ruined the old feudal system. The latter succumbed beneath the attacks of a strong and centralised power, imbued with the conviction that it had received a mandate from God to employ exceptional measures against the evil. The kings of the new model[1] who established modern monarchical system were terrible despots, wholly destitute of scruples; but great historians have absolved them from all blame for the acts of violence they committed, because they lived in times when feudal anarchy, the barbarous manners of the old nobles and their lack of culture, joined to a want of respect for the ideas of the past,[2] seemed crimes against which it was the duty of the royal power to act energetically. It is probably then with a view to treating the leaders of capitalism with a wholly royal energy that there is so much talk nowadays of a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Later on, royalty relaxed its despotism and constitutional government took its place. It is said that the dictatorship of the proletariat will also weaken at length, and will disappear, and that finally an anarchical society will take its place; but how this will come about is not explained. The regal despotism did not fall by itself or by the goodness of sovereigns; one must be very simple to suppose that the people who would profit by the demagogic dictatorship would willingly abandon its advantages.
Bernstein saw quite plainly that the dictatorship of the proletariat corresponds to a division of society into masters and servants, but it is curious that he did not
- ↑ Cf. Gervinus, Introduction à l'histoire du XIXᵉ siècle, French trans., p. 27.
- ↑ The history of the papacy very much embarrasses modern writers; some of them are fundamentally hostile to it on account of their hatred of Christianity; but many are led to condone the greatest faults of the papal policy in the Middle Ages on account of the natural sympathy which inclines them to admire all the efforts made by theorists to tyrannise the world.
