MOTHER NATURE BEFORE THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY

Naturam expellis furca.—Horace.

1791.

Hush for a moment, children! I have a few things to tell you. Listen to your mother; let nature speak.

What are you doing here? Why have you been absent from your homes for so long? Let each of your return to your family! This place here is not your place. What do you intend to do?

Twenty-five million men, spoiled by contact, discontented with one another, & no longer able to tolerate one another, demand from you in loud cries a new code, & and you have had the courage to promise it to them. Why don’t you instead have the good sense to send them back to me, saying to them: Brothers, don’t you have the laws nature? & could you ever do better than that?

But, no! You have not been able to resist the glory attached to the title of legislators: & here you are, vying with nature, & pronouncing each day decrees, the wisdom of which are extolled everywhere.

Do not be vain for having shown a bit more reason than your predecessors. That was not difficult. And, children, beware of pretending to give your new laws a more solid basis! You have made poor work of it. The edifice at such great cost is impressive in the short view: but I warn you, you are building on sand. You travel in a vicious circle, with laudable intentions, no doubt, and perhaps with great talents. The task is beyond your means; new abuses will succeed the old, & that is all. A passing enthusiasm will be the recompense for your ephemeral labors, & the future will have no grounds to reproach the past.

The present at least hardly responds to the great revolution of which you are so proud. It is already a year in the past. What results has it fetched? You have abolished some odious & revolting distinctions. You have dared to proclaim all men equal & free. But this sublime effort, of which the child at the breast gives you each day a domestic example, what has it produced? Among the twenty-five millions men of whom you have been the courageous representatives, I still see changes only in their costume. Their customs have remained the same, with no amendment in their public conduct or private life. I still see, as before, two clearly distinct castes, the riches & the poor; despite the solemn declaration of the rights of man, everywhere, as before, my eyes are presented with masters & servants. An iron rampart still rises between those who have too much & those who do not have enough. When that insulting & harmful separation disappears at your command, I will believe in the sublimity of your decrees, in the efficacy of your labors.

You allow yourselves to speak of the Golden Age in the speeches that you make: but can those who speak to you of it, & you yourselves, recall well what was this age of gold? It was a time on earth when there were neither masters, nor slaves, nor priests, nor soldiers, nor kings, nor nations, nor poor, nor rich; men were quite naturally nothing but men. Is it really back there that you wish to bring your constituents? So far, you have not set them on that route.

Children! You amuse yourself on the road, but you do not go to the end. You play gravely on the banks of a torrent, which sometimes carries you off, and sometimes blocks your advance.

Time is mine. I have only assigned a rather small portion of it to you; but I have only imposed a small number of laws: you, on the contrary, each morning you go to swell the volume of your decrees; you apparently prefer quantity to quality, so that the life a man suffices only to study & understand them.

Among you there is genius & insight, spirit & eloquence; & you think that with all these gifts it is impossible for you to do shoddy work. None of that is required to do fine work; it is not required to make twenty-five million men happy & good; nothing is needed but instinct…..

Yes, instinct. Why murmur? That word embarrasses you. Children that you are! Eh! Don’t you understand? It is for scorning instinct, that first faculty of man, that you find yourselves reduced to the extremities where I find you. Instinct is the limit beyond which I have forbidden you to go, on pain of misfortune. Return within the limits that the finger of nature has traced for you. In order to become free, submit to the yoke of instinct, the only one that you should bear.

And where would you be, if instinct, which you have sought to stymie with all your bizarre institutions, had not got the upper hand, despite you, & had not still prevented each day & unbeknownst to you, many falls & many blunders?…

Badly brought up children! You think that you know better than your mother. To correct you of this childish vanity, I have watched you for a while; I wanted to know if, in a crisis, you would finally turn to me. You have too much pride for that. Well, then! I have come to you.

When, after so many centuries of errors, I see twenty-five million men gather to undertake, de concert, the total destruction of the prejudices, whose weight they finally feel, I will breathe a bit, & say to myself:

Finally, here are some who have regained their primitive energy; they doubtless go to help themselves to all these socials conventions of which they had been slaves. My reign will finally recommence.

