, but nihilism as well as purely historical values in order to rediscover the creative source of rebellion.  Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.  Undoubtedly, it has nothing but scorn for the formal and mystifying morality to be found in bourgeois society.  But its folly has been to extend this scorn to every moral demand.  At the very sources of its inspiration and in its most profound transports is to be found a rule that is not formal but that nevertheless can serve as a guide.  Rebellion, in fact, says – and will say more and more explicitly – that revolution must try to act, not in order to come into existence at some future date in the eyes of a world reduced to acquiescence, but in terms of the obscure existence that is already made manifest in the act of insurrection.  This rule is neither formal nor subject to history, it is what can be best described by examining it in its pure state – in artistic creation.  Before doing so, let us only note that to the “I rebel, therefore we exist” and the “We are alone” of metaphysical rebellion, rebellion at grips with history adds that instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.