Nationalism and Culture (77 page)

Only a few poets of that enslaved period constitute a glorious exception. First of all comes Moliere, the unique, in whom the spirit of Rabelais still lived and gave to his genius the power to overstep the narrow bounds and to tear the solemn mask of vain pretence from the hypocritical countenance of his time. No wonder that the French Academy failed to add his name to the troop of the "immortals" or that the Archbishop of Paris threatened readers of Tartuje with excommunication. Perhaps it was fortunate for the poet that he died young j such a rebellious head as his was exposed to dangers of many kinds in that time of rigid forms and majestic mendacity. La Fontaine, too, and Lesage, must be named here. The exquisite fables of the former have kept their freshness of coloring because he discarded rigid rules and turned back to the inexhaustible wealth of ideas of the old fabliaux. Lesage, who with such masterly skill had told those wholesome truths to his contemporaries in The Devil on Two Slicks and his delightful Gil Bias, was the actual creator of the modern novel.

It was at that time, too, when every expression of life was adjusted to the spirit of authority and absolutism, that Bossuet wrote his Discours sur Vhistoire universelle, thus becoming the founder of the theological concept of history purposing to proclaim the system of royal despotism as a divinely ordained reality over which man had no pov/er, since its foundations lay in the plan of Providence itself. Every revolt against the system or the sacred person of the monarch became a revolt against God and a capital crime against church and state. The unintelligent theology which was then taught in the Sorbonne permitted no scientific explanations. Thus, the church rendered invaluable service to the temporal despotism, for it left no means untried to plant the principle of authority deep in the consciousness of every subject.

And it was not only language, art, and literature that were placed under the control of a special authority. Crafts and industry, also, were brought under regimentation by the state and could no longer make independent decisions. Definite methods were prescribed by the state for all the industries in the country, and an army of officials took care that no one of them deviated by a hair's breadth from the established norm. In his great work, De Pindustrie fran^aise, Jean de Chaptal has pictured the whole monstrosity of this crazy system in its every detail and has shown how every creative instinct was deliberately smothered and every new idea condemned to suppression. Thus, the tailor was told how many stitches to use in sewing a sleeve into a coatj the cooper, how many hoops he must put qn a barrel. The state bureaucracy not only determined the length, width and color of the fabrics that were woven j even the exact number of threads in each weave was prescribed, and a widespread police system saw to it that every prescription was meticulously observed. Violations were

Strictly dealt with, being punished by confiscation or destruction of the goods. In serious cases destruction of tools and workshops, mutilation of offenders, even the death penalty, were employed. That under such circumstances the entire industrial system of the country must have been crippled is clear. Just as under serfdom agricultural production constantly diminished, so the royal ordinances destroyed industry and drove the country toward the abyss. Only the revolution put an end to this insane condition.

But one chain not even the revolution could break: the chain of authoritarian tradition, the basic principle of absolutism. It changed the old forms, it is true, but the deeper purport was not touched, and it merely continued what the monarchy had begun long before. Just as today in Russia Bolshevism carries to the extreme the authoritarian state-concept of tsarism by suppressing indiscriminately all free exchange of ideas and therefore all creative impulse in the people, so, then, the Jacobins carried the political centralization of society to its ultimate conclusion and so became, like their later imitators in Russia, the real leaders of the counterrevolution. The revolution gave France the republic, but this could have meaning only if it represented the opposite of autocracy and safeguarded right with the same determination with which the monarchy had hitherto safeguarded power. The republic must become the symbol of the true community of the people, in which every movement really comes from the people and rests on the freedom of man. To the royal dictum: "I am the state!" the republican enfranchisement must reply: "We are the community!" Man must come to feel that he is no longer bound by the decisions of a higher power, that his fate from now on rests in his own hands and in his cooperation with his fellows. The republic could bring to the people something genuinely new only by replacing the ancient principle of guardianship with the creative activity of freedom, intellectual coercion by education for intellectual independence, the mechanical operation of a directing power by organic evolution.

The revolution did, indeed, free the people from the yoke of royal power, but in doing so it merely plunged them into deeper bondage to the national state. And this chain proved more effective than the strait-jacket of the absolute monarchy because it was anchored, not to the person of the ruler, but to the abstract idea of the "common will," which sought to fit all efforts of the people to a definite norm. Thus, they landed happily back in the old abs9lutism that they thought they had overthrown. As the galley-slave dragged the ball at his leg, so the new citizen dragged through life the abstract idea of the nation, which had been set up as the reservoir of the "common will" and, doing this, forgot the art of standing on his own feet, which the revolution had scarcely restored to him. The "republicans" gave to the republic as content absolutism dressed up as

the nation, and so destroyed the genuine community of the people of the res publica. What the men of the Convention had begun, their imitators in all subsequent popular uprisings followed undeviatingly: they retained absolutism under the name of freedom and followed slavishly the tradition of the Great Revolution, whose counterfeit glory still today outshines all the signs and symbols of genuine liberation.