Alas! I spoke too soon. It is still not time for that. How you struggle to get along! It seems that you do not all speak the same language, or that you are not all beings of the same species; & then, what are we to say of that bizarre distinction of executive, legislative and constitutive powers? Is that how I proceed? Haven’t I given to each man all the powers together? So how can an assembly of men consent to be stripped of half their rights, in order to invest them in one man alone? What a pity it is to see you break that precious unity that should characterize, it seems to me, the labors of a great concours of reasonable men, & imagine two authorities, two interests that are necessarily rivals to one another! What a pity to see here twelve hundred legislators, the elite among twenty-five million men, seriously occupied in consecrating such thoughtlessness!

You call yourselves free, & yet the decrees, as they emanate from your assembly, must, in order to have the force of law, be ratified by one individual whom the chance of birth has placed above rather than among you.

I have established kings in the fathers of families; & through that wholly natural arrangement, I have established a sweet harmony among men, sparing them the shame of obeying their fellows.

Today, when you have experienced all the evils resulting from that social royalty, imagined by your good ancestors in the days of darkness; today, when, freely assembled & discussing your interests among yourself, you finally perceive that royalty is not an evil as necessary as you have believed for so long, how is it that, with the good sense of which you have shown some evident on several other occasions, you still persist in keeping your fetish & awarding it a cult?

What an imposing spectacle is the sight of twelve hundred legislators assembled to take the axe to the prejudices of twelve centuries. A still more preferable spectacle would be that of twelve hundred fathers of families, in the vicinity of one another, at the same point on the globe, peacefully practicing the ready-made laws of nature, & offering their conduct a simple example to 25 million beset for thousands of years by all the horrors of an artificial & unnatural society.

Twelve hundred actually happy families are well worth one theory that is ingenious, but impracticable among twenty-five million men united by artifice.

I believe in private virtues, in calm, in the felicity of a family maintained in the midst of a gentle mediocrity.

I do not believe at all in public mores, in the tranquility, in the happiness of a nation composed of several millions individuals friendly to luxury.

There was a great & beautiful revolution to be attempted; & it was to be hoped for from the wisdom of twelve hundred elected representatives among twenty-five million men: that would have been to truly recall the human species to the original rights of individual liberty, & to break the coils of civil society, instead of wishing to extend them anew; it would have been, in short, to preserve only what nature admits.

All that scaffolding, raised up with so much difficulty, maintained at such great cost—you have had time to realize how useless, expensive & cumbersome it had become, & and yet here you are constructing another, more elegant perhaps at first glance, more solid in appearance; but do you not perceive that it already contains within it the same vices of construction?

Say, children! Is it your ambition to perfect the human species? & because the gardener, through his cares, has been able to make from the eglantine a hundred-leaved rose, do you believe you will obtain as much from men? The perfectibility of which I have made you susceptible has its limits. Know that I no longer lend myself to your industry, when it degenerates into caprice.

The brutish man, hardly released from my hands, is one extreme. The civilized man is another extreme: man in his family, finds himself placed in this middle ground, where we encounter innocence & bliss.

But, by thinking in this way, & proceeding accordingly, you would not have satisfied that miserable vanity, an almost incurable malady contracted in the heart of civil society. You wish to astonish your constituents & deserve their homage. By saying to them, my friends! You know as much of it as we: in order to be happy & good, follow your instinct, that right sense that guides you so well in an infinite number of daily circumstances. The science of government is an hors-d’œuvre. The human race must not faire masse; let us separate amicably into small groups. Man must not obey man; his father alone has the right to command him. A king & some representatives, a civil code, a political constitution…. All that is fine, perhaps, but perfectly useless to the family man, who prefers domestic peace to the fleeting & perilous brilliance of civilization.

By speaking in this way to your constituents, you would have had their esteem & their gratitude. You require admiration & incense. Poor humans, where have you got to? I can hardly recognize you. How you have disfigured my work! How far it is from what you are, from what you claim to be one day, to what you should have always been!

