maintains the possibility of bringing light to our minds, of presenting what he calls "the exegesis of the Revolution"; in order to do this, he examines history, showing how humanity has never ceased to strive towards Justice, how religion has been the cause of corruption, and how "the French Revolution by bringing about the predominance of the juridical principle (over the religious principle) opens a new epoch, an entirely contrary order of things, the different elements of which it is now our task to determine."[1] Whatever may happen in the future to our worn-out race, he says at the end of this discourse, "posterity will recognise that the third age of humanity[2] has its start in the French Revolution; that an understanding of this new law has been given to some of us in all its fulness; that we have not been found quite wanting in the practice of it; and that to perish in this sublime childbirth was, after all, not without grandeur. At that hour the Revolution became clear, then it lived. The rest of the nation (i.e. those who had not understood the Revolution) does not think at all. Will that part which lives and thinks he suppressed by that which does not?"[3]
I said in the preceding chapter that the whole doctrine of Proudhon was subordinated to revolutionary enthusiasm and that this enthusiasm has been extinct since the Church has ceased to be formidable; thus there is nothing astonishing in the fact that the undertaking which Proudhon considered so easy (the creation of a morality absolutely free from all religious belief) seems very uncertain to many of our contemporaries. I find a proof
- ↑ Proudhon, loc. cit. p. 93.
- ↑ The two first epochs are those of paganism and of Christianity.
- ↑ Proudhon, loc. cit. p. 104.
by respect for the right of another than by its own fortune"—without the third "citizens submitting to the attraction of individualism could not form, whatever they did, anything other than a mere aggregate of incoherent and repulsive existences that the first wind will disperse like dust" (loc. cit. pp. 72–73). In the strict sense of the word, juridical faith would be the second of these three.
