But while liberty has become very doubtful and fraternity has completely vanished, the principle of equality has grown unchecked.It has been supreme in all the political upheavals of which France has been the stage during the last century, and has reached such a development that our political and social life, our laws, manners, and customs are at least in theory based on this principle.It constitutes the real legacy of the Revolution.The craving for equality, not only before the law, but in position and fortune, is the very pivot of the last product of democracy: Socialism.This craving is so powerful that it is spreading in all directions, although in contradiction with all biological and economic laws.It is a new phase of the interrupted struggle of the sentiments against reason, in which reason so rarely triumphs.
2.The Democracy of the ``Intellectuals'' and Popular Democracy.
All ideas that have hitherto caused an upheaval of the world of men have been subject to two laws: they evolve slowly, and they completely change their sense according to the mentalities in which they find reception.
A doctrine may be compared to a living being.It subsists only by process of transformation.The books are necessarily silent upon these variations, so that the phase of things which they establish belongs only to the past.They do not reflect the image of the living, but of the dead.The written statement of a doctrine often represents the most negligible side of that doctrine.
I have shown in another work how institutions, arts, and languages are modified in passing from one people to another, and how the laws of these transformations differ from the truth as stated in books.I allude to this matter now merely to show why, in examining the subject of democratic ideas, we occupy ourselves so little with the text of doctrines, and seek only for the psychological elements of which they constitute the vestment, and the reactions which they provoke in the various categories of men who have accepted them.
Modified rapidly by men of different mentalities, the original theory is soon no more than a label which denotes something quite unlike itself.
Applicable to religious beliefs, these principles are equally so to political beliefs.When a man speaks of democracy, for example, must we inquire what this word means to various peoples, and also whether in the same people there is not a great difference between the democracy of the ``intellectuals'' and popular democracy.
In confining ourselves now to the consideration of this latter point we shall readily perceive that the democratic ideas to be found in books and journals are purely the theories of literary people, of which the people know nothing, and by the application of which they would have nothing to gain.Although the working-man possesses the theoretical right of passing the barriers which separate him from the upper classes by a whole series of competitions and examinations, his chance of reaching them is in reality extremely slight.
The democracy of the lettered classes has no other object than to set up a selection which shall recruit the directing classes exclusively from themselves.I should have nothing to say against this if the selection were real.It would then constitute the application of the maxim of Napoleon: ``The true method of government is to employ the aristocracy, but under the forms of democracy.''
Unhappily the democracy of the ``intellectuals'' would simply lead to the substitution of the Divine right of kings by the Divine right of a petty oligarchy, which is too often narrow and tyrannical.Liberty cannot be created by replacing a tyranny.
Popular democracy by no means aims at manufacturing rulers.
Dominated entirely by the spirit of equality and the desire to ameliorate the lot of the workers, it rejects the idea of fraternity, and exhibits no anxiety in respect of liberty.No government is conceivable to popular democracy except in the form of an autocracy.We see this, not only in history, which shows us that since the Revolution all despotic Governments have been vigorously acclaimed, but also in the autocratic fashion in which the workers' trades unions are conducted.
This profound distinction between the democracy of the lettered classes and popular democracy is far more obvious to the workers than to the intellectuals.In their mentalities there is nothing in common; the two classes do not speak the same language.The syndicalists emphatically assert to-day that no alliance could possibly exist between them and the politicians of the bourgeoisie.This assertion is strictly true.
It was always so, and this, no doubt, is why popular democracy, from Plato's to our own times, has never been defended by the great thinkers.