In giving existence to men, my intention had certainly not been to make of them rich & poor, masters & servants, citizens & soldiers or priests, representatives and represented. You should have better studied my plan & your character. By consulting me, your glory would be associated with mine; & your establishments, supported by mine, would have lasted as long as they.

You have preferred to rake over the ideas of your predecessors. Following your example, it seems that your successors will dwell as much on your own. There are only the works of nature to which we add nothing, from which we subtract nothing. I leave to men the development of some of my works, which I did not finish with this intention, but woe to the men who wish to march down a road cleared by themselves. After many concerns & vain labors, they are astonished to find themselves back at the point fro which they began. They have reaped from that painful excursion only the impression of their weakness, & the knowledge of many evils of which they might have remained ignorant by remaining beneath my wings.

And do you not see that this revolution that stirs up twenty-five million men, resemble those changes of position that the incurably ill procure on their sickbed? Their imagination alone is relieved by it for a moment; they fall back soon after, more miserable than before.

Children! You still have the tender sight. There are objects that you can only catch by blinking. Your uncertain gaze can only take in one point at a time; but in your pride, this point becomes all of space for you.

If only you knew how small everything that issues from your narrow minds is before the vast conception of nature! If you knew how pitiful your decrees are, compared to the laws of nature! In the style alone, one senses all the pettiness of your views, the drought of ideas that goes into the composition of your code. By consulting me, you would familiarize yourself with these simple & imposing forms with which nature invests everything that comes from its hands.

It is not that you have surpassed your predecessors. They were only midgets beside you; but that has not prevented you from only being children.

You sow good grain in a field of tares: civil society is like an ungrateful land, where everything degenerates.

Do you hope to be able to regeneration twenty-five million men, by adopting nearly all the germs of the corruption that has made them gangrenous? You preserve royalty & all that follows, commerce & all the base passions that invigorate it, religion & all the errors that give it existence; it is the kings & their ministers, religion & its priests, luxury & and the bad habits of which it is the father; the commanders of the army & their despotism, the mass of laws & the subterfuges that they occasion, which have reduced a whole nation to the most deplorable extremities; & you pretend to save that same nation with the same instruments that have doomed it!

While seated in this sad enclosure, you are occupied with forging new chains for me, & complicating the elements of happiness that I had been pleased to simply, so that they might be within the reach of the greatest number, ungrateful children! My provident hand never tires of spreading over you & your constituents my daily benefits. While you exhaust yourselves in sterile words, I, mighty in deeds, ensure your preservation. Children! Imitate your mother, leave behind these reforms that only emanate from new excesses, these revolutions that, in the last analysis, are only changes, & too often surfeits of the evil. Abandon the social system, & hold fast to the natural order; your decrees will share the fate of everything that issues from the exalted brains of men. It is only that which is sanctioned by nature that can have lasting results. I smile when I see you place such importance on your little civil regulations, & treat with an inconceivable frivolity the most holy rights & the most sacred duties of man.

It seems that you want to raise altar against altar; but I warn you against it, & I cannot repeat it too often. The decrees of the national assembly will pass way, but the laws of nature will endure eternally. You may well dream, but all your political combinations will not make man in society better & more happy; you want more than nature can provide.

I observe gradations in all the physical revolutions. I do not make cold suddenly follow heat, or light darkness: you, on the other hand, extol the charms & the advantages of liberty to men tied up in civil bonds: you recommend equality to men forced to submit to the yoke of social subordination. You have been thoughtless!

Never have I hard men so often call each other brothers. How is it that men, all brothers, continue, some to serve, the others to be served? Are brothers them masters & and servants of one another?

Men have never been so often called to order, and I have never seen so little of it among the children of men.

Everywhere I hear the cry: the nation! the nation! Nowhere do they invoke nature.

Children! I had many mysteries to reveal to you. For, even in the Age of Enlightenment, it is good for you to know it: you still walk in darkness; but so many serious things concern you! You have citizen militias to discipline, departments to organize: these things have a very different importance than the operations of nature.

It was only yesterday that you learned to extract from when good that is wholesome & substantial; but you have perfected the science of government. In your wisdom, you have combined monarchy, oligarchy, aristocracy and democracy. All of these political forms are much more worthy of your meditations than the phenomena of nature.

