French fiction -- 20th century; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
You will not be afraid of magic formulas and the churches. Your giant
reason will destroy the idol which suffocates its true believers. You
will salute the flags for the last time; to that ancient enthusiasm
which flattered the puerility of your ancestors, you will say a
peaceful and final farewell. In some corners of the calamities of the
past, there were times of tender emotion; but truth is greater, and
there are not more boundaries on the earth than on the sea!
Each country will be a moral force, and no longer a brutal force; while
all brutal forces clash with themselves, all moral forces make mighty
harmony together.
The universal republic is the inevitable consequence of equal rights in
life for all. Start from the principle of equality, and you arrive at
the people's international. If you do not arrive there it is because
you have not reasoned aright. They who start from the opposite point
of view--God, and the divine rights of popes and Kings and nobles, and
authority and tradition--will come, by fabulous paths but quite
logically, to opposite conclusions. You must not cease to hold that
there are only two teachings face to face. All things are amenable to
reason, the supreme Reason which mutilated humanity, wounded in the
eyes, has deified among the clouds.
* * * * * *
You will do away with the rights of the dead, and with heredity of
power, whatever it may be, that inheritance which is unjust in all its
gradations, for tradition takes root there, and it is an outrage on
equality, against the order of labor. Labor is a great civic deed
which all men and all women without exception must share or go down.
Such divisions will reduce it for each one to dignified proportions and
prevent it from devouring human lives.
You will not permit colonial ownership by States, which makes stains on
the map of the world and is not justified by confessable reasons; and
you will organize the abolition of that collective slavery. You will
allow the individual property of the living to stand. It is equitable
because its necessity is inherent in the circumstances of the living,
and because there are cases where you cannot tear away the right of
ownership without tearing right itself. Besides, the love of things is
a passion, like the love of beings. The object of social organization
is not to destroy sentiment and pleasure, but on the contrary to allow
them to flourish, within the limit of not wronging others. It is right
to enjoy what you have clearly earned by your work. That focused
wisdom alone bursts among the old order of things like a curse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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