Proudhon had understood this truth in its full profundity j to him, therefore, all the efforts of political parties to get power into their hands were simply different demonstrations of absolutism under false colors. He had come to see that anyone who undertakes a social revolution by the conquest of political power comes inevitably to deceive himself and others. For power is, in its very essence, counterrevolutionary, an outgrowth of the concepts of absolutism, in which every system of exploitation has its roots. Absolutism is the principle of authority which is most logically represented in the state and the church. Until this principle is overthrown the so-called "culture nations" will continue to sink deeper and deeper into the bog of power-politics and a dead industrial technique j this, too, at the cost of that freedom and manhood out of which alone there can grow for us a higher social culture. Ibsen felt this when he said:

The state must go! Nor will I have anything to do with revolution! Undermine the state concept; establish free choice and its intellectual implications as the sole determinant for a union—that is the beginning of a freedom that is worth something! A change in the form of government is nothing but a fussing about degrees—a little more or a little less—all of it's just nonsense. Yes, my dear friend, all that counts is not to let yourself be frightened by the venerableness of ownership. The state had its roots in time; it will reach its growth in time. Greater things than it will fall; all religion willfall.8

The same experiences run through the history of all peoples} they lead everywhere to the same results. National-political unity has never and nowhere vitalized the development of the intellectual culture of a people J on the contrary, it has always set limits to it, because it always sacrifices the best forces in the people as a whole to the unlimited ambition for power of the national state and so dries up the deeper sources of intellectual progress. As we have seen, the periods of so-called "national disunion" have always been up to now the great culture periods of history, while the epochs of "national vjnity" have always brought degradation and ruin to all the higher culture forms.

In ancient Germany culture reached its zenith in the free cities of the Middle Ages in the midst of a world of cultureless barbarism. They were the only places where art and handicraft could expand, where free thought

'Letter to Georg Brandes, February 17, 1873. Briefe von Henrik Ibsen. Berlin, 1905, p. 159.

Still had a place and a social spirit kept men united. The mighty monuments of medieval architecture and art are still great witnesses to a cultural development which belonged among the most glorious that German history can display. But the history of the more recent intellectual culture in Germany is also only a confirmation of that old truth, which so few, alas, have thus far understood. All great intellectual achievements in this country hark back to the time of its "national disunion." Its classic literature from Klopstock to Schiller and Goethe, the art of its Romantic School, its classic philosophy from Kant to Feuerbach and Nietzsche, its music from Beethoven to Richard Wagner—all of it falls in the time before the founding of the Reich. With the victory of the German national state begins also the decline of German culture, the drying up of its creative forces, and along with this collapse the triumph of Bismarckism, as Bakunin has styled the senseless combination of militarism and bureaucracy. Nietzsche was quite right when he said: "When the Germans began to interest the other peoples of Europe it was because of a culture which they now no longer possess, yes, which they have, with blind zeal, shaken off as if it were a diseasej and yet they knew of nothing better to put in its place than the political and national delusion." ®

And Constantin Frantz, the South German Federalist and opponent of Bismarck, opines: "One needs but contemplate the situation existing today in every field of art, which the proclamation of the new empire at Versailles represents, and the nature of this new creation stands out with all desired clarity: a company in glittering uniforms before which a few gentlemen in black coats play an utterly humble part, the whole as prosaic as it is unfolklike—the inauguration of militarism could not reveal itself more drastically." ^^

In fact, national unity turned Germany into an enlarged Prussia, which felt itself called to pursue world politics. The barracks became the high school of the new German mentality. Germany became great in the fields of technique and applied sciences, but narrow-minded and poor of soul. Worst of all, she lost that great universal attitude of Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul and Heine, which once had been the pride of the Germans. This is not a plea either for particularism or-for the small state. What we urge is the complete elimination of the power principle from the life of society and, consequently, the supplanting of the state in every form by a higher social culture founded on the freedom of man and his free union with his fellow men. This does not, however, alter the fact that the larger a state is, the stronger the instruments of power which it commands, the more dangerous it is to human freedom and the demands for higher forms of intellectual and cultural

^WgrJ^e, V: 179.

^° Die freussische Intelligenx tind ihre Grenzen. Munich, 1874, p. 53.

life. These are most imperiled in a central, unified state. Carlo Pisacane had recognized this clearly when he wrote in his Saggio sulla Rivolutione:

Every government, even a despotism, is once in a while in a position to advance science and to attract to it brilh'ant men and great minds; be it thus to make some concessions to the spirit of the time, be it because this accords with the personal ambitions of the head of the state. From this one can deduce the fact that the more governments there are in a country the greater is the probability that the general darkness will be illuminated by at least a few sparks of intelh'gence.

One could perhaps cite England as counter-evidence and show that here culture took a great upsurge in spite of the national state, especially in the age of Queen Elizabeth. But one must not forget that only under the Stuarts was genuine absolutism able to claim an overwhelming success there, and that the English state never succeeded in centralizing public life to the degree which was reached in France, for example. The English government had always a strongly developed liberal opposition against it, which was deeply rooted in the people and which gave to the whole of English history its peculiar character. The fact is that in no other country did so much of the ancient municipal constituti'ons persist as in England, and that the English city government is today, so far as local independence is concerned, the freest in Europe. But that in England also the central powers of the state were always trying to shackle the economic and cultural life of the country, and that the shackles were only broken by the revolution, has already been more fully developed in the first part of this work.

In his political masterpiece, Du Principe Federatijy Proudhon gave expression to the thought: "Either the twentieth century will introduce the era of federation or mankind will be plunged for another thousand years into purgatory. The true problem which delays the redemption is in reality no longer the political, but the economic problem."

Now the twentieth century has thus far brought us, not federalism, but an unlimited strengthening of centralization. Whither this development of matters has led us the World War showed j it is shown also by the frightful chaos of our political and economic conditions, by the startling unspirituality of the time and by the complete lack of any higher cultural feeling. We find ourselves actually in purgatory, and no one can predict when the hour of our redemption will sound. But that the solution of the problem of which Proudhoa spoke is possible only within the framework of a federation of free communes on the basis of social community interests is becoming today more and more an inner certainty for everyone who has recognized the dangers of the immediate future and does not wish to throttle man slowly with state capitalism.