Statuary & painting take me for a model in their compositions, & are successful only insofar as they make exact copies of me. Grave legislators! Why have you alone freed yourself from this homage that the arts render each day to nature? More than the artists, it is important for you to observe me, to study me, even to copy me…. Do not blush at this word. The faithful copyists of nature are the sublime originals of society.

We can clearly see that you have not familiarized yourselves with nature. Always enclosed in tight spaces, you live as little as you can in my presence: yet the daily image of the beauties of nature would have imbued you with my principles of simplicity & order, justice & grandeur. Your legislation still does not bear these characteristics.

Children! You are still very young: everything that has occurred on the earth is still not known to you. Well! Learn, then, or recall that, before you, beings like you, limited in their faculties, also wished to have the last word with nature, &c do more & better than her; but also know that nature, witness of the powerless efforts of these pygmies, has seen them, victims of their senseless pretentions, ruin one another, & change this globe into a place of torment, when they might simply have lived in peace.

Children! The day will come for your new laws, as it did for your ancient libraries. How many dusty books will suffer the flames in order to make room for new errors, which in their turn will give way to others newer still, & so on, & so forth, if you do not seriously decide to return to me, & adopt as your only code that of nature!

Twenty million men groaned under the rod of their king, under the rule of their priests. They have said to you, in breaking the yoke of their double slavery: We want to be free; assemble yourselves, & make us laws I accordance with our wish. What will they say when, returning to your provinces, you present themselves with the code for which they yearn, & on which they read:

Royal sanction,

Suspensive veto,

Cost of a dominant religion….

&c. ?

Alas! (they will cry dolorously) what was the point of arming ourselves: we have gained nothing from our insurrection; & in some few years, we will have need of a new crisis….

And, indeed, what feebleness, for example, what spinelessness have you shown with regard to what you call the clergy? Children! Are you still afraid of the rule? Never was an association of men more contrary to nature than that precarious & parasitical order, which can only exist in darkness, which, after having infected the pure sources of primitive morals (1), subjected reason itself to the yoke, & ended by sanctifying the chains of despotism? Eh! What! You hem and haw with that horde! You spare the insolent members of that monstrous hierarchy! With a single hammer-blow, you could crush that three-headed hydra: with a single decree, you could reduce this insatiable body to starvation. It seems that you fear it will perish too soon of hunger. With a breath, you could have made this imposing chimera disappear. Why don’t you consult nature? I would have said to you:

Children! Filial piety is the only religion suitable for men. An invisible divinity, composed of abstractions, leaves no grip on material beings. A dominant religion, with ex professo priests, leads straight to poverty. Religion is a macabre alloy with good morals: nature has never ordained priests; but it has etched on the hearts of children this indelible precept: You shall honor your father. So have no other temple but the paternal home.

Based on the serious drawbacks that result from the corporation that you have not had the courage to entirely erase from the book of your constitution, calculate the series of obstacles that you would have to overcome, by giving the basis of your new legislation the cornerstone of all the previous legislation.

Even if your constitution, modeled on my invariable principles, offered a system of political economy, linked in all its parts, what salutary effects could you reasonably await on the minds & hearts of twenty-five millions individuals, of which nearly all the social customs, which you dare not touch, oppose nearly all the natural laws?

From the time that men were only men, truly nothing was easier than to keep them happy & good; then a man was absolutely the semblable of another man. But since men have made themselves, some masters, the others servants, some rich, the others poor, some city-dwellers, the others villagers, some priests, the others soldiers, some representatives, the others represented; they have almost nothing in common among them, & the magistrate no more resembled the officer in character than in clothes.

Now, in that struggle of the various interests that meet in the midst of all these artificial professions, which can only blosson at the expense of one another, in the mass of the contradictory ambitions of all these different states that diverge, how are we to make heard the voice of reason & and justice? & if we manage to make them heard for a moment, how would we dare flatter ourselves with preserving their sustained ascendancy? The threats of the penal code are the only dikes capable of containing for a time these floods of individuals raised up in the opposite direction. But tell me, children, when it is necessary to resort to the rod of punishment, by which name to call the men in society? & how to feel the courage to be their legislator?

