French fiction -- 20th century; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
Socially, women are the equals of men, without restrictions. The
beings who shine and who bring forth are not made solely to lend or to
give the heat of their bodies. It is right that the sum total of work
should be shared, reduced and harmonized by their hands. It is just
that the fate of humanity should be grounded also in the strength of
women. Whatever the danger which their instinctive love of shining
things may occasion, in spite of the facility with which they color all
things with their own feelings and the totality of their slightest
impulses--the legend of their incapacity is a fog that you will
dissipate with a gesture of _your_ hands. Their advent is in the order
of things; and it is also in order to await with hopeful heart the day
when the social and political chains of women will fall off, when human
liberty will suddenly become twice as great.
People of the world, establish equality right up to the limits of your
great life. Lay the foundations of the republic of republics over all
the area where you breathe; that is to say, the common control in broad
daylight of all external affairs, of community in the laws of labor, of
production and of commerce. The subdivision of these high social and
moral arrangements by nations or by limited unions of nations
(enlargements which are reductions) is artificial, arbitrary, and
malignant. The so-called inseparable cohesions of national interests
vanish away as soon as you draw near to examine them. There are
individual interests and a general interest, those two only. When you
say "I," it means "I"; when you say "We," it means Man. So long as a
single and identical Republic does not cover the world, all national
liberations can only be beginnings and signals!
Thus you will disarm the "fatherlands" and "motherlands," and you will
reduce the notion of Motherland to the little bit of social importance
that it must have. You will do away with the military frontiers, and
those economic and commercial barriers which are still worse.
Protection introduces violence into the expansion of labor; like
militarism, it brings in a fatal absence of balance. You will suppress
that which justifies among nations the things which among individuals
we call murder, robbery, and unfair competition. You will suppress
battles--not nearly so much by the direct measure of supervision and
order that you will take as because you will suppress the causes of
battle. You will suppress them chiefly because it is _you_ who will do
it, by yourself, everywhere, with your invincible strength and the
lucid conscience that is free from selfish motives. You will not make
war on yourself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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