The wise man who has been able to escape the influence of such a regime, pities his fellows & withdraws, far from claiming to contribute to their enrichment, which he considers imposible or at least beyond his strength. There remains to him only one single recourse,—very weak, it is true, and very slow,—that of example. As much as the civil relations that he has had to contract can allow him, he lives according to nature, within his family, & tacitly invites his fellows to imitate him.

This is the decision that you should perhaps have made, grave legislators, after solemnly declaring the physical & moral impossibility of making happy & good twenty-five million men who persist in only making up a mass composed of elements rivaling one another.

For there is perhaps not one among you who does not know that the regeneration large group of people is only what we call Penelope’s web. Consequently, there is perhaps not one in your midst who does not act against his conscience, by occupying himself with the great work of society.

To shield yourself from your inadequacy, see to what miserable means you were obliged to stoop. Oaths & masses, epaulets & sashes, knots of tri-colored ribbon & flags, sometimes red and sometimes white, depending on the circumstances; on the one hand, you knock down some citadels, while on the other you build long was: there, a bell calls some grave legislators to order; here, a drum sends rushing to their post some citizens who call themselves free, & who no longer have the liberty to take their steps where they wish. Everywhere I see the silk livery of civil subordination, the golden chains of social dependence; nowhere do I glimpse man left to his natural gait.

To defend themselves against a handful of irritated individuals, twenty-five million men have suddenly taken up arms & abandon them no more; & the most pleasant, the most fertile region of Europe, which should only be covered with peaceful farmers & practical habitations, transformed suddenly into a camp, is overburdened with soldiers & cannons.

And that is what is called the most superb of revolutions.

I can conceive a still finer one, more worthy especially of reasonable beings.

Children! Listen:

Since, through an unheard of convergence of circumstances, twenty-five million men came to the point of finding themselves at the mercy of a group of little monsters with human faces; & since, finally, after several centuries of servitude, these twenty-five millions again recalled their primitive independence, & were determined to return to it; here is, it seems to me, how they ought to have gone about it.

First of all, it was necessary to abandon to their own forces all these useless beings who make up the castes of the nobility & clergy, & draw back the nourishing arm that made them so free to vegetate.

Then, putting back in common everything that has been subject to divisions of a monstrous inequality, you task the representatives of what we would in the past have had the impudence to call the third order, with proceeding, in the name of nature, with a distribution proportional to the number of individuals making up each family, beginning with that of the Bourbons. The honest man that you have the weakness to recognize at this moment as supreme leader, would have been the first to applaud this arrangement. He would have found himself more at his ease on a farm rich in good grain than in the Louvre, peopled with suspect lackeys & questionable women. Toinette, his better half, would have become a good housewife, who, at the end of autumn, while arranging her fruit in the warehouse, would have had the good sense to say to herself: it is with men as with the fruits of the earth; to keep both healthy, we must take the wise precaution of placing them at a certain distance from one another. They are spoiled by contact. The human race, embodied in the nation, is the worst of all species. The human species, distributed in families that do not rub shoulders, will be incorruptible, & deserve the first place in the scale of beings.

Attentive to that revolution, the other nations of Europe, far from wanting to cause trouble among these thousands of agricultural families, would have hastened, on the contrary, to choose you for models, after having helped themselves to the thrones & all these diplomatic rags with which we have sullied for so long the august brow of nature.

Last year, your king, Louis XVI, has done himself an infinite honor by coming into your midst to pronounce himself a fine speech, which made you all cry, because it was doubtless the first time that you had heard a monarch applaud liberty.

Louis XVI would have covered himself with an even greater glory, if, when you were occupied with what you call his civil list, he had addressed to you this short harangue, much less ambiguous than his pretty speech:

Friends! My predecessors have not all been good kings, far from it. From my own experience, I begin to suspect that the best intentioned king is not so necessary to men, his fellows, his equals, who can very well govern themselves, since they are no longer children. So then, without disturbing you, in order to place me in a condition appropriate to my rank, without exposing you any more to worse kings than men, let each of you go home; let each father be the king of his children alone; I want to show you an example, & that role will suit me better in every regard. So take back what I have in excess, at present I am no more than a head of household; & distribute the surplus to the fathers of families who do not have enough.—

Since Louis XVI has not been capable of that heroism (& indeed, it is too much to demand of a king), who prevented the different civilized nations of this globe from passing the word around on the day of Saturnalia, to seize the persons of their kings, to convene at the same time a general rendezvous to assemble that handful of crowned individuals, & relegate them to a small island, uninhabited, but habitable, & whose fertile soil only awaited arms & minor cultivation? They would establish a cordon of little armed launches to watch over the island of the dethroned kings, & prevent the inhabitants from escaping. The predicament of the nearly disembarked would doubtless not be slight; in order to live, each of them would be obliged to pitch in. No more servants, no more courtiers, and no more soldiers. They would all have to fend for themselves. Those half-hundred characters would perhaps not live long in peace, & the human race, a calm spectator, would have the satisfaction of seeing itself delivered from its tyrants by their own hands. It is only from that moment that the nations of the earth could date the era of their independence.

[This desert island scenario is the subject of Maréchal’s 1793 play, Le jugement dernier des rois (The Last Judgement of Kings), which I will be translating next.]

One of the insurmountable obstacles to that regeneration that you seem to have your heart set on, is your persistence in keeping a king. Know that, even when your Louis XVI joined in his person all the marvelous attributes that your imagination supposes in your divinities, you would still be foolish to salute him as your monarch. Remember that liberty has never been able to look a king in the eye. Remember that a nation subject to a king is not free, & cannot become free, whatever the political ties with which the prince has let himself be bound. A king is the scarecrow of liberty. The court is for nature & liberty what a house of prostitution is for a self-respecting virgin. No manners under the malign influence of the courts; no liberty without the reign of manners; & besides, why permit the duplication? What will you do with a king? Don’t you have the president of your assembly? Why let him go and tell another to execute what he could just as well arrange himself? And, furthermore, don’t you sense all the advantages that there would be for you to change your leader every fortnight? What savings would not result? No more civil list, no more domain! How much would the dignity of man be lifted, if each individual in a vast empire could claim in his turn the first place, without holding it by chance of birth!

I do not love kings, and I love the rich even less. The inequality of goods is still more odious to me than the inequality of ranks, & yet you have made of it the chain that links all the parts of civil society. Children! I say this to you in truth: as long as you tolerate rich & poor among you, you will never be done with your own regeneration. It is not that I advise the poor, in the present regime, to hurl themselves against the rich. I have permitted violence & lawless acts to the animals, who only have brute instinct. But couldn’t men, whom I have endowed with an instinct capable of perfection, come to an amicable arrangement among themselves? Will the rich, once clearly persuaded that they are at the mercy of the poor, who are far more numerous than they are, & that they will never have peaceful enjoyments, be such enemies of their own rest & interests, not to consent to a new, more equal division? Without this division, without a distribution of the human species in isolated families, drawn together only by the link of humanity, & each living in their own domain, children! It is I who say it to you, do not hope for a regeneration; you will only make a lot of noise. Liberty is a chimera for men in society; they will only enjoy the reality under a more natural regime; for you must know that liberty & nature are two inseparable things; we can obtain nothing of the one without appealing to the other: they only want one single altar.

I say it to you again: the revolution has not been accomplished; it will not be finished as long as you remain in the circle of the same ideas, of which only the nuances will have changed. You have created political liberty; but have you abolished domestic servitude? You decree the abolition of the nobility, but you preserve the respective states of the poor & rich, of masters & and their servants: you forbid a coat of arms to the first, you unburden the second of their liveries; but these distinctions are only simulacra; you do not alter the realities.

If the elimination of all these social monstrosities is beyond your means, then admit your inadequacy, & do not believe in a revolution.

After that, dare then to summon liberty within the walls of the towns. Do you hope that it will resolve to share your chains & your prisons? Do you flatter yourself that you will fix it in your midst? Liberty is not or is no longer nature. Its name shines in vain on your helmets, on your flags: the love of liberty is not in your hearts, tant que vous vous plairez dans le séjour des esclaves.

Incidentally, don’t you know that liberty wants an exclusive worship; it wants to be loved for itself, & is outraged to be treated as a new fashion.

Children!… You must be a man in order to be free. So you will not do it, as long as, given over to childishness, you do not elevate yourselves to that character of nobility & simplicity, which befits independence. Liberty is a wholly natural thing, which should not inspire this mad enthusiasm by which you have been carried off. One would say, to see you, that you enjoy a treasure that does not belong to you; it seems that you taste the forbidden fruit.

Why all these solemn moves, these religious consecrations, these federative pacts in the honor of liberty? Does the child, in order to love his mother, need to swear? & isn’t it as natural to be a free man as to be a good son?

You swear to live & die free, as if it was possible not to wish it. How petty is all this ceremony! How little suffused with your independence you seem to be! All this rattling of arms only announce the changeability of your character. All these artillery discharges prove only that the noise amuses you, & that is all.

Must there not be some quackery on your part? For you cannot conceal from yourselves that of the twenty-five million men that you represent, there are very few individuals prepared for the regeneration that you contemplate, & capable of the virtues that liberty presupposes.

The men who make up the people (2), only appear good for slavery. Liberty is not happy in the crowd; it disavows these debased beings who rub shoulders in the intersections of your towns; it sees there only vile mercenaries who compete for their existence with other animals. A bit of ease is required to appreciate the fruits of liberty, & to be enamored of its charms. The tatters of misery, like the liveries of luxury, are repulsive to liberty; it loves to find among its partisans the comforts of a sweet mediocrity: in a region where three quarters of the inhabitants only live on the cast-off scraps of the other fourth, where nine hundred thousand wretches bear the burdens of the day alone, paid by one hundred thousand of their fellows, themselves giving way under the burden of boredom, where the poor are at the beck & call of the rich: in such a country, what is that proud independence for which I have brought all men into the world, without distinction, but a vain word, a cruel & revolting mockery? Sad humans! In the midst of your charity workshops, deep within your cadaverous hospitals, in the muck of your public markets, under the walls of your flourishing & corrupt cities, sing hymns to liberty.

While awaiting the rising of your master, offer a canticle to liberty, you who have become the servant of your fellow, the coachman of your fellow, the cook of your fellow, the hairdresser of your fellow.

While awaiting the rising of the rich, sing, honest pauper, on his doorstep, a hymn to fraternal equality.

Repeat a canticle to liberty, honest but poor girl, who has become the companion of an imperious Messalina.

In these civil dens of base acts & crimes, of waste & poverty, wise representatives! raise then the voice of reason: in the public squares, in the temples, proclaim the rights of men; boast of the advantages & charms of liberty. Who will profit from your labors? Those, those alone, & in very small numbers, who did not need a free constitution to make themselves independent. Would the rest be able to hear you? And if the rabble of the citizenry, which is to say nearly the totality, could, could they profit from it & put it into practice?

The valet attentive to his meticulous service.

The worker diligently as his task.

The merchant calculating his profits & losses.

The carter who never rests.

The gardener penetrating deep into the earth, in order to obtain its first fruits.

The soldier chained to his orders & barracks.

The sailor tied to his mast.

The roofer hanging from the roof of your home.

The unfortunate man covered with the filth of a sewer entrusted to his care, &c.

In short, nine-tenths of the unfortunate humans who reproach themselves for the half hour that they give to their frugal meals. Where will they find the time, the unfortunate! to give themselves the prior instruction necessary to the understanding of your numerous decrees, which are not all masterpieces of clarity?

Ah! Is it not then for them that liberty has been recaptured, & proclaimed with so much pomp, with so much clamor, from the heart of the capital to the smallest of hamlets? And when they understand the whole extent of this great benefit, could they enjoy it? Does not the daily chain of renewed needs that squeezes them, proscribe for them every rapid advance and every moment of introspection?

I have conceived another order of things that would leave men the time & means to apply reason to their pleasures, to set their rights & their duty firmly in their minds.

The man in an isolated family, proprietor of a field, vast enough to feed a hundred individuals of the same blood, would divide his day between work & rest, occupied with himself & those close to him. A demanding & monotonous chore would not shrink his brain, would not diminish the intellectual faculties, & would not take from him all his time: there would remain time for him to reflect to himself, & to familiarize himself with my simple & sufficient laws.

But the immense flock of men that you represent, having multiplied its labors by multiplying the relations that necessarily result from a large & complicated association, corrupted by a close cohabitation, by a coalition subject to a thousand deplorable accidents, find neither the time nor the means to even slow the progress of the corruption in the heart of which it stagnates.

Children! You know all of that, & yet you have pursued your political labors with no less assurance. I do not understand you, but I foresee the result.

You will soon be obliged to agree with me. That marvelous revolution that has electrified you all is only one necessary, inevitable event, one point on the circle that any great mass of men must travel, a change of position, the only advantage that one could reasonably hope for from a state of things too distant from nature to be favorable & permanent.

With the memory of what has been, of what your fathers have done, could you reasonably flatter yourselves with improving the lot of your contemporaries & of future generations?

How you are to be pitied, if you are in good faith! If you are not, how culpable you are!

I perceive that my harangue does not produce the effect on your minds that I should have had the right to expect. Some smile scornfully, others wrinkle their brows; these show impatience, those, few in numbers, acknowledge, deep down, the truth of my words; but they would not dare to proclaim my principles on the platform.

Ungrateful & ill-bred children! I would be more than avenged by abandoning you to your own forces. Farewell.

Mother Nature addresses the Galleries.

And you, my other children! who from the height of these galleries give a sustained attention to all that is said at the rostrum, that is enough time wasted. Go home as well, well convinced that you know by yourselves all that is necessary for you to live lives that are happy & good. Listen! In three words, here is the charter of the human race:

Child, Husband & Father:

Filial piety, Conjugal tenderness & Paternal care.

All your duties, all your pleasures, all your rights are contained in these three words.

Morals, worship, legislation, everything that constitutes man at all times, in all places, are in these three words.

There is nothing short of that, nothing beyond: we have said everything when we have pronounced these three words; we have done everything when we have fulfilled their meaning; everything that has been imagined in addition, is not worth the trouble of guarding against.

We are only born to pass successively through three states: we have lived as happy, we die as satisfied as possible, when we have fulfilled these three roles well.

It is not at all necessary for men to assemble by the thousands, to elect a leader, to imagine a public code & creed, to build cities, &c.

Without leaving the paternal home, man finds everything he requires to be born, live & die.

We must have no other distinctions among men than those of sex, of age & of family.

The distinction of age necessitates the obedience of children to their father, & the sovereignty of the father over the children.

The distinction of the sexes motivates the protection of the stronger, or of the male, accorded to the weaker, or to the female, & the deference of the weaker to the stronger.

The distinction of family prevents men from living pell-mell, & forms them into small groups, each united by links of the same blood, & distributed equally over all the points of the globe.

Nothing is less complicated than this natural regime of the human species; it stays between the savage state & civil state, between man barely sketched, & man already degenerate.

Man is only destined to be husband, father, son, brother & friend.

What is there in common between the duties attached to these names and the artificial relations designated under the bizarre titles of

representative or represented,

voter or candidate,

prince — people,

master — servant,

rich — poor,

magistrate — soldier,

priest — layman,

foreigner — citizen?

Child, husband & father.

Man always begins with this, & he must return to it.

You have no other destination.

These are the three aims of man.

Man is only truly man from one of these three points of view. He has only received the intelligence & organization that is necessary for that. Woe to him, if he misunderstands his strengths enough to form other ambitions!

I have traced for him this sort of triangle, from which he does not step with impunity. Be, I have told him: a good son, a good husband, a good father, & I will take care of the rest. As long as you will be just that, I will be with you; but I warn you: I will abandon you to your own forces, if you carry your views outside these three lines, well proportioned for your character. From the moment that you cross them, crime & misfortune await you beyond.

(1) We mix religion and morals, as we throw spices on the meat of a man with a jaded palate.

(2) People is here a synonym for a great mass of men.

[Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur]