God and the State

Michail Bakunin

1882
Contents
Preface to the First French Edition 3

I 6

II 14

III 31

IV Credo quod absurdum 42

2
Preface to the First French Edition
One of us is soon to tell in all its details the story of the life of Michael Bakunin, but its general
features are already sufficiently familiar. Friends and enemies know that this man was great in
thought, will, persistent energy; they know also with what lofty contempt he looked down upon
wealth, rank, glory, all the wretched ambitions which most human beings are base enough to
entertain. A Russian gentleman related by marriage to the highest nobility of the empire, he was
one of the first to enter that intrepid society of rebels who were able to release themselves from
traditions, prejudices, race and class interests, and set their own comfort at naught. With them
he fought the stern battle of life, aggravated by imprisonment, exile, all the dangers and all the
sorrows that men of self-sacrifice have to undergo during their tormented existence.
A simple stone and a name mark the spot in the cemetery of Berne where was laid the body
of Bakunin. Even that is perhaps too much to honor the memory of a worker who held vanities
of that sort in such slight esteem. His friends surely will raise to him no ostentatious tombstone
or statue. They know with what a huge laugh he would have received them, had they spoken
to him of a commemorative structure erected to his glory; they knew, too, that the true way
to honor their dead is to continue their work — with the same ardor and perseverance that they
themselves brought to it. In this case, indeed, a difficult task demanding all our efforts, for among
the revolutionists of the present generation not one has labored more fervently in the common
cause of the Revolution.
In Russia among the students, in Germany among the insurgents of Dresden, in Siberia among
his brothers in exile, in America, in England, in France, in Switzerland, in Italy, among all earnest
men, his direct influence has been considerable. The originality of his ideas, the imagery and
vehemence of his eloquence, his untiring zeal in propogandism, helped too by the natural majesty
of his person and by a powerful vitality, gave Bakunin access to all the revolutionary groups, and
his efforts left deep traces everywhere, even upon those who, after having welcomed him, thrust
him out because of a difference of object or method. His correspondence was most extensive;
he passed entire nights in preparing long letters to his friends in the revolutionary world, and
some of these letters, written to strengthen the timid, arouse the sluggish, and outline plans of
propagandism or revolt, took on the proportions of veritable volumes. These letters more than
anything else explain the prodigious work of Bakunin in the revolutionary movement of the
century. The pamphlets published by him, in Russian, French, and Italian, however important
they may be, and however useful they may have been in spreading the new ideas, are the smallest
part of Bakunin’s work.
The present memoir, “God and the State,” is really a fragment of a letter or report. Composed
in the same manner as most of Bakunin’s other writings, it has the same literary fault, lack of
proportion; moreover it breaks off abruptly: we have searched in vain to discover the end of the
manuscript. Bakunin never had the time necessary to finish all the tasks he undertook. One
work was not completed when others were already under way. “My life itself is a fragment,”
he said to those who criticized his writings. Nevertheless, the readers of “God and the State”

3
certainly will not regret that Bakunin’s memoir, incomplete though it be, has been published.
The questions discussed in it are treated decisively and with a singular vigor of logic. Rightly
addressing himself only to his honest opponents, Bakunin demonstrates to them the emptiness
of their belief in that divine authority on which all temporal authorities are founded; he proves
to them the purely human genesis of all governments; finally, without stopping to discuss those
bases of the State already condemned by public morality, such as physical superiority, violence,
nobility, wealth, he does justice to the theory which would entrust science with the government
of societies. Supposing even that it were possible to recognize, amid the conflict of rival ambitions
and intrigues, who are the pretenders and who are the real savants, and that a method of election
could be found which would not fail to lodge the power in the hands of those whose knowledge
is authentic, what guarantee could they offer us of the wisdom and honesty of their government?
On the contrary, can we not foresee in these new masters the same follies and the same crimes
found in those of former days and of the present time? In the first place, science is not: it
is becoming. The learned man of to-day is but the know-nothing of tomorrow. Let him once
imagine that he has reached the end, and for that very reason he sinks beneath even the babe
just born. But, could he recognize truth in its essence, he can only corrupt himself by privilege
and corrupt others by power. To establish his government, he must try, like all chiefs of State,
to arrest the life of the masses moving below him, keep them in ignorance in order to preserve
quiet, and gradually debase them that he may rule them from a loftier throne.
For the rest, since the doctrinaires made their appearance, the true or pretended “genius” has
been trying his hand at wielding the scepter of the world, and we know what it has cost us. We
have seen them at work, all these savants: the more hardened the more they have studied; the
narrower in their views the more time they have spent in examining some isolated fact in all its
aspects; without any experience of life, because they have long known no other horizon than
the walls of their cheese; childish in their passions and vanities, because they have been unable
to participate in serious struggles and have never learned the true proportion of things. Have
we not recently witnessed the foundation of a white school of “thinkers” — wretched courtiers,
too, and people of unclean lives — who have constructed a whole cosmogony for their sole use?
According to them, worlds have been created, societies have developed, revolutions have over-
turned nations, empires have gone down in blood, poverty, disease, and death have been the
queens of humanity, only to raise up an élite of academicians, the full-blown flower, of which all
other men are but the manure. That these editors of the Temps and the Debats may have leisure
to “think,” nations live and die in ignorance; all other human beings are destined for death in
order that these gentlemen may become immortal!
But we may reassure ourselves: all these academicians will not have the audacity of Alexan-
der in cutting with his sword the Gordian knot; they will not lift the blade of Charlemagne.
Government by science is becoming as impossible as that of divine right, wealth, or brute force.
All powers are henceforth to be submitted to pitiless criticism. Men in whom the sentiment of
equality is born suffer themselves no longer to be governed; they learn to govern themselves. In
precipitating from the heights of the heavens him from whom all power is reputed to descend,
societies unseat also all those who reigned in his name. Such is the revolution now in progress.
States are breaking up to give place to a new order, in which, as Bakunin was fond of saying,
“human justice will be substituted for divine justice.” If it is allowable to cite any one name from
those of the revolutionists who have taken part in this immense work of renovation, there is not
one that may be singled out with more justice than that of Michael Bakunin.

4
Carlo Cafiero.
Elisée Reclus.

5
I
Who are right, the idealists or the materialists? The question once stated in this way, hesitation
becomes impossible. Undoubtedly the idealists are wrong and the materialists right. Yes, facts
are before ideas; yes, the ideal, as Proudhon said, is but a flower, whose root lies in the material
conditions of existence. Yes, the whole history of humanity, intellectual and moral, political and
social, is but a reflection of its economic history.
All branches of modern science, of true and disinterested science, concur in proclaiming this
grand truth, fundamental and decisive: The social world, properly speaking, the human world —
in short, humanity — is nothing other than the last and supreme development — at least on our
planet and as far as we know — the highest manifestation of animality. But as every development
necessarily implies a negation, that of its base or point of departure, humanity is at the same
time and essentially the deliberate and gradual negation of the animal element in man; and it is
precisely this negation, as rational as it is natural, and rational only because natural — at once
historical and logical, as inevitable as the development and realization of all the natural laws in
the world — that constitutes and creates the ideal, the world of intellectual and moral convictions,
ideas.
Yes, our first ancestors, our Adams and our Eves, were, if not gorillas, very near relatives
of gorillas, omnivorous, intelligent and ferocious beasts, endowed in a higher degree than the
animals of any other species with two precious faculties — the power to think and the desire to
rebel.
These faculties, combining their progressive action in history, represent the essential factor,
the negative power in the positive development of human animality, and create consequently all
that constitutes humanity in man.
The Bible, which is a very interesting and here and there very profound book when considered
as one of the oldest surviving manifestations of human wisdom and fancy, expresses this truth
very naively in its myth of original sin. Jehovah, who of all the good gods adored by men was cer-
tainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty,
the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty — Jehovah had just created
Adam and Eve, to satisfy we know not what caprice; no doubt to while away his time, which
must weigh heavy on his hands in his eternal egoistic solitude, or that he might have some new
slaves. He generously placed at their disposal the whole earth, with all its fruits and animals, and
set but a single limit to this complete enjoyment. He expressly forbade them from touching the
fruit of the tree of knowledge. He wished, therefore, that man, destitute of all understanding of
himself, should remain an eternal beast, ever on all-fours before the eternal God, his creator and
his master. But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator
of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him,
stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the
fruit of knowledge.

6
 We know what followed. The good God, whose foresight, which is one of the divine faculties,
should have warned him of what would happen, flew into a terrible and ridiculous rage; he cursed
Satan, man, and the world created by himself, striking himself so to speak in his own creation,
as children do when they get angry; and, not content with smiting our ancestors themselves, he
cursed them in all the generations to come, innocent of the crime committed by their forefathers.
Our Catholic and Protestant theologians look upon that as very profound and very just, precisely
because it is monstrously iniquitous and absurd. Then, remembering that he was not only a God
of vengeance and wrath, but also a God of love, after having tormented the existence of a few
milliards of poor human beings and condemned them to an eternal hell, he took pity on the rest,
and, to save them and reconcile his eternal and divine love with his eternal and divine anger,
always greedy for victims and blood, he sent into the world, as an expiatory victim, his only son,
that he might be killed by men. That is called the mystery of the Redemption, the basis of all
the Christian religions. Still, if the divine Savior had saved the human world! But no; in the
paradise promised by Christ, as we know, such being the formal announcement, the elect will
number very few. The rest, the immense majority of the generations present and to come, will
burn eternally in hell. In the meantime, to console us, God, ever just, ever good, hands over
the earth to the government of the Napoleon Thirds, of the William Firsts, of the Ferdinands of
Austria, and of the Alexanders of all the Russias.
Such are the absurd tales that are told and the monstrous doctrines that are taught, in the full
light of the nineteenth century, in all the public schools of Europe, at the express command of
the government. They call this civilizing the people! Is it not plain that all these governments
are systematic poisoners, interested stupefiers of the masses?
I have wandered from my subject, because anger gets hold of me whenever I think of the base
and criminal means which they employ to keep the nations in perpetual slavery, undoubtedly
that they may be the better able to fleece them. Of what consequence are the crimes of all the
Tropmanns in the world compared with this crime of treason against humanity committed daily,
in broad day, over the whole surface of the civilized world, by those who dare to call themselves
the guardians and the fathers of the people? I return to the myth of original sin.
God admitted that Satan was right; he recognized that the devil did not deceive Adam and Eve
in promising them knowledge and liberty as a reward for the act of disobedience which he had
induced them to commit; for, immediately they had eaten of the forbidden fruit, God himself said
(see Bible): “Behold, man is become as of the Gods, knowing both good and evil; prevent him,
therefore, from eating of the fruit of eternal life, lest he become immortal like Ourselves.”
Let us disregard now the fabulous portion of this myth and consider its true meaning, which
is very clear. Man has emancipated himself; he has separated himself from animality and consti-
tuted himself a man; he has begun his distinctively human history and development by an act of
disobedience and science — that is, by rebellion and by thought.
Three elements or, if you like, three fundamental principles constitute the essential conditions
of all human development, collective or individual, in history:

1. human animality;

2. thought; and

3. rebellion.

7
 To the first properly corresponds social and private economy; to the second, science; to the third,
liberty.
Idealists of all schools, aristocrats and bourgeois, theologians and metaphysicians, politicians
and moralists, religionists, philosophers, or poets, not forgetting the liberal economists — un-
bounded worshippers of the ideal, as we know — are much offended when told that man, with
his magnificent intelligence, his sublime ideas, and his boundless aspirations, is, like all else ex-
isting in the world, nothing but matter, only a product of vile matter.
We may answer that the matter of which materialists speak, matter spontaneously and eter-
nally mobile, active, productive, matter chemically or organically determined and manifested by
the properties or forces, mechanical, physical, animal, and intelligent, which necessarily belong
to it — that this matter has nothing in common with the vile matter of the idealists. The latter, a
product of their false abstraction, is indeed a stupid, inanimate, immobile thing, incapable of giv-
ing birth to the smallest product, a caput mortuum, an ugly fancy in contrast to the beautiful fancy
which they call God; as the opposite of this supreme being, matter, their matter, stripped by that
constitutes its real nature, necessarily represents supreme nothingness. They have taken away
intelligence, life, all its determining qualities, active relations or forces, motion itself, without
which matter would not even have weight, leaving it nothing but impenetrability and absolute
immobility in space; they have attributed all these natural forces, properties, and manifestations
to the imaginary being created by their abstract fancy; then, interchanging rôles, they have called
this product of their imagination, this phantom, this God who is nothing, “supreme Being” and,
as a necessary consequence, have declared that the real being, matter, the world, is nothing. Af-
ter which they gravely tell us that this matter is incapable of producing anything, not even of
setting itself in motion, and consequently must have been created by their God.
At the end of this book I exposed the fallacies and truly revolting absurdities to which one is
inevitably led by this imagination of a God, let him be considered as a personal being, the creator
and organizer of worlds; or even as impersonal, a kind of divine soul spread over the whole
universe and constituting thus its eternal principle; or let him be an idea, infinite and divine,
always present and active in the world, and always manifested by the totality of material and
definite beings. Here I shall deal with one point only.
The gradual development of the material world, as well as of organic animal life and of the
historically progressive intelligence of man, individually or socially, is perfectly conceivable. It
is a wholly natural movement from the simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher,
from the inferior to the superior; a movement in conformity with all our daily experiences, and
consequently in conformity also with our natural logic, with the distinctive laws of our mind,
which being formed and developed only by the aid of these same experiences; is, so to speak, but
the mental, cerebral reproduction or reflected summary thereof.
The system of the idealists is quite the contrary of this. It is the reversal of all human ex-
periences and of that universal and common good sense which is the essential condition of all
human understanding, and which, in rising from the simple and unanimously recognized truth
that twice two are four to the sublimest and most complex scientific considerations — admitting,
moreover, nothing that has not stood the severest tests of experience or observation of things
and facts — becomes the only serious basis of human knowledge.
Very far from pursuing the natural order from the lower to the higher, from the inferior to the
superior, and from the relatively simple to the more complex; instead of wisely and rationally
accompanying the progressive and real movement from the world called inorganic to the world

8
organic, vegetables, animal, and then distinctively human — from chemical matter or chemical
being to living matter or living being, and from living being to thinking being — the idealists, ob-
sessed, blinded, and pushed on by the divine phantom which they have inherited from theology,
take precisely the opposite course. They go from the higher to the lower, from the superior to
the inferior, from the complex to the simple. They begin with God, either as a person or as divine
substance or idea, and the first step that they take is a terrible fall from the sublime heights of the
eternal ideal into the mire of the material world; from absolute perfection into absolute imper-
fection; from thought to being, or rather, from supreme being to nothing. When, how, and why
the divine being, eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect, probably weary of himself, decided upon
this desperate salto mortale is something which no idealist, no theologian, no metaphysician, no
poet, has ever been able to understand himself or explain to the profane. All religions, past and
present, and all the systems of transcendental philosophy hinge on this unique and iniquitous
mystery.1
Holy men, inspired lawgivers, prophets, messiahs, have searched it for life, and found only tor-
ment and death. Like the ancient sphinx, it has devoured them, because they could not explain it.
Great philosophers from Heraclitus and Plato down to Descartes, Spinoza: Leibnitz, Kant, Fichte,
Schelling, and Hegel, not to mention the Indian philosophers, have written heaps of volumes
and built systems as ingenious as sublime, in which they have said by the way many beautiful
and grand things and discovered immortal truths, but they have left this mystery, the principal
object of their transcendental investigations, as unfathomable as before. The gigantic efforts of
the most Wonderful geniuses that the world has known, and who, one after another, for at least
thirty centuries, have undertaken anew this labor of Sisyphus, have resulted only in rendering
this mystery still more incomprehensible. Is it to be hoped that it will be unveiled to us by the
routine speculations of some pedantic disciple of an artificially warmed-over metaphysics at a
time when all living and serious spirits have abandoned that ambiguous science born of a com-
promise — historically explicable no doubt — between the unreason of faith and sound scientific
reason?
It is evident that this terrible mystery is inexplicable — that is, absurd, because only the ab-
surd admits of no explanation. It is evident that whoever finds it essential to his happiness and
life must renounce his reason, and return, if he can, to naive, blind, stupid faith, to repeat with
Tertullianus and all sincere believers these words, which sum up the very quintessence of theol-
ogy: Credo quia absurdum. Then all discussion ceases, and nothing remains but the triumphant
stupidity of faith. But immediately there arises another question: How comes an intelligent and
well-informed man ever to feel the need of believing in this mystery?
Nothing is more natural than that the belief in God, the creator, regulator, judge, master, curser,
savior, and benefactor of the world, should still prevail among the people, especially in the ru-
ral districts, where it is more widespread than among the proletariat of the cities. The people,
unfortunately, are still very ignorant, and are kept in ignorance by the systematic efforts of all
the governments, who consider this ignorance, not without good reason, as one of the essential
conditions of their own power. Weighted down by their daily labor, deprived of leisure, of intel-
lectual intercourse, of reading, in short of all the means and a good portion of the stimulants that
1
I call it “iniquitous” because, as I believe I have proved In the Appendix alluded to, this mystery has been and
still continues to be the consecration of all the horrors which have been and are being committed in the world; I call
it unique, because all the other theological and metaphysical absurdities which debase the human mind are but its
necessary consequences.

9
develop thought in men, the people generally accept religious traditions without criticism and in
a lump. These traditions surround them from infancy in all the situations of life, and artificially
sustained in their minds by a multitude of official poisoners of all sorts, priests and laymen, are
transformed therein into a sort of mental and moral babit, too often more powerful even than
their natural good sense.
There is another reason which explains and in some sort justifies the absurd beliefs of the peo-
ple — namely, the wretched situation to which they find themselves fatally condemned by the
economic organization of society in the most civilized countries of Europe. Reduced, intellec-
tually and morally as well as materially, to the minimum of human existence, confined in their
life like a prisoner in his prison, without horizon, without outlet, without even a future if we
believe the economists, the people would have the singularly narrow souls and blunted instincts
of the bourgeois if they did not feel a desire to escape; but of escape there are but three methods
— two chimerical and a third real. The first two are the dram-shop and the church, debauchery
of the body or debauchery of the mind; the third is social revolution. Hence I conclude this last
will be much more potent than all the theological propagandism of the freethinkers to destroy to
their last vestige the religious beliefs and dissolute habits of the people, beliefs and habits much
more intimately connected than is generally supposed. In substituting for the at once illusory
and brutal enjoyments of bodily and spiritual licentiousness the enjoyments, as refined as they
are real, of humanity developed in each and all, the social revolution alone will have the power
to close at the same time all the dram-shops and all the churches.
Till then the people. Taken as a whole, will believe; and, if they have no reason to believe, they
will have at least a right.
There is a class of people who, if they do not believe, must at least make a semblance of be-
lieving. This class comprising all the tormentors, all the oppressors, and all the exploiters of
humanity; priests, monarchs, statesmen, soldiers, public and private financiers, officials of all
sorts, policemen, gendarmes, jailers and executioners, monopolists, capitalists, tax-leeches, con-
tractors and landlords, lawyers, economists, politicians of all shades, down to the smallest vendor
of sweetmeats, all will repeat in unison those words of Voltaire:
“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” For, you understand, “the people
must have a religion.” That is the safety-valve.
There exists, finally, a somewhat numerous class of honest but timid souls who, too intelligent
to take the Christian dogmas seriously, reject them in detail, but have neither the courage nor the
strength nor the necessary resolution to summarily renounce them altogether. They abandon to
your criticism all the special absurdities of religion, they turn up their noses at all the miracles, but
they cling desperately to the principal absurdity; the source of all the others, to the miracle that
explains and justifies all the other miracles, the existence of God. Their God is not the vigorous
and powerful being, the brutally positive God of theology. It is a nebulous, diaphanous, illusory
being that vanishes into nothing at the first attempt to grasp it; it is a mirage, an ignis fatuus; that
neither warms nor illuminates. And yet they hold fast to it, and believe that, were it to disappear,
all would disappear with it. They are uncertain, sickly souls, who have lost their reckoning in
the present civilisation, belonging to neither the present nor the future, pale phantoms eternally
suspended between heaven and earth, and occupying exactly the same position between the
politics of the bourgeois and the Socialism of the proletariat. They have neither the power nor
the wish nor the determination to follow out their thought, and they waste their time and pains

10
in constantly endeavouring to reconcile the irreconcilable. In public life these are known as
bourgeois Socialists.
With them, or against them, discussion is out of the question. They are too puny.
But there are a few illustrious men of whom no one will dare to speak without respect, and
whose vigorous health, strength of mind, and good intention no one will dream of calling in ques-
tion. I need only cite the names of Mazzini, Michelet, Quinet, John Stuart Mill.2 Generous and
strong souls, great hearts, great minds, great writers, and the first the heroic and revolutionary
regenerator of a great nation, they are all apostles of idealism and bitter despisers and adversaries
of materialism, and consequently of Socialism also, in philosophy as well as in politics.
Against them, then, we must discuss this question.
First, let it be remarked that not one of the illustrious men I have just named nor any other
idealistic thinker of any consequence in our day has given any attention to the logical side of
this question properly speaking. Not one has tried to settle philosophically the possibility of the
divine salto mortale; from the pure and eternal regions of spirit into the mire of the material world.
Have they feared to approach this irreconcilable contradiction and despaired of solving it after the
failures of the greatest geniuses of history, or have they looked upon it as already sufficiently well
settled? That is their secret. The fact is that they have neglected the theoretical demonstration
of the existence of a God, and have developed only its practical motives and consequences. They
have treated it as a fact universally accepted, and, as such, no longer susceptible of any doubt
whatever, for sole proof thereof limiting themselves to the establishment of the antiquity and
this very universality of the belief in God.
This imposing unanimity, in the eyes of many illustrious men and writers to quote only the
most famous of them who eloquently expressed it, Joseph de Maistre and the great Italian patriot,
Giuseppe Mazzini — is of more value than all the demonstrations of science; and if the reasoning
of a small number of logical and even very powerful, but isolated, thinkers is against it, so much
the worse, they say, for these thinkers and their logic, for universal consent, the general and
primitive adoption of an idea, has always been considered the most triumphant testimony to its
truth. The I sentiment of the whole world, a conviction that is found and maintained always and
everywhere, cannot be mistaken; it must have its root in a necessity absolutely inherent in the
very nature of man. And since it has been established that all peoples, past and present, have
believed and still believe in the existence of God, it is clear that those who have the misfortune
to doubt it, whatever the logic that led them to this doubt, are abnormal exceptions, monsters.
Thus, then, the antiquity; and universality; of a belief should be regarded, contrary to all science
and all logic, as sufficient and unimpeachable proof of its truth. Why?
Until the days of Copernicus and Galileo everybody believed that the sun revolved about the
earth. Was not everybody mistaken? What is more ancient and more universal than slavery?
Cannibalism perhaps. From the origin of historic society down to the present day there has
been always and everywhere exploitation of the compulsory labour of the masses — slaves, serfs,
or wage workers — by some dominant minority; oppression of the people by the Church and
by the State. Must it be concluded that this exploitation and this oppression are necessities

2
Mr. Stuart Mill is perhaps the only one whose serious idealism may be fairly doubted, and that for two reasons:
first, that if not absolutely the disciple, he is a passionate admirer, an adherent of the positive philosophy of Auguste
Comte, a philosophy which, in spite of its numerous reservations, is really Atheistic; second, that Mr. Stuart Mill is
English, and in England to proclaim oneself an Atheist is to ostracise oneself, even at this late day.

11
absolutely inherent in the very existence of human society? These are examples which show
that the argument of the champions of God proves nothing.
Nothing, in fact, is as universal or as ancient as the iniquitous and absurd; truth and justice,
on the contrary, are the least universal, the youngest features in the development of human
society. In this fact, too, lies the explanation of a constant historical phenomenon — namely, the
persecution of which those who first proclaim the truth have been and continue to be the objects
at the hands of the official, privileged, and interested representatives of “universal” and “ancient”
beliefs, and often also at the hands of the same masses who, after having tortured them, always
end by adopting their ideas and rendering them victorious.
To us materialists and Revolutionary Socialists, there is nothing astonishing or terrifying in
this historical phenomenon. Strong in our conscience, in our love of truth at all hazards, in that
passion for logic which of itself alone constitutes a great power and outside of which there is
no thought; strong in our passion for justice and in our unshakeable faith in the triumph of
humanity over all theoretical and practical bestialities; strong, finally, in the mutual confidence
and support given each other by the few who share our convictions — we resign ourselves to all
the consequences of this historical phenomenon, in which we see the manifestation of a social
law as natural, as necessary, and as invariable as all the other laws which govern the world.
This law is a logical, inevitable consequence of the animal origin; of human society; for in face
of all the scientific, physiological, psychological, and historical proofs accumulated at the present
day, as well as in face of the exploits of the Germans conquering France, which now furnish so
striking a demonstration thereof, it is no longer possible to really doubt this origin. But from
the moment that this animal origin of man is accepted, all is explained. History then appears to
us as the revolutionary negation, now slow, apathetic, sluggish, now passionate and powerful,
of the past. It consists precisely in the progressive negation of the primitive animality of man
by the development of his humanity. Man, a wild beast, cousin of the gorilla, has emerged from
the profound darkness of animal instinct into the light of the mind, which explains in a wholly
natural way all his past mistakes and partially consoles us for his present errors. He has gone
out from animal slavery, and passing through divine slavery, a temporary condition between his
animality and his humanity, he is now marching on to the conquest and realisation of human
liberty. Whence it results that the antiquity of a belief, of an idea, far from proving anything in its
favour, ought, on the contrary, to lead us to suspect it. For behind us is our animality and before
us our humanity; human light, the only thing that can warm and enlighten us, the only thing
that can emancipate us, give us dignity, freedom, and happiness, and realise fraternity among
us, is never at the beginning, but, relatively to the epoch in which we live, always at the end
of history. Let us, then, never look back, let us look ever forward; for forward is our sunlight,
forward our salvation. If it is justifiable, and even useful and necessary, to turn back to study our
past, it is only in order to establish what we have been and what we must no longer be, what we
have believed and thought and what we must no longer believe or think, what we have done and
what we must do nevermore.
So much for antiquity. As for the universality; of an error, it proves but one thing — the
similarity, if not the perfect identity, of human nature in all ages and under all skies. And, since
it is established that all peoples, at all periods of their life, have believed and still believe in God,
we must simply conclude that the divine idea, an outcome of ourselves, is an error historically
necessary in the development of humanity, and ask why and how it was produced in history and
why an immense majority of the human race still accept it as a truth.

12
 Until we shall account to ourselves for the manner in which the idea of a supernatural or divine
world was developed and had to be developed in the historical evolution of the human conscience,
all our scientific conviction of its absurdity will be in vain; until then we shall never succeed in
destroying it in the opinion of the majority, because we shall never be able to attack it in the
very depths of the human being where it had birth. Condemned to a fruitless struggle, without
issue and without end, we should for ever have to content ourselves with fighting it solely on
the surface, in its innumerable manifestations, whose absurdity will be scarcely beaten down by
the blows of common sense before it will reappear in a new form no less nonsensical. While the
root of all the absurdities that torment the world, belief in God, remains intact, it will never fail
to bring forth new offspring. Thus, at the present time, in certain sections of the highest society,
Spiritualism tends to establish itself upon the ruins of Christianity.
It is not only in the interest of the masses, it is in that of the health of our own minds, that we
should strive to understand the historic genesis, the succession of causes which developed and
produced the idea of God in the consciousness of men. In vain shall we call and believe ourselves
Atheists, until we comprehend these causes, for, until then, we shall always suffer ourselves to
be more or less governed by the clamours of this universal conscience whose secret we have not
discovered; and, considering the natural weakness of even the strongest individual against the
all-powerful influence of the social surroundings that trammel him, we are always in danger of
relapsing sooner or later, in one way or another, into the abyss of religious absurdity. Examples
of these shameful conversions are frequent in society today.

13
II
I have stated the chief practical reason of the power still exercised today over the masses by
religious beliefs. These mystical tendencies do not signify in man so much an aberration of mind
as a deep discontent at Heart. They are the instinctive and passionate protest of the human being
against the narrowness, the platitudes, the sorrows, and the shame of a wretched existence. For
this malady, I have already said, there is but one remedy — Social Revolution.
In the meantime I have endeavored to show the causes responsible for the birth and historical
development of religious hallucinations in the human conscience. Here it is my purpose to treat
this question of the existence of a God, or of the divine origin of the world and of man, solely
from the standpoint of its moral and social utility, and I shall say only a few words, to better
explain my thought, regarding the theoretical grounds of this belief.
All religions, with their gods, their demigods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their
saints, were created by the credulous fancy of men who had not attained the full development
and full possession of their faculties. Consequently, the religious heaven is nothing but a mi-
rage in which man, exalted by ignorance and faith, discovers his own image, but enlarged and
reversed — that is, divinized. The history of religion, of the birth, grandeur, and decline of the
gods who have succeeded one another in human belief, is nothing, therefore, but the develop-
ment of the collective intelligence and conscience of mankind. As fast as they discovered, in
the course of their historically progressive advance, either in themselves or in external nature,
a power, a quality, or even any great defect whatever, they attributed them to their gods, after
having exaggerated and enlarged them beyond measure, after the manner of children, by an act
of their religious fancy. Thanks to this modesty and pious generosity of believing and credulous
men, heaven has grown rich with the spoils of the earth, and, by a necessary consequence, the
richer heaven became, the more wretched became humanity and the earth. God once installed,
he was naturally proclaimed the cause, reason, arbiter and absolute disposer of all things: the
world thenceforth was nothing, God was all; and man, his real creator, after having unknowingly
extracted him from the void, bowed down before him, worshipped him, and avowed himself his
creature and his slave.
Christianity is precisely the religion par excellence, because it exhibits and manifests, to the
fullest extent, the very nature and essence of every religious system, which is the impoverishment,
enslavement, and annihilation of humanity for the benefit of divinity.
God being everything, the real world and man are nothing. God being truth, justice, goodness,
beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood, iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death. God being
master, man is the slave. Incapable of finding justice, truth, and eternal life by his own effort, he
can attain them only through a divine revelation. But whoever says revelation says revealers,
messiahs, prophets, priests, and legislators inspired by God himself; and these, once recognized
as the representatives of divinity on earth, as the holy instructors of humanity, chosen by God
himself to direct it in the path of salvation, necessarily exercise absolute power. All men owe
them passive and unlimited obedience; for against the divine reason there is no human reason,

14
and against the justice of God no terrestrial justice holds. Slaves of God, men must also be slaves
of Church and State, in so far as the State is consecrated by the Church. This truth Christianity,
better than all other religions that exist or have existed, understood, not excepting even the
old Oriental religions, which included only distinct and privileged nations, while Christianity
aspires to embrace entire humanity; and this truth Roman Catholicism, alone among all the
Christian sects, has proclaimed and realized with rigorous logic. That is why Christianity is the
absolute religion, the final religion; why the Apostolic and Roman Church is the only consistent,
legitimate, and divine church.
With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers, politi-
cians, or poets: The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most
decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in
theory and practice.
Unless, then, we desire the enslavement and degradation of mankind, as the Jesuits desire it, as
the mômiers, pietists, or Protestant Methodists desire it, we may not, must not make the slightest
concession either to the God of theology or to the God of metaphysics. He who, in this mystical
alphabet, begins with A will inevitably end with Z; he who desires to worship God must harbor
no childish illusions about the matter, but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.
If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, God does not exist.
I defy anyone whomsoever to avoid this circle; now, therefore, let all choose.
Is it necessary to point out to what extent and in what manner religions debase and corrupt
the people? They destroy their reason, the principal instrument of human emancipation, and
reduce them to imbecility, the essential condition of their slavery. They dishonor human labor,
and make it a sign and source of servitude. They kill the idea and sentiment of human justice,
ever tipping the balance to the side of triumphant knaves, privileged objects of divine indulgence.
They kill human pride and dignity, protecting only the cringing and humble. They stifle in the
heart of nations every feeling of human fraternity, filling it with divine cruelty instead.
All religions are cruel, all founded on blood; for all rest principally on the idea of sacrifice —
that is, on the perpetual immolation of humanity to the insatiable vengeance of divinity. In this
bloody mystery man is always the victim, and the priest — a man also, but a man privileged by
grace — is the divine executioner. That explains why the priests of all religions, the best, the
most humane, the gentlest, almost always have at the bottom of their hearts — and, if not in their
hearts, in their imaginations, in their minds (and we know the fearful influence of either on the
hearts of men) — something cruel and sanguinary.
None know all this better than our illustrious contemporary idealists. They are learned men,
who know history by heart; and, as they are at the same time living men, great souls penetrated
with a sincere and profound love for the welfare of humanity, they have cursed and branded all
these misdeeds, all these crimes of religion with an eloquence unparalleled. They reject with
indignation all solidarity with the God of positive religions and with his representatives, past,
present, and on earth.
The God whom they adore, or whom they think they adore, is distinguished from the real gods
of history precisely in this — that he is not at all a positive god, defined in any way whatever,
theologically or even metaphysically. He is neither the supreme being of Robespierre and J. J.
Rousseau, nor the pantheistic god of Spinoza, nor even the at once immanent, transcendental,
and very equivocal god of Hegel. They take good care not to give him any positive definition
whatever, feeling very strongly that any definition would subject him to the dissolving power

15
of criticism. They will not say whether he is a personal or impersonal god, whether he created
or did not create the world; they will not even speak of his divine providence. All that might
compromise him. They content themselves with saying “God” and nothing more. But, then,
what is their God? Not even an idea; it is an aspiration.
It is the generic name of all that seems grand, good, beautiful, noble, human to them. But
why, then, do they not say, “Man.” Ah! because King William of Prussia and Napoleon III, and
all their compeers are likewise men: which bothers them very much. Real humanity presents a
mixture of all that is most sublime and beautiful with all that is vilest and most monstrous in the
world. How do they get over this? Why, they call one divine and the other bestial, representing
divinity and animality as two poles, between which they place humanity. They either will not
or cannot understand that these three terms are really but one, and that to separate them is to
destroy them.
They are not strong on logic, and one might say that they despise it. That is what distinguishes
them from the pantheistical and deistical metaphysicians, and gives their ideas the character of
a practical idealism, drawing its inspiration much less from the severe development of a thought
than from the experiences, I might almost say the emotions, historical and collective as well as
individual, of life. This gives their propaganda an appearance of wealth and vital power, but an
appearance only; for life itself becomes sterile when paralyzed by a logical contradiction.
This contradiction lies here: they wish God, and they wish humanity. They persist in connect-
ing two terms which, once separated, can come together again only to destroy each other. They
say in a single breath: “God and the liberty of man,” “God and the dignity, justice, equality, frater-
nity, prosperity of men” — regardless of the fatal logic by virtue of which, if God exists, all these
things are condemned to non-existence. For, if God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme,
absolute master, and, if such a master exists, man is a slave; now, if he is a slave, neither justice,
nor equality, nor fraternity, nor prosperity are possible for him. In vain, flying in the face of good
sense and all the teachings of history, do they represent their God as animated by the tenderest
love of human liberty: a master, whoever he may be and however liberal he may desire to show
himself, remains none the less always a master. His existence necessarily implies the slavery of
all that is beneath him. Therefore, if God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty
— by ceasing to exist.
A jealous lover of human liberty, and deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire
and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it
would be necessary to abolish him.
The severe logic that dictates these words is far too evident to require a development of this
argument. And it seems to me impossible that the illustrious men, whose names so celebrated
and so justly respected I have cited, should not have been struck by it themselves, and should
not have perceived the contradiction in which they involve themselves in speaking of God and
human liberty at once. To have disregarded it, they must have considered this inconsistency or
logical license practically necessary to humanity’s well-being.
Perhaps, too, while speaking of liberty as something very respectable and very dear in their
eyes, they give the term a meaning quite different from the conception entertained by us, mate-
rialists and Revolutionary Socialists. Indeed, they never speak of it without immediately adding
another word, authority — a word and a thing which we detest with all our heart.
What is authority? Is it the inevitable power of the natural laws which manifest themselves
in the necessary concatenation and succession of phenomena in the physical and social worlds?

16
Indeed, against these laws revolt is not only forbidden — it is even impossible. We may misun-
derstand them or not know them at all, but we cannot disobey them; because they constitute the
basis and fundamental conditions of our existence; they envelop us, penetrate us, regulate all our
movements, thoughts, and acts; even when we believe that we disobey them, we only show their
omnipotence.
Yes, we are absolutely the slaves of these laws. But in such slavery there is no humiliation,
or, rather, it is not slavery at all. For slavery supposes an external master, a legislator outside of
him whom he commands, while these laws are not outside of us; they are inherent in us; they
constitute our being, our whole being, physically, intellectually, and morally: we live, we breathe,
we act, we think, we wish only through these laws. Without them we are nothing, we are not.
Whence, then, could we derive the power and the wish to rebel against them?
In his relation to natural laws but one liberty is possible to man — that of recognizing and
applying them on an ever-extending scale in conformity with the object of collective and indi-
vidual emancipation or humanization which he pursues. These laws, once recognized, exercise
an authority which is never disputed by the mass of men. One must, for instance, be at bottom
either a fool or a theologian or at least a metaphysician, jurist, or bourgeois economist to rebel
against the law by which twice two make four. One must have faith to imagine that fire will not
burn nor water drown, except, indeed, recourse be had to some subterfuge founded in its turn
on some other natural law. But these revolts, or, rather, these attempts at or foolish fancies of
an impossible revolt, are decidedly, the exception; for, in general, it may be said that the mass of
men, in their daily lives, acknowledge the government of common sense — that is, of the sum of
the natural laws generally recognized — in an almost absolute fashion.
The great misfortune is that a large number of natural laws, already established as such by sci-
ence, remain unknown to the masses, thanks to the watchfulness of these tutelary governments
that exist, as we know, only for the good of the people. There is another difficulty — namely,
that the major portion of the natural laws connected with the development of human society,
which are quite as necessary, invariable, fatal, as the laws that govern the physical world, have
not been duly established and recognized by science itself.
Once they shall have been recognized by science, and then from science, by means of an ex-
tensive system of popular education and instruction, shall have passed into the consciousness
of all, the question of liberty will be entirely solved. The most stubborn authorities must admit
that then there will be no need either of political organization or direction or legislation, three
things which, whether they emanate from the will of the sovereign or from the vote of a parlia-
ment elected by universal suffrage, and even should they conform to the system of natural laws
— which has never been the case and never will be the case — are always equally fatal and hostile
to the liberty of the masses from the very fact that they impose upon them a system of external
and therefore despotic laws.
The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself
recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any
extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual.
Suppose a learned academy, composed of the most illustrious representatives of science; sup-
pose this academy charged with legislation for and the organization of society, and that, inspired
only by the purest love of truth, it frames none but laws in absolute harmony with the latest dis-
coveries of science. Well, I maintain, for my part, that such legislation and such organization
would be a monstrosity, and that for two reasons: first, that human science is always and neces-

17
sarily imperfect, and that, comparing what it has discovered with what remains to be discovered,
we may say that it is still in its cradle. So that were we to try to force the practical life of men,
collective as well as individual, into strict and exclusive conformity with the latest data of science,
we should condemn society as well as individuals to suffer martyrdom on a bed of Procrustes,
which would soon end by dislocating and stifling them, life ever remaining an infinitely greater
thing than science.
The second reason is this: a society which should obey legislation emanating from a scientific
academy, not because it understood itself the rational character of this legislation (in which case
the existence of the academy would become useless), but because this legislation, emanating from
the academy, was imposed in the name of a science which it venerated without comprehending
— such a society would be a society, not of men, but of brutes. It would be a second edition of
those missions in Paraguay which submitted so long to the government of the Jesuits. It would
surely and rapidly descend to the lowest stage of idiocy.
But there is still a third reason which would render such a government impossible — namely
that a scientific academy invested with a sovereignty, so to speak, absolute, even if it were com-
posed of the most illustrious men, would infallibly and soon end in its own moral and intellectual
corruption. Even today, with the few privileges allowed them, such is the history of all academies.
The greatest scientific genius, from the moment that he becomes an academician, an officially
licensed savant, inevitably lapses into sluggishness. He loses his spontaneity, his revolutionary
hardihood, and that troublesome and savage energy characteristic of the grandest geniuses, ever
called to destroy old tottering worlds and lay the foundations of new. He undoubtedly gains in
politeness, in utilitarian and practical wisdom, what he loses in power of thought. In a word, he
becomes corrupted.
It is the characteristic of privilege and of every privileged position to kill the mind and heart
of men. The privileged man, whether politically or economically, is a man depraved in mind and
heart. That is a social law which admits of no exception, and is as applicable to entire nations
as to classes, corporations, and individuals. It is the law of equality, the supreme condition of
liberty and humanity. The principal object of this treatise is precisely to demonstrate this truth
in all the manifestations of human life.
A scientific body to which had been confided the government of society would soon end by
devoting itself no longer to science at all, but to quite another affair; and that affair, as in the case
of all established powers, would be its own eternal perpetuation by rendering the society confided
to its care ever more stupid and consequently more in need of its government and direction.
But that which is true of scientific academies is also true of all constituent and legislative
assemblies, even those chosen by universal suffrage. In the latter case they may renew their
composition, it is true, but this does not prevent the formation in a few years’ time of a body
of politicians, privileged in fact though not in law, who, devoting themselves exclusively to the
direction of the public affairs of a country, finally form a sort of political aristocracy or oligarchy.
Witness the United States of America and Switzerland.
Consequently, no external legislation and no authority — one, for that matter, being insep-
arable from the other, and both tending to the servitude of society and the degradation of the
legislators themselves.
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I
refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of
the architect or engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But

18
I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the savant to impose his authority upon me.
I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their
knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content
myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare
their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognize no infallible
authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty
and the sincerity of such or such an individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a
faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it
would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of
others.
If I bow before the authority of the specialists and avow my readiness to follow, to a certain
extent and as long as may seem to me necessary, their indications and even their directions, it is
because their authority is imposed upon me by no one, neither by men nor by God. Otherwise
I would repel them with horror, and bid the devil take their counsels, their directions, and their
services, certain that they would make me pay, by the loss of my liberty and self-respect, for such
scraps of truth, wrapped in a multitude of lies, as they might give me.
I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed upon me by my own reason. I
am conscious of my inability to grasp, in all its details and positive developments, any very large
portion of human knowledge. The greatest intelligence would not be equal to a comprehension
of the whole. Thence results, for science as well as for industry, the necessity of the division and
association of labor. I receive and I give — such is human life. Each directs and is directed in
his turn. Therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual,
temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination.
This same reason forbids me, then, to recognize a fixed, constant, and universal authority,
because there is no universal man, no man capable of grasping in that wealth of detail, without
which the application of science to life is impossible, all the sciences, all the branches of social
life. And if such universality could ever be realized in a single man, and if he wished to take
advantage thereof to impose his authority upon us, it would be necessary to drive this man out
of society, because his authority would inevitably reduce all the others to slavery and imbecility.
I do not think that society ought to maltreat men of genius as it has done hitherto; but neither
do I think it should indulge them too far, still less accord them any privileges or exclusive rights
whatsoever; and that for three reasons: first, because it would often mistake a charlatan for a
man of genius; second, because, through such a system of privileges, it might transform into a
charlatan even a real man of genius, demoralize him, and degrade him; and, finally, because it
would establish a master over itself.
To sum up. We recognize, then, the absolute authority of science, because the sole object of
science is the mental reproduction, as well-considered and systematic as possible, of the natural
laws inherent in the material, intellectual, and moral life of both the physical and the social
worlds, these two worlds constituting, in fact, but one and the same natural world. Outside of
this only legitimate authority, legitimate because rational and in harmony with human liberty,
we declare all other authorities false, arbitrary and fatal.
We recognize the absolute authority of science, but we reject the infallibility and universality
of the savant. In our church — if I may be permitted to use for a moment an expression which I
so detest: Church and State are my two bêtes noires — in our church, as in the Protestant church,
we have a chief, an invisible Christ, science; and, like the Protestants, more logical even than the

19
Protestants, we will suffer neither pope, nor council, nor conclaves of infallible cardinals, nor
bishops, nor even priests. Our Christ differs from the Protestant and Christian Christ in this
— that the latter is a personal being, ours impersonal; the Christian Christ, already completed
in an eternal past, presents himself as a perfect being, while the completion and perfection of
our Christ, science, are ever in the future: which is equivalent to saying that they will never be
realized. Therefore, in recognizing absolute science as the only absolute authority, we in no way
compromise our liberty.
I mean by the words “absolute science,” which would reproduce ideally, to its fullest extent and
in all its infinite detail, the universe, the system or coordination of all the natural laws manifested
by the incessant development of the world. It is evident that such a science, the sublime object
of all the efforts of the human mind, will never be fully and absolutely realized. Our Christ, then,
will remain eternally unfinished, which must considerably take down the pride of his licensed
representatives among us. Against that God the Son in whose name they assume to impose upon
us their insolent and pedantic authority, we appeal to God the Father, who is the real world,
real life, of which he (the Son) is only a too imperfect expression, whilst we real beings, living,
working, struggling, loving, aspiring, enjoying, and suffering, are its immediate representatives.
But, while rejecting the absolute, universal, and infallible authority of men of science, we
willingly bow before the respectable, although relative, quite temporary, and very restricted au-
thority of the representatives of special sciences, asking nothing better than to consult them by
turns, and very grateful for such precious information as they may extend to us, on condition
of their willingness to receive from us on occasions when, and concerning matters about which,
we are more learned than they. In general, we ask nothing better than to see men endowed with
great knowledge, great experience, great minds, and, above all, great hearts, exercise over us a
natural and legitimate influence, freely accepted, and never imposed in the name of any official
authority whatsoever, celestial or terrestrial. We accept all natural authorities and all influences
of fact, but none of right; for every authority or every influence of right, officially imposed as
such, becoming directly an oppression and a falsehood, would inevitably impose upon us, as I
believe I have sufficiently shown, slavery and absurdity.
In a word, we reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal
influence, even though arising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can turn only to the
advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interests of the immense majority in
subjection to them.
This is the sense in which we are really Anarchists.
The modern idealists understand authority in quite a different way. Although free from the
traditional superstitions of all the existing positive religions, they nevertheless attach to this
idea of authority a divine, an absolute meaning. This authority is not that of a truth miracu-
lously revealed, nor that of a truth rigorously and scientifically demonstrated. They base it to
a slight extent upon quasi-philosophical reasoning, and to a large extent also on sentiment, ide-
ally, abstractly poetical. Their religion is, as it were, a last attempt to divinise all that constitutes
humanity in men.
This is just the opposite of the work that we are doing. On behalf of human liberty, dignity
and prosperity, we believe it our duty to recover from heaven the goods which it has stolen and
return them to earth. They, on the contrary, endeavouring to commit a final religiously heroic
larceny, would restore to heaven, that divine robber, finally unmasked, the grandest, finest and

20
noblest of humanity’s possessions. It is now the freethinker’s turn to pillage heaven by their
audacious piety and scientific analysis.
The idealists undoubtedly believe that human ideas and deeds, in order to exercise greater
authority among men, must be invested with a divine sanction. How is this sanction manifested?
Not by a miracle, as in the positive religions, but by the very grandeur or sanctity of the ideas and
deeds: whatever is grand, whatever is beautiful, whatever is noble, whatever is just, is considered
divine. In this new religious cult every man inspired by these ideas, by these deeds, becomes a
priest, directly consecrated by God himself. And the proof? He needs none beyond the very
grandeur of the ideas which he expresses and the deeds which he performs. These are so holy
that they can have been inspired only by God.
Such, in so few words, is their whole philosophy: a philosophy of sentiments, not of real
thoughts, a sort of metaphysical pietism. This seems harmless, but it is not so at all, and the very
precise, very narrow and very barren doctrine hidden under the intangible vagueness of these
poetic forms leads to the same disastrous results that all the positive religions lead to — namely,
the most complete negation of human liberty and dignity.
To proclaim as divine all that is grand, just, noble, and beautiful in humanity is to tacitly admit
that humanity of itself would have been unable to produce it — that is, that, abandoned to itself,
its own nature is miserable, iniquitous, base, and ugly. Thus we come back to the essence of all
religion — in other words, to the disparagement of humanity for the greater glory of divinity.
And from the moment that the natural inferiority of man and his fundamental incapacity to
rise by his own effort, unaided by any divine inspiration, to the comprehension of just and true
ideas, are admitted, it becomes necessary to admit also all the theological, political, and social
consequences of the positive religions. From the moment that God, the perfect and supreme
being, is posited face to face with humanity, divine mediators, the elect, the inspired of God
spring from the earth to enlighten, direct, and govern in his name the human race.
May we not suppose that all men are equally inspired by God? Then, surely, there is no further
use for mediators. But this supposition is impossible, because it is too clearly contradicted by
the facts. It would compel us to attribute to divine inspiration all the absurdities and errors
which appear, and all the horrors, follies, base deeds, and cowardly actions which are committed,
in the world. But perhaps, then, only a few men are divinely inspired, the great men of history,
the virtuous geniuses, as the illustrious Italian citizen and prophet, Giuseppe Mazzini, called them.
Immediately inspired by God himself and supported upon universal consent expressed by popular
suffrage — Dio e Popolo — such as these should be called to the government of human societies.1
But here we are again fallen back under the yoke of Church and State. It is true that in this
new organization, indebted for its existence, like all the old political organisations, to the grace
of God, but supported this time — at least so far as form is concerned, as a necessary concession
to the spirit of modern times, and just as in the preambles of the imperial decrees of Napoleon
III. — on the (pretended) will of the people, the Church will no longer call itself Church; it will
call itself School. What matters it? On the benches of this School will be seated not children
only; there will be found the eternal minor, the pupil confessedly forever incompetent to pass

1
In London I once heard M. Louis Blanc express almost the same idea. “The best form of government,” said he
to me, “would be that which would invariably call men of virtuous genius to the control of affairs.”

21
his examinations, rise to the knowledge of his teachers, and dispense with their discipline — the
people.2
2
One day I asked Mazzini what measures would be taken for the emancipation of the people, once his tri-
umphant unitary republic had been definitely established. “The first measure,” he answered “will be the foundation
of schools for the people.” “And what will the people be taught in these schools?” “The duties of man — sacrifice
and devotion.” But where will you find a sufficient number of professors to teach these things, which no one has the
right or power to teach, unless he preaches by example? Is not the number of men who find supreme enjoyment in
sacrifice and devotion exceedingly limited? Those who sacrifice themselves in the service of a great idea obey a lofty
passion, and, satisfying this personal passion, outside of which life itself loses all value in their eyes, they generally
think of something else than building their action into doctrine, while those who teach doctrine usually forget to
translate it into action, for the simple reason that doctrine kills the life, the living spontaneity, of action. Men like
Mazzini, in whom doctrine and action form an admirable unity, are very rare exceptions. In Christianity also there
have been great men, holy men, who have really practised, or who, at least, have passionately tried to practice all that
they preached, and whose hearts, overflowing with love, were full of contempt for the pleasures and goods of this
world. But the immense majority of Catholic and Protestant priests who, by trade, have preached and still preach the
doctrines of chastity, abstinence, and renunciation belie their teachings by their example. It is not without reason, but
because of several centuries’ experience, that among the people of all countries these phrases have become by-words:
As licentious as a priest; as gluttonous as a priest; as ambitious as a priest; as greedy, selfish, and grasping as a priest. It is,
then, established that the professors of the Christian virtues, consecrated by the Church, the priests, in the immense
majority of cases, have practised quite the contrary of what they have preached. This very majority, the universality
of this fact, show that the fault is not to be attributed to them as individuals, but to the social position, impossible and
contradictory in itself, in which these individuals are placed. The position of the Christian priest involves a double
contradiction. In the first place, that between the doctrine of abstinence and renunciation and the positive tendencies
and needs of human nature — tendencies and needs which, in some individual cases, always very rare, may indeed be
continually held back, suppressed, and even entirely annihilated by the constant influence of some potent intellectual
and moral passion; which at certain moments of collective exaltation, may be forgotten and neglected for some time
by a large mass of men at once; but which are so fundamentally inherent in our nature that sooner or later they always
resume their rights: so that, when they are not satisfied in a regular and normal way, they are always replaced at
last by unwholesome and monstrous satisfaction. This is a natural and consequently fatal and irresistible law, under
the disastrous action of which inevitably fall all Christian priests and especially those of the Roman Catholic Church.
It cannot apply to the professors, that is to the priests of the modern Church, unless they are also obliged to preach
Christian abstinence and renunciation. But there is another contradiction common to the priests of both sects. This
contradiction grows out of the very title and position of the master. A master who commands, oppresses, and exploits
is a wholly logical and quite natural personage. But a master who sacrifices himself to those who are subordinated
to him by his divine or human privilege is a contradictory and quite impossible being. This is the very constitution
of hypocrisy, so well personified by the Pope, who, while calling himself the lowest servant of the servants of God —
in token whereof, following the example of Christ, he even washes once a year the feet of twelve Roman beggars —
proclaims himself at the same time vicar of God, absolute and infallible master of the world. Do I need to recall that
the priests of all churches, far from sacrificing themselves to the flocks confided to their care, have always sacrificed
them, exploited them, and kept them in the condition of a flock, partly to satisfy their own personal passions and
partly to serve the omnipotence of the Church? Like conditions, like causes, always produce like effects. It will,
then, be the same with the professors of the modern School divinely inspired and licensed by the State. They will
necessarily become, some without knowing it, others with full knowledge of the cause, teachers of the doctrine of
popular sacrifice to the power of the State and to the profit of the privileged classes. Must we, then, eliminate from
society all instruction and abolish all schools? Far from it! Instruction must be spread among the masses without stint,
transforming all the churches, all those temples dedicated to the glory of God and to the slavery of men, into so many
schools of human emancipation. But, in the first place, let us understand each other; schools, properly speaking, in a
normal society founded on equality and on respect for human liberty, will exist only for children and not for adults:
and, in order that they may become schools of emancipation and not of enslavement, it will be necessary to eliminate,
first of all, this fiction of God, the eternal and absolute enslaver. The whole education of children and their instruction
must be founded on the scientific development of reason, not on that of faith; on the development of personal dignity
and independence, not on that of piety and obedience; on the worship of truth and justice at any cost, and above
all on respect for humanity, which must replace always and everywhere the worship of divinity. The principle of
authority, in the education of children, constitutes the natural point of departure; it is legitimate, necessary, when

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 The State will no longer call itself Monarchy; it will call itself Republic: but it will be none the
less the State — that is, a tutelage officially and regularly established by a minority of competent
men, men of virtuous genius or talent, who will watch and guide the conduct of this great, incor-
rigible, and terrible child, the people. The professors of the School and the functionaries of the
State will call themselves republicans; but they will be none the less tutors, shepherds, and the
people will remain what they have been hitherto from all eternity, a flock. Beware of shearers,
for where there is a flock there necessarily must be shepherds also to shear and devour it.
The people, in this system, will be the perpetual scholar and pupil. In spite of its sovereignty,
wholly fictitious, it will continue to serve as the instrument of thoughts, wills, and consequently

applied to children of a tender age, whose intelligence has not yet openly developed itself. But as the development of
everything, and consequently of education, implies the gradual negation of the point of departure, this principle must
diminish as fast as education and instruction advance, giving place to increasing liberty. All rational education is at
bottom nothing but this progressive immolation of authority for the benefit of liberty, the final object of education
necessarily being the formation of free men full of respect and love for the liberty of others. Therefore the first day of
the pupils’ life, if the school takes infants scarcely able as yet to stammer a few words, should be that of the greatest
authority and an almost entire absence of liberty; but its last day should be that of the greatest liberty and the absolute
abolition of every vestige of the animal or divine principle of authority. The principle of authority, applied to men
who have surpassed or attained their majority, becomes a monstrosity, a flagrant denial of humanity, a source of
slavery and intellectual and moral depravity. Unfortunately, paternal governments have left the masses to wallow in
an ignorance so profound that it will be necessary to establish schools not only for the people’s children, but for the
people themselves. From these schools will be absolutely eliminated the smallest applications or manifestations of
the principle of authority. They will be schools no longer; they will be popular academies, in which neither pupils nor
masters will be known, where the people will come freely to get, if they need it, free instruction, and in which, rich
in their own experience, they will teach in their turn many things to the professors who shall bring them knowledge
which they lack. This, then, will be a mutual instruction, an act of intellectual fraternity between the educated youth
and the people. The real school for the people and for all grown men is life. The only grand and omnipotent authority,
at once natural and rational, the only one which we may respect, will be that of the collective and public spirit of a
society founded on equality and solidarity and the mutual human respect of all its members. Yes, this is an authority
which is not at all divine, wholly human, but before which we shall bow willingly, certain that, far from enslaving
them, it will emancipate men. It will be a thousand times more powerful, be sure of it, than all your divine, theological,
metaphysical, political, and judicial authorities, established by the Church and by the State, more powerful than your
criminal codes, your jailers, and your executioners. The power of collective sentiment or public spirit is even now a
very serious matter. The men most ready to commit crimes rarely dare to defy it, to openly affront it. They will seek
to deceive it, but will take care not to be rude with it unless they feel the support of a minority larger or smaller. No
man, however powerful he believes himself, will ever have the strength to bear the unanimous contempt of society;
no one can live without feeling himself sustained by the approval and esteem of at least some portion of society. A
man must be urged on by an immense and very sincere conviction in order to find courage to speak and act against
the opinion of all, and never will a selfish, depraved, and cowardly man have such courage. Nothing proves more
clearly than this fact the natural and inevitable solidarity — this law of sociability — which binds all men together,
as each of us can verify daily, both on himself and on all the men whom he knows. But, if this social power exists,
why has it not sufficed hitherto to moralise, to humanise men? Simply because hitherto this power has not been
humanised itself; it has not been humanised because the social life of which it is ever the faithful expression is based,
as we know, on the worship of divinity, not on respect for humanity; on authority, not on liberty; on privilege, not
on equality; on the exploitation, not on the brotherhood of men; on iniquity and falsehood, not on justice and truth.
Consequently its real action, always in contradiction of the humanitarian theories which it professes, has constantly
exercised a disastrous and depraving influence. It does not repress vices and crimes; it creates them. Its authority
is consequently a divine, anti-human authority; its influence is mischievous and baleful. Do you wish to render its
authority and influence beneficent and human? Achieve the social revolution. Make all needs really solidary, and
cause the material and social interests of each to conform to the human duties of each. And to this end there is but one
means: Destroy all the institutions of Inequality; establish the economic and social equality of all, and on this basis
will arise the liberty, the morality, the solidary humanity of all. I shall return to this, the most important question of
Socialism.

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interests not its own. Between this situation and what we call liberty, the only real liberty, there
is an abyss. It will be the old oppression and old slavery under new forms; and where there is
slavery there is misery, brutishness, real social materialism, among the privileged classes as well
as among the masses.
In defying human things the idealists always end in the triumph of a brutal materialism. And
this for a very simple reason: the divine evaporates and rises to its own country, heaven, while
the brutal alone remains actually on earth.
Yes, the necessary consequence of theoretical idealism is practically the most brutal materi-
alism; not, undoubtedly, among those who sincerely preach it — the usual result as far as they
are concerned being that they are constrained to see all their efforts struck with sterility — but
among those who try to realise their precepts in life, and in all society so far as it allows itself to
be dominated by idealistic doctrines.
To demonstrate this general fact, which may appear strange at first, but which explains itself
naturally enough upon further reflection, historical proofs are not lacking.
Compare the last two civilisations of the ancient world — the Greek and the Roman. Which
is the most materialistic, the most natural, in its point of departure, and the most humanly ideal
in its results? Undoubtedly the Greek civilisation. Which on the contrary, is the most abstractly
ideal in its point of departure — sacrificing the material liberty of the man to the ideal liberty of
the citizen, represented by the abstraction of judicial law, and the natural development of human
society to the abstraction of the State — and which became nevertheless the most brutal in its
consequences? The Roman civilisation, certainly. It is true that the Greek civilisation, like all the
ancient civilisations, including that of Rome, was exclusively national and based on slavery. But,
in spite of these two immense defects, the former none the less conceived and realised the idea of
humanity; it ennobled and really idealised the life of men; it transformed human herds into free
associations of free men; it created through liberty the sciences, the arts, a poetry, an immortal
philosophy, and the primary concepts of human respect. With political and social liberty, it
created free thought. At the close of the Middle Ages, during the period of the Renaissance,
the fact that some Greek emigrants brought a few of those immortal books into Italy sufficed to
resuscitate life, liberty, thought, humanity, buried in the dark dungeon of Catholicism. Human
emancipation, that is the name of the Greek civilisation. And the name of the Roman civilisation?
Conquest, with all its brutal consequences. And its last word? The omnipotence of the Caesars.
Which means the degradation and enslavement of nations and of men.
Today even, what is it that kills, what is it that crushes brutally, materially, in all European
countries, liberty and humanity? It is the triumph of the Caesarian or Roman principle.
Compare now two modern civilisations — the Italian and the German. The first undoubtedly
represents, in its general character, materialism; the second, on the contrary, represents idealism
in its most abstract, most pure, and most transcendental form. Let us see what are the practical
fruits of the one and the other.
Italy has already rendered immense services to the cause of human emancipation. She was the
first to resuscitate and widely apply the principle of liberty in Europe, and to restore to humanity
its titles to nobility: industry, commerce, poetry, the arts, the positive sciences, and free thought.
Crushed since by three centuries of imperial and papal despotism, and dragged in the mud by
her governing bourgeoisie, she reappears today, it is true, in a very degraded condition in com-
parison with what she once was. And yet how much she differs from Germany! In Italy, in spite
of this decline — temporary let us hope — one may live and breathe humanly, surrounded by a

24
people which seems to be born for liberty. Italy, even bourgeois Italy, can point with pride to
men like Mazzini and Garibaldi..In Germany one breathes the atmosphere of an immense politi-
cal and social slavery, philosophically explained and accepted by a great people with deliberate
resignation and free will. Her heroes — I speak always of present Germany, not of the Germany
of the future; of aristocratic, bureaucratic, political and bourgeoisie Germany, not of the Ger-
many of the prolétaires — her heroes are quite the opposite of Mazzini and Garibaldi: they are
William I., that ferocious and ingenuous representative of the Protestant God, Messrs, Bismarck
and Moltke, Generals Manteuffel and Werder. In all her international relations Germany, from
the beginning of her existence, has been slowly, systematically invading, conquering, ever ready
to extend her own voluntary enslavement into the territory of her neighbours; and, since her
definitive establishment as a unitary power, she has become a menace, a danger to the liberty of
entire Europe. Today Germany is servility brutal and triumphant.
To show how theoretical idealism incessantly and inevitably changes into practical material-
ism, one needs only to cite the example of all the Christian Churches, and, naturally, first of
all, that of the Apostolic and Roman Church. What is there more sublime, in the ideal sense,
more disinterested, more separate from all the interests of this earth, than the doctrine of Christ
preached by that Church? And what is there more brutally materialistic than the constant prac-
tice of that same Church since the eighth century, from which dates her definitive establishment
as a power? What has been and still is the principal object of all her contests with the sovereigns
of Europe? Her temporal goods, her revenues first, and then her temporal power, her political
privileges. We must do her the justice to acknowledge that she was the first to discover, in mod-
ern history, this incontestable but scarcely Christian truth that wealth and power, the economic
exploitation and the political oppression of the masses, are the two inseparable terms of the reign
of divine ideality on earth: wealth consolidating and augmenting power, power ever discovering
and creating new sources of wealth, and both assuring, better than the martyrdom and faith of
the apostles, better than divine grace, the success of the Christian propagandism. This is a his-
torical truth, and the Protestant Churches do not fail to recognise it either. I speak, of course, of
the independent churches of England, America, and Switzerland, not of the subjected churches
of Germany. The latter have no initiative of their own; they do what their masters, their tem-
poral sovereigns, who are at the same time their spiritual chieftains, order them to do, It is well
known that the Protestant propagandism, especially in England and America, is very intimately
connected with the propagandism of the material, commercial interests of those two great na-
tions; and it is known also that the objects of the latter propagandism is not at all the enrichment
and material prosperity of the countries into which it penetrates in company with the Word of
God, but rather the exploitation of those countries with a view to the enrichment and material
prosperity of certain classes, which in their own country are very covetous and very pious at the
same time.
In a word, it is not at all difficult to prove, history in hand, that the Church, that all the
Churches, Christian and non-Christian, by the side of their spiritualistic propagandism, and
probably to accelerate and consolidate the success thereof, have never neglected to organise
themselves into great corporations for the economic exploitation of the masses under the pro-
tection and with the direct and special blessing of some divinity or other; that all the States,
which originally, as we know, with all their political and judicial institutions and their dominant
and privileged classes, have been only temporal branches of these various Churches, have like-
wise had principally in view this same exploitation for the benefit of lay minorities indirectly

25
sanctioned by the Church; finally and in general, that the action of the good God and of all the
divine idealities on earth has ended at last, always and everywhere, in founding the prosperous
materialism of the few over the fanatical and constantly famishing idealism of the masses.
We have a new proof of this in what we see today. With the exception of the great hearts
and great minds whom I have before referred to as misled, who are today the most obstinate de-
fenders of idealism? In the first place, all the sovereign courts. In France, until lately, Napoleon
III. and his wife, Madame Eugénie; all their former ministers, courtiers, and ex-marshals, from
Rouher and Bazaine to Fleury and Piétri; the men and women of this imperial world, who have
so completely idealised and saved France; their journalists and their savants — the Cssagnacs, the
Girardins, the Duvernois, the Veuillots, the Leverriers, the Dumas; the black phalanx of Jesuits
and Jesuitesses in every garb; the whole upper and middle bourgeoisie of France; the doctrinaire
liberals, and the liberals without doctrine — the Guizots, the Thiers, the Jules Favres, the Pel-
letans, and the Jules Simons, all obstinate defenders of the bourgeoisie exploitation. In Prussia,
in Germany, William I., the present royal demonstrator of the good God on earth; all his gener-
als, all his officers, Pomeranian and other; all his army, which, strong in its religious faith, has
just conquered France in that ideal way we know so well. In Russia, the Czar and his court;
the Mouravieffs and the Bergs, all the butchers and pious proselyters of Poland. Everywhere, in
short, religious or philosophical idealism, the one being but the more or less free translation of
the other, serves today as the flag of material, bloody, and brutal force, of shameless material
exploitation; while, on the contrary, the flag of theoretical materialism, the red flag of economic
equality and social justice, is raised by the practical idealism of the oppressed and famishing
masses, tending to realise the greatest liberty and the human right of each in the fraternity of all
men on the earth.
Who are the real idealists — the idealists not of abstraction, but of life, not of heaven, but of
earth — and who are the materialists?
It is evident that the essential condition of theoretical or divine idealism is the sacrifice of logic,
of human reason, the renunciation of science. We see, further, that in defending the doctrines
of idealism one finds himself enlisted perforce in the ranks of the oppressors and exploiters of
the masses. These are two great reasons which, it would seem, should be sufficient to drive
every great mind, every great heart, from idealism. How does it happen that our illustrious
contemporary idealists, who certainly lack neither mind, nor heart, nor good will, and who have
devoted their entire existence to the service of humanity — how does it happen that they persist
in remaining among the representatives of a doctrine henceforth condemned and dishonoured?
They must be influenced by a very powerful motive. It cannot be logic or science, since logic
and science have pronounced their verdict against the idealistic doctrine. No more can it be
personal interests, since these men are infinitely above everything of that sort. It must, then, be
a powerful moral motive. Which? There can be but one. These illustrious men think, no doubt,
that idealistic theories or beliefs are essentially necessary to the moral dignity and grandeur of
man, and that materialistic theories, on the contrary, reduce him to the level of the beasts.
And if the truth were just the opposite!
Every development, I have said, implies the negation of its point of departure. The basis or
point of departure, according to the materialistic school, being material, the negation must be
necessarily ideal. Starting from the totality of the real world, or from what is abstractly called
matter, it logically arrives at the real idealisation — that is, at the humanisation, at the full and
complete emancipation of society. Per contra; and for the same reason, the basis and point of

26
departure of the idealistic school being ideal, it arrives necessarily at the materialisation of society,
at the organization of a brutal despotism and an iniquitous and ignoble exploitation, under the
form of Church and State. The historical development of man according to the materialistic
school, is a progressive ascension; in the idealistic system it can be nothing but a continuous fall.
Whatever human question we may desire to consider, we always find this same essential con-
tradiction between the two schools. Thus, as I have already observed, materialism starts from
animality to establish humanity; idealism starts from divinity to establish slavery and condemn
the masses to an endless animality. Materialism denies free will and ends in the establishment
of liberty; idealism, in the name of human dignity, proclaims free will, and on the ruins of ev-
ery liberty founds authority. Materialism rejects the principle of authority, because it rightly
considers it as the corollary of animality, and because, on the contrary, the triumph of human-
ity, the object and chief significance of history, can be realised only through liberty. In a word,
you will always find the idealists in the very act of practical materialism, while you will see the
materialists pursuing and realising the most grandly ideal aspirations and thoughts.
History, in the system of the idealists, as I have said, can be nothing but a continuous fall. They
begin by a terrible fall, from which they never recover — by the salto mortale; from the sublime
regions of pure and absolute idea into matter. And into what kind of matter ! Not into the matter
which is eternally active and mobile, full of properties and forces, of life and intelligence, as we
see it in the real world; but into abstract matter, impoverished and reduced to absolute misery
by the regular looting of these Prussians of thought, the theologians and metaphysicians, who
have stripped it of everything to give everything to their emperor, to their God; into the matter
which, deprived of all action and movement of its own, represents, in opposition to the divine
idea, nothing but absolute stupidity, impenetrability, inertia and immobility.
The fall is so terrible that divinity, the divine person or idea, is flattened out, loses consciousness
of itself, and never more recovers it. And in this desperate situation it is still forced to work
miracles! For from the moment that matter becomes inert, every movement that takes place in the
world, even the most material, is a miracle, can result only from a providential intervention, from
the action of God upon matter. And there this poor Divinity, degraded and half annihilated by its
fall, lies some thousands of centuries in this swoon, then awakens slowly, in vain endeavouring
to grasp some vague memory of itself, and every move that it makes in this direction upon matter
becomes a creation, a new formation, a new miracle. In this way it passes through all degrees of
materiality and bestiality — first, gas, simple or compound chemical substance, mineral, it then
spreads over the earth as vegetable and animal organization till it concentrates itself in man.
Here it would seem as if it must become itself again, for it lights in every human being an angelic
spark, a particle of its own divine being, the immortal soul.
How did it manage to lodge a thing absolutely immaterial in a thing absolutely material; how
can the body contain, enclose, limit, paralyse pure spirit? This, again, is one of those questions
which faith alone, that passionate and stupid affirmation of the absurd, can solve. It is the greatest
of miracles. Here, however, we have only to establish the effects, the practical consequences of
this miracle.
After thousands of centuries of vain efforts to come back to itself, Divinity, lost and scattered
in the matter which it animates and sets in motion, finds a point of support, a sort of focus
for self-concentration. This focus is man his immortal soul singularly imprisoned in a mortal
body. But each man considered individually is infinitely too limited, too small, to enclose the
divine immensity; it can contain only a very small particle, immortal like the whole, but infinitely

27
smaller than the whole. It follows that the divine being, the absolutely immaterial being, mind,
is divisible like matter. Another mystery whose solution must be left to faith.
If God entire could find lodgment in each man, then each man would be God. We should have
an immense quantity of Gods, each limited by all the others and yet none the less infinite — a
contradiction which would imply a mutual destruction of men, an impossibility of the existence
of more than one. As for the particles, that is another matter; nothing more rational, indeed, than
that one particle should be limited by another and be smaller than the whole. Only, here another
contradiction confronts us. To be limited, to be greater and smaller are attributes of matter, not
of mind. According to the materialists, it is true, mind is only the working of the wholly material
organism of man, and the greatness or smallness of mind depends absolutely on the greater or
less material perfection of the human organism. But these same attributes of relative limitation
and grandeur cannot be attributed to mind as the idealists conceive it, absolutely immaterial
mind, mind existing independent of matter. There can be neither greater nor smaller nor any
limit among minds, for there is only one mind — God. To add that the infinitely small and
limited particles which constitute human souls are at the same time immortal is to carry the
contradiction to a climax. But this is a question of faith. Let us pass on.
Here then we have Divinity torn up and lodged, in infinitely small particles, in an immense
number of beings of all sexes, ages, races, and colours. This is an excessively inconvenient and
unhappy situation, for the divine particles are so little acquainted with each other at the outset
of their human existence that they begin by devouring each other. Moreover, in the midst of this
state of barbarism and wholly animal brutality, these divine particles, human souls, retain as it
were a vague remembrance of their primitive divinity, and are irresistibly drawn towards their
whole; they seek each other, they seek their whole. It is Divinity itself, scattered and lost in the
natural world, which looks for itself in men, and it is so demolished by this multitude of human
prisons in which it finds itself strewn, that, in looking for itself, it commits folly after folly.
Beginning with fetishism, it searches for and adores itself, now in a stone, now in a piece of
wood, now in a rag. It is quite likely that it would never have succeeded in getting out of the
rag, if the other; divinity which was not allowed to fall into matter and which is kept in a state
of pure spirit in the sublime heights of the absolute ideal, or in the celestial regions, had not had
pity on it.
Here is a new mystery — that of Divinity dividing itself into two halves, both equally infinite,
of which one — God the Father — stays in the purely immaterial regions, and the other — God
the Son — falls into matter. We shall see directly, between these two Divinities separated from
each other, continuous relations established, from above to below and from below to above; and
these relations, considered as a single eternal and constant act, will constitute the Holy Ghost.
Such, in its veritable theological and metaphysical meaning, is the great, the terrible mystery of
the Christian Trinity.
But let us lose no time in abandoning these heights to see what is going on upon earth.
God the Father, seeing from the height of his eternal splendour that the poor God the Son,
flattened out and astounded by his fall, is so plunged and lost in matter that even having reached
human state he has not yet recovered himself, decides to come to his aid. From this immense
number of particles at once immortal, divine, and infinitely small, in which God the Son has
disseminated himself so thoroughly that he does not know himself, God the Father chooses those
most pleasing to him, picks his inspired persons, his prophets, his “men of virtuous genius,” the
great benefactors and legislators of humanity: Zoroaster, Buddha, Moses, Confucius, Lycurgus,

28
Solon, Socrates, the divine Plato, and above all Jesus Christ, the complete realisation of God the
Son, at last collected and concentrated in a single human person; all the apostles, Saint Peter,
Saint Paul, Saint John before all, Constantine the Great, Mahomet, then Charlemagne, Gregory
VII Dante, and, according to some, Luther also, Voltaire and Rousseau, Robespierre and Danton,
and many other great and holy historical personages, all of whose names it is impossible to
recapitulate, but among whom I, as a Russian, beg that Saint Nicholas may not be forgotten.
Then we have reached at last the manifestation of God upon earth. But immediately God
appears, man is reduced to nothing. It will be said that he is not reduced to nothing, since he is
himself a particle of God. Pardon me! I admit that a particle of a definite, limited whole, however
small it be, is a quantity, a positive greatness. But a particle of the infinitely great, compared
with it, is necessarily infinitely small, Multiply milliards of milliards by milliards of milliards —
their product compared to the infinitely great, will be infinitely small, and the infinitely small is
equal to zero. God is everything; therefore man and all the real world with him, the universe, are
nothing. You will not escape this conclusion.
God appears, man is reduced to nothing; and the greater Divinity becomes, the more miserable
becomes humanity. That is the history of all religions; that is the effect of all the divine inspi-
rations and legislations. In history the name of God is the terrible club with which all divinely
inspired men, the great “virtuous geniuses,” have beaten down the liberty, dignity, reason, and
prosperity of man.
We had first the fall of God. Now we have a fall which interests us more — that of man, caused
solely by the apparition of God manifested on earth.
See in how profound an error our dear and illustrious idealists find themselves. In talking to us
of God they purpose, they desire, to elevate us, emancipate us, ennoble us, and, on the contrary,
they crush and degrade us. With the name of God they imagine that they can establish fraternity
among men, and, on the contrary, they create pride, contempt; they sow discord, hatred, war;
they establish slavery. For with God come the different degrees of divine inspiration; humanity
is divided into men highly inspired, less inspired, uninspired. All are equally insignificant before
God, it is true; but, compared with each other, some are greater than others; not only in fact —
which would be of no consequence, because inequality in fact is lost in the collectivity when it
cannot cling to some legal fiction or institution — but by the divine right of inspiration, which
immediately establishes a fixed, constant, petrifying inequality. The highly inspired must be
listened to and obeyed by the less inspired, and the less inspired by the uninspired. Thus we
have the principle of authority well established, and with it the two fundamental institutions of
slavery: Church and State.
Of all despotisms that of the doctrinaires; or inspired religionists is the worst. They are so
jealous of the glory of their God and of the triumph of their idea that they have no heart left for the
liberty or the dignity or even the sufferings of living men, of real men. Divine zeal, preoccupation
with the idea, finally dry up the tenderest souls, the most compassionate hearts, the sources of
human love. Considering all that is, all that happens in the world from the point of view of
eternity or of the abstract idea, they treat passing matters with disdain; but the whole life of real
men, of men of flesh and bone, is composed only of passing matters; they themselves are only
passing beings, who, once passed, are replaced by others likewise passing, but never to return
in person. Alone permanent or relatively eternal in men is humanity, which steadily developing,
grows richer in passing from one generation to another. I say relatively; eternal, because, our
planet once destroyed — it cannot fail to perish sooner or later, since everything which has begun

29
must necessarily end — our planet once decomposed, to serve undoubtedly as an element of some
new formation in the system of the universe, which alone is really eternal, who knows what will
become of our whole human development? Nevertheless, the moment of this dissolution being
an enormous distance in the future, we may properly consider humanity, relatively to the short
duration of human life, as eternal. But this very fact of progressive humanity is real and living
only through its manifestations at definite times, in definite places, in really living men, and not
through its general idea.
The general idea is always an abstraction and, for that very reason, in some sort a negation of
real life. I have stated in the Appendix that human thought and, in consequence of this, science
can grasp and name only the general significance of real facts, their relations, their laws — in
short, that which is permanent in their continual transformations — but never their material,
individual side, palpitating, so to speak, with reality and life, and therefore fugitive and intangible.
Science comprehends the thought of the reality, not reality itself; the thought of life, not life. That
is its limit, its only really insuperable limit, because it is founded on the very nature of thought,
which is the only organ of science.
Upon this nature are based the indisputable rights and grand mission of science, but also its
vital impotence and even its mischievous action whenever, through its official licensed represen-
tatives, it arrogantly claims the right to govern life. The mission of science is, by observation of
the general relations of passing and real facts, to establish the general laws inherent in the devel-
opment of the phenomena of the physical and social world; it fixes, so to speak, the unchangeable
landmarks of humanity’s progressive march by indicating the general conditions which it is nec-
essary to rigorously observe and always fatal to ignore or forget. In a word, science is the compass
of life; but it is not life itself. Science is unchangeable, impersonal, general, abstract, insensible,
like the laws of which it is but the ideal reproduction, reflected or mental — that is cerebral (using
this word to remind us that science itself is but a material product of a material organ, the brain).
Life is wholly fugitive and temporary, but also wholly palpitating with reality and individuality,
sensibility, sufferings, joys, aspirations, needs, and passions. It alone spontaneously creates real
things and; beings. Science creates nothing; it establishes and recognises only the creations of
life. And every time that scientific men, emerging from their abstract world, mingle with living
creation in the real world, all that they propose or create is poor, ridiculously abstract, bloodless
and lifeless, still-born, like the homunculus created by Wagner, the pedantic disciple of the im-
mortal Doctor Faust. It follows that the only mission of science is to enlighten life, not to govern
it.
The government of science and of men of science, even be they positivists, disciples of Auguste
Comte, or, again, disciples of the doctrinaire; school of German Communism, cannot fail to be
impotent, ridiculous, inhuman, cruel, oppressive, exploiting, maleficent. We may say of men of
science, as such, what I have said of theologians and metaphysicians: they have neither sense nor
heart for individual and living beings. We cannot even blame them for this, for it is the natural
consequence of their profession. In so far as they are men of science, they have to deal with and
can take interest in nothing except generalities; that do the laws […]
[Three pages of the manuscript are missing]
… they are not exclusively men of science, but are also more or less men of life. [The lost part
of this sentence perhaps said: “If men of science in their researches and experiments are not treating
men actually as they treat animals, the reason is that” they are not exclusively men of science, but
are also more or less men of life.]

30
III
Nevertheless, we must not rely too much on this. Though we may be well nigh certain that a
savant; would not dare to treat a man today as he treats a rabbit, it remains always to be feared
that the savants; as a body, if not interfered with, may submit living men to scientific experiments,
undoubtedly less cruel but none the less disagreeable to their victims. If they cannot perform
experiments upon the bodies of individuals, they will ask nothing better than to perform them
on the social body, and that what must be absolutely prevented.
In their existing organisation, monopolising science and remaining thus outside of social life,
the savants; form a separate caste, in many respects analogous to the priesthood. Scientific ab-
stractions is their God, living and real individuals are their victims, and they are the consecrated
and licensed sacrificers.
Science cannot go outside of the sphere of abstractions. In this respect it is infinitely inferior
to art, which, in its turn, is peculiarly concerned also with general types and general situations,
but which incarnates them by an artifice of its own in forms which, if they are not living in
the sense of real life none the less excite in our imagination the memory and sentiment of life;
art in a certain sense individualizes the types and situations which it conceives; by means of
the individualities without flesh and bone, and consequently permanent and immortal, which it
has the power to create, it recalls to our minds the living, real individualities which appear and
disappear under our eyes. Art, then, is as it were the return of abstraction to life; science, on the
contrary, is the perpetual immolation of life, fugitive, temporary, but real, on the altar of eternal
abstractions.
Science is as incapable of grasping the individuality of a man as that of a rabbit, being equally
indifferent to both. Not that it is ignorant of the principle of individuality: it conceives it per-
fectly as a principle, but not as a fact. It knows very well that all the animal species, including
the human species, have no real existence outside of an indefinite number of individuals, born
and dying to make room for new individuals equally fugitive. It knows that in rising from the
animal species to the superior species the principle of individuality becomes more pronounced;
the individuals appear freer and more complete. It knows that man, the last and most perfect
animal of earth, presents the most complete and most remarkable individuality, because of his
power to conceive, concrete, personify, as it were, in his social and private existence, the uni-
versal law. It knows, finally, when it is not vitiated by theological or metaphysical, political or
judicial doctrinairisme, or even by a narrow scientific pride, when it is not deaf to the instincts
and spontaneous aspirations of life — it knows (and this is its last word) that respect for man is
the supreme law of Humanity, and that the great, the real object of history, its only legitimate
object is the humanization and emancipation, the real liberty, the prosperity and happiness of
each individual living in society. For, if we would not fall back into the liberticidal fiction of the
public welfare represented by the State, a fiction always founded on the systematic sacrifice of
the people, we must clearly recognize that collective liberty and prosperity exist only so far as
they represent the sum of individual liberties and prosperities.

31
 Science knows all these things, but it does not and cannot go beyond them. Abstraction being
its very nature, it can well enough conceive the principle of real and living individuality, but
it can have no dealings with real and living individuals; it concerns itself with individuals in
general, but not with Peter or James, not with such or such a one, who, so far as it is concerned,
do not, cannot, have any existence. Its individuals, I repeat, are only abstractions.
Now, history is made, not by abstract individuals, but by acting, living and passing individuals.
Abstractions advance only when borne forward by real men. For these beings made, not in
idea only, but in reality of flesh and blood, science has no heart: it considers them at most as
material for intellectual and social development. What does it care for the particular conditions
and chance fate of Peter or James? It would make itself ridiculous, it would abdicate, it would
annihilate itself, if it wished to concern itself with them otherwise than as examples in support
of its eternal theories. And it would be ridiculous to wish it to do so, for its mission lies not there.
It cannot grasp the concrete; it can move only in abstractions. Its mission is to busy itself with
the situation and the general conditions of the existence and development, either of the human
species in general, or of such a race, such a people, such a class or category of individuals; the
general causes of their prosperity, their decline, and the best general methods of securing, their
progress in all ways. Provided it accomplishes this task broadly and rationally, it will do its whole
duty, and it would be really unjust to expect more of it.
But it would be equally ridiculous, it would be disastrous to entrust it with a mission which it is
incapable of fulfilling. Since its own nature forces it to ignore the existence of Peter and James, it
must never be permitted, nor must anybody be permitted in its name, to govern Peter and James.
For it were capable of treating them almost as it treats rabbits. Or rather, it would continue
to ignore them; but its licensed representatives, men not at all abstract, but on the contrary in
very active life and having very substantial interests, yielding to the pernicious influence which
privilege inevitably exercises upon men, would finally fleece other men in the name of science,
just as they have been fleeced hitherto by priests, politicians of all shades, and lawyers, in the
name of God, of the State, of judicial Right.
What I preach then is, to a certain extent, the revolt of life against science, or rather against
the government of science, not to destroy science — that would be high treason to humanity —
but to remand it to its place so that it can never leave it again. Until now all human history
has been only a perpetual and bloody immolation of millions of poor human beings in honor of
some pitiless abstraction — God, country, power of State, national honor, historical rights, judi-
cial rights, political liberty, public welfare. Such has been up to today the natural, spontaneous,
and inevitable movement of human societies. We cannot undo it; we must submit to it so far
as the past is concerned, as we submit to all natural fatalities. We must believe that that was
the only possible way, to educate the human race. For we must not deceive ourselves: even in
attributing the larger part to the Machiavellian wiles of the governing classes, we have to recog-
nize that no minority would have been powerful enough to impose all these horrible sacrifices
upon the masses if there had not been in the masses themselves a dizzy spontaneous movement
which pushed them on to continual self-sacrifice, now to one, now to another of these devouring
abstractions the vampires of history ever nourished upon human blood.
We readily understand that this is very gratifying, to the theologians, politicians, and jurists.
Priests of these abstractions, they live only by the continual immolation of the people. Nor is it
more surprising that metaphysics too, should give its consent. Its only mission is to justify and
rationalize as far as possible the iniquitous and absurd. But that positive science itself should

32
have shown the same tendencies is a fact which we must deplore while we establish it. That
it has done so is due to two reasons: in the first place, because, constituted outside of life, it is
represented by a privileged body; and in the second place, because thus far it has posited itself
as an absolute and final object of all human development. By a judicious criticism, which it can
and finally will be forced to pass upon itself, it would understand, on the contrary, that it is only
a means for the realization of a much higher object — that of the complete humanization of the
real situation of all the real individuals who are born, who live, and who die, on earth.
The immense advantage of positive science over theology, metaphysics, politics, and judicial
right consists in this — that, in place of the false and fatal abstractions set up by these doctrines,
it posits true abstractions which express the general nature and logic of things, their general rela-
tions, and the general laws of their development. This separates it profoundly from all preceding
doctrines, and will assure it for ever a great position in society: it will constitute in a certain
sense society’s collective consciousness. But there is one aspect in which it resembles all these
doctrines: its only possible object being abstractions, it is forced by its very nature to ignore real
men, outside of whom the truest abstractions have no existence. To remedy this radical defect
positive science will have to proceed by a different method from that followed by the doctrines
of the past. The latter have taken advantage of the ignorance of the masses to sacrifice them with
delight to their abstractions, which by the way, are always very lucrative to those who represent
them in flesh and bone. Positive science, recognizing its absolute inability to conceive real in-
dividuals and interest itself in their lot, must definitely and absolutely renounce all claim to the
government of societies; for if it should meddle therein, it would only sacrifice continually the
living men whom it ignores to the abstractions which constitute the sole object of its legitimate
preoccupations.
The true science of history, for instance, does not yet exist; scarcely do we begin today to catch
a glimpse of its extremely complicated conditions. But suppose it were definitely developed, what
could it give us? It would exhibit a faithful and rational picture of the natural development of the
general conditions — material and ideal, economical, political and social, religious, philosophical,
aesthetic, and scientific — of the societies which have a history. But this universal picture of
human civilization, however detailed it might be, would never show anything beyond general
and consequently abstract estimates. The milliards of individuals who have furnished the living
and suffering materials of this history at once triumphant and dismal — triumphant by its general
results, dismal by the immense hecatomb of human victims “crushed under its car” — those
milliards of obscure individuals without whom none of the great abstract results of history would
have been obtained — and who, bear in mind, have never benefited by any of these results — will
find no place, not even the slightest in our annals. They have lived and been sacrificed, crushed
for the good of abstract humanity, that is all.
Shall we blame the science of history. That would be unjust and ridiculous. Individuals cannot
be grasped by thought, by reflection, or even by human speech, which is capable of expressing
abstractions only; they cannot be grasped in the present day any more than in the past. There-
fore social science itself, the science of the future, will necessarily continue to ignore them. All
that, we have a right to demand of it is that it shall point us with faithful and sure hand to the
general causes of individual suffering — among these causes it will not forget the immolation and
subordination (still too frequent, alas!) of living individuals to abstract generalities — at the same
time showing us the general conditions necessary to the real emancipation of the individuals living
in society. That is its mission; those are its limits, beyond which the action of social science can be

33
only impotent and fatal. Beyond those limits being the doctrinaire and governmental pretentious
of its licensed representatives, its priests. It is time to have done with all popes and priests; we
want them no longer, even if they call themselves Social Democrats.
Once more, the sole mission of science is to light the road. Only Life, delivered from all its
governmental and doctrinaire barriers, and given full liberty of action, can create.
How solve this antinomy?
On the one hand, science is indispensable to the rational organization of society; on the other,
being incapable of interesting itself in that which is real and living, it must not interfere with the
real or practical organization of society.
This contradiction can be solved only in one way: by the liquidation of science as a moral be-
ing existing outside the life of all, and represented by a body of breveted savants; it must spread
among the masses. Science, being called upon to henceforth represent society’s collective con-
sciousness, must really become the property of everybody. Thereby, without losing anything of
its universal character, of which it can never divest itself without ceasing to be science, and while
continuing to concern itself exclusively with general causes, the conditions and fixed relations of
individuals and things, it will become one in fact with the immediate and real life of all individu-
als. That will be a movement analogous to that which said to the Protestants at the beginning of
the Reformation that there was no further need of priests for man, who would henceforth be his
own priest, every man, thanks to the invisible intervention of the Lord Jesus Christ alone, having
at last succeeded in swallowing his good God. But here the question is not of Jesus Christ, nor
good God, nor of political liberty, nor of judicial right — things all theologically or metaphysi-
cally revealed, and all alike indigestible. The world of scientific abstractions is not revealed; it is
inherent in the real world, of which it is only the general or abstract expression and representa-
tion. As long as it forms a separate region, specially represented by the savants as a body, this
ideal world threatens to take the place of a good God to the real world, reserving for its licensed
representatives the office of priests. That is the reason why it is necessary to dissolve the special
social organization of the savants by general instruction, equal for all in all things, in order that
the masses, ceasing to be flocks led and shorn by privileged priests, may take into their own
hands the direction of their destinies.1
But until the masses shall have reached this degree of instruction, will it be necessary to leave
them to the government of scientific men? Certainly not. It would be better for them to dis-
pense with science than allow themselves to be governed by savants. The first consequence of
the government of these men would be to render science inaccessible to the people, and such
a government would necessarily be aristocratic because the existing scientific institutions are
essentially aristocratic. An aristocracy of learning! from the practical point of view the most
implacable, and from the social point of view the most haughty and insulting — such would be
the power established in the name of science. This régime would be capable of paralyzing the
life and movement of society. The savants always presumptuous, ever self-sufficient and ever

1
Science, in becoming the patrimony of everybody, will wed itself in a certain sense to the immediate and real
life of each. It will gain in utility and grace what it loses in pride, ambition, and doctrinaire pedantry. This, however,
will not prevent men of genius, better organized for scientific speculation than the majority of their fellows, from
devoting themselves exclusively to the cultivation of the sciences, and rendering great services to humanity. Only,
they will be ambitious for no other social influence than the natural influence exercised upon its surroundings by
every superior intelligence, and for no other reward than the high delight which a noble mind always finds in the
satisfaction of a noble passion.

34
impotent, would desire to meddle with everything, and the sources of life would dry up under
the breath of their abstractions.
Once more, Life, not science, creates life; the spontaneous action of the people themselves
alone can create liberty. Undoubtedly it would be a very fortunate thing if science could, from
this day forth, illuminate the spontaneous march of the people towards their emancipation. But
better an absence of light than a false and feeble light, kindled only to mislead those who follow it.
After all, the people will not lack light. Not in vain have they traversed a long historic career, and
paid for their errors by centuries of misery. The practical summary of their painful experiences
constitutes a sort of traditional science, which in certain respects is worth as much as theoretical
science. Last of all, a portion of the youth — those of the bourgeois students who feel hatred
enough for the falsehood, hypocrisy, injustice, and cowardice of the bourgeoisie to find courage
to turn their backs upon it, and passion enough to unreservedly embrace the just and human
cause of the proletariat — those will be, as I have already said, fraternal instructors of the people;
thanks to them, there will be no occasion for the government of the savants.
If the people should beware of the government of the savants, all the more should they provide
against that of the inspired idealists. The more sincere these believers and poets of heaven, the
more dangerous they become. The scientific abstraction, I have said, is a rational abstraction, true
in its essence, necessary to life, of which it is the theoretical representation, or, if one prefers, the
conscience. It may, it must be, absorbed and digested by life. The idealistic abstraction, God, is
a corrosive poison, which destroys and decomposes life, falsifies and kills it. The pride of the
idealists, not being personal but divine, is invincible and inexorable: it may, it must, die, but it
will never yield, and while it has a breath left it will try to subject men to its God, just as the
lieutenants of Prussia, these practical idealists of Germany, would like to see the people crushed
under the spurred boot of their emperor. The faith is the same, the end but little different, and
the result, as that of faith, is slavery.
It is at the same time the triumph of the ugliest and most brutal materialism. There is no need
to demonstrate this in the case of Germany; one would have to be blind to avoid seeing it at the
present hour. But I think it is still necessary to demonstrate it in the case of divine idealism.
Man, like all the rest of nature, is an entirely material being. The mind, the facility of thinking,
of receiving and reflecting upon different external and internal sensations, of remembering them
when they have passed and reproducing them by the imagination, of comparing and distinguish-
ing them, of abstracting determinations common to them and thus creating general concepts, and
finally of forming ideas by grouping and combining concepts according to different methods —
intelligence, in a word, sole creator of our whole, ideal world, is a property of the animal body
and especially of the quite material organism of the brain.
We know this certainly, by the experience of all, which no fact has ever contradicted and
which any man can verify at any moment of his life. In all animals, without excepting the wholly
inferior species, we find a certain degree of intelligence, and we see that, in the series of species,
animal intelligence develops in proportion as the organization of a species approaches that of
man, but that in man alone it attains to that power of abstraction which properly constitutes
thought.

35
 Universal experience,2 which is the sole origin, the source of all our knowledge, shows us,
therefore, that all intelligence is always attached to some animal body, and that the intensity, the
power, of this animal function depends on the relative perfection of the organism. The latter of
these results of universal experience is not applicable only to the different animal species; we
establish it likewise in men, whose intellectual and moral power depends so clearly upon the
greater or less perfection of their organism as a race, as a nation, as a class, and as individuals,
that it is not necessary to insist upon this point.3
On the other hand, it is certain that no man has ever seen or can see pure mind, detached from
all material form existing separately from any animal body whatsoever. But if no person has seen
it, how is it that men have come to believe in its existence? The fact of this belief is certain and if
not universal, as all the idealists pretend, at least very general, and as such it is entirely worthy
of our closest attention, for a general belief, however foolish it may be, exercises too potent a
sway over the destiny of men to warrant us in ignoring it or putting it aside.
The explanation of this belief, moreover, is rational enough. The example afforded us by chil-
dren and young people, and even by many men long past the age of majority, shows us that man
may use his mental faculties for a long time before accounting to himself for the way in which
he uses them, before becoming clearly conscious of it. During this working of the mind uncon-
scious of itself, during this action of innocent or believing intelligence, man, obsessed by the
external world, pushed on by that internal goad called life and its manifold necessities, creates a
quantity of imaginations, concepts, and ideas necessarily very imperfect at first and conforming
but slightly to the reality of the things and facts which they endeavour to express Not having yet
the consciousness of his own intelligent action, not knowing yet that he himself has produced
and continues to produce these imaginations, these concepts, these ideas, ignoring their wholly
subjective - that is, human-origin, he must naturally consider them as objective; beings, as real
beings, wholly independent of him, existing by themselves and in themselves.

2
Universal experience, on which all science rests, must be clearly distinguished from universal faith, on which
the idealists wish to support their beliefs: the first is a real authentication of facts; the second is only a supposition of
facts which nobody has seen, and which consequently are at variance with the experience of everybody.
3
The idealists, all those who believe in the immateriality and immortality of the human soul, must be excessively
embarrassed by the difference in intelligence existing between races, peoples, and individuals. Unless we suppose that
the various divine particles have been irregularly distributed, how is this difference to be explained? Unfortunately
there is a considerable number of men wholly stupid, foolish even to idiocy. Could they have received in the distribu-
tion a particle at once divine and stupid? To escape this embarrassment the idealists must necessarily suppose that
all human souls are equal. but that the prisons in which they find themselves necessarily confined, human bodies, are
unequal, some more capable than others of serving as an organ for the pure intellectuality of soul. According to this.
such a one might have very fine organs at his disposition. such another very gross organs. But these are distinctions
which idealism has not the power to use without falling into inconsistency and the grossest materialism, for in the
presence of absolute immateriality of soul all bodily differences disappear, all that is corporeal, material, necessarily
appearing indifferent, equally and absolutely gross. The abyss which separates soul from body, absolute immateriality
from absolute materiality, is infinite. Consequently all differences, by the way inexplicable and logically impossible,
which may exist on the other side of the abyss, in matter, should be to the soul null and void, and neither can nor
should exercise any influence over it. In a word, the absolutely immaterial cannot be constrained, imprisoned, and
much less expressed in any degree whatsoever by the absolutely material. Of all the gross and materialistic (using
the word in the sense attached to it by the idealists) imaginations which were engendered by the primitive ignorance
and stupidity of men, that of an immaterial soul imprisoned in a material body is certainly the grossest, the most
stupid. and nothing better proves the omnipotence exercised by ancient prejudices even over the best minds than the
deplorable sight of men endowed with lofty intelligence still talking of it in our days.

36
 It was thus that primitive peoples, emerging slowly from their animal innocence, created their
gods. Having created them, not suspecting that they themselves were the real creators, they wor-
shipped them; considering them as real beings infinitely superior to themselves, they attributed
omnipotence to them, and recognised themselves as their creatures, their slaves. As fast as hu-
man ideas develop, the gods, who, as I have already stated, were never anything more than a
fantastic, ideal, poetical reverberation of an inverted image, become idealised also. At first gross
fetishes, they gradually become pure spirits, existing outside of the visible world, and at last, in
the course of a long historic evolution, are confounded in a single Divine Being, pure, eternal,
absolute Spirit, creator and master of the worlds.
In every development, just or false, real or imaginary collective or individual, it is always the
first step, the first act that is the most difficult. That step once taken, the rest follows naturally as
a necessary consequence. The difficult step in the historical development of this terrible religious
insanity which continues to obsess and crush us was to posit a divine world as such, outside the
world. This first act of madness, so natural from the physiological point of view and consequently
necessary in the history of humanity, was not accomplished at a single stroke. I know not how
many centuries were needed to develop this belief and make it a governing influence upon the
mental customs of men. But, once established, it became omnipotent, as each insane notion
necessarily becomes when it takes possession of man’s brain. Take a madman, whatever the
object of his madness — you will find that obscure and fixed idea which obsesses him seems to him
the most natural thing in the world, and that, on the contrary, the real things which contradict
this idea seem to him ridiculous and odious follies. Well religion is a collective insanity, the more
powerful because it is traditional folly, and because its origin is lost in the most remote antiquity.
As collective insanity it has penetrated to the very depths of the public and private existence of
the peoples; it is incarnate in society; it has become, so to speak, the collective soul and thought.
Every man is enveloped in it from his birth; he sucks it in with his mother’s milk, absorbs it with
all that he touches, all that he sees. He is so exclusive]y fed upon it, so poisoned and penetrated
by it in all his being that later, however powerful his natural mind, he has to make unheard-of
efforts to deliver himself from it, and then never completely succeeds. We have one proof of this
in our modern idealists, and another in our doctrinaire; materialists — the German Communists.
They have found no way to shake off the religion of the State.
The supernatural world, the divine world, once well established in the imagination of the
peoples, the development of the various religious systems has followed its natural and logical
course, conforming, moreover, in all things to the contemporary development of economical and
political relations of which it has been in all ages, in the world of religious fancy, the faithful
reproduction and divine consecration. Thus has the collective and historical insanity which calls
itself religion been developed since fetishism, passing through all the stages from polytheism to
Christian monotheism.
The second step in the development of religious beliefs, undoubtedly the most difficult next
to the establishment of a separate divine world, was precisely this transition from polytheism to
monotheism, from the religious materialism of the pagans to the spiritualistic faith of the Chris-
tians. She pagan gods — and this was their principal characteristic — were first of all exclusively
national gods. Very numerous, they necessarily retained a more or less material character, or,
rather, they were so numerous because they were material, diversity being one of the principal
attributes of the real world. The pagan gods were not yet strictly the negation of real things; they
were only a fantastic exaggeration of them.

37
 We have seen how much this transition cost the Jewish people, constituting, so to speak, its
entire history. In vain did Moses and the prophets preach the one god; the people always re-
lapsed into their primitive idolatry, into the ancient and comparatively much more natural and
convenient faith in many good gods, more material, more human, and more palpable. Jehovah
himself, their sole God, the God of Moses and the prophets, was still an extremely national God,
who, to reward and punish his faithful followers, his chosen people, used material arguments,
often stupid, always gross and cruel. It does not even appear that faith in his existence implied
a negation of the existence of earlier gods. The Jewish God did not deny the existence of these
rivals; he simply did not want his people to worship them side by side with him, because before
all Jehovah was a very Jealous God. His first commandment was this:
“I am the Lord thy God, and thou shalt have no other gods before me.”
Jehovah, then, was only a first draft, very material and very rough, of the supreme deity of
modern idealism. Moreover, he was only a national God, like the Russian God worshipped by
the German generals, subjects of the Czar and patriots of the empire of all the Russias; like the
German God, whom the pietists and the German generals, subjects of William I. at Berlin, will
no doubt soon proclaim. The supreme being cannot be a national God; he must be the God of
entire Humanity. Nor can the supreme being be a material being; he must be the negation of all
matter — pure spirit. Two things have proved necessary to the realisation of the worship of the
supreme being:

1. a realisation, such as it is, of Humanity by the negation of nationalities and national forms
of worship;

2. a development, already far advanced, of metaphysical ideas in order to spiritualise the

gross Jehovah of the Jews.

The first condition was fulfilled by the Romans, though in a very negative way no doubt, by the
conquest of most of the countries known to the ancients and by the destruction of their national
institutions. The gods of all the conquered nations, gathered in the Pantheon, mutually cancelled
each other. This was the first draft of humanity, very gross and quite negative.
As for the second condition, the spiritualisation of Jehovah, that was realised by the Greeks
long before the conquest of their country by the Romans. They were the creators of metaphysics.
Greece, in the cradle of her history, had already found from the Orient a divine world which
had been definitely established in the traditional faith of her peoples; this world had been left
and handed over to her by the Orient. In her instinctive period, prior to her political history,
she had developed and prodigiously humanised this divine world through her poets; and when
she actually began her history, she already had a religion readymade, the most sympathetic and
noble of all the religions which have existed, so far at least as a religion — that is, a lie — can
be noble and sympathetic. Her great thinkers — and no nation has had greater than Greece —
found the divine world established, not only outside of themselves in the people, but also in
themselves as a habit of feeling and thought, and naturally they took it as a point of departure.
That they made no theology — that is, that they did not wait in vain to reconcile dawning reason
with the absurdities of such a god, as did the scholastics of the Middle Ages — was already much
in their favour. They left the gods out of their speculations and attached themselves directly to
the divine idea, one, invisible, omnipotent, eternal, and absolutely spiritualistic but impersonal.

38
As concerns Spiritualism, then, the Greek metaphysicians, much more than the Jews, were the
creators of the Christian god. The Jews only added to it the brutal personality of their Jehovah.
That a sublime genius like the divine Plato could have been absolutely convinced of the reality
of the divine idea shows us how contagious, how omnipotent, is the tradition of the religious
mania even on the greatest minds. Besides, we should not be surprised at it, since, even in our day,
the greatest philosophical genius which has existed since Aristotle and Plato, Hegel — in spite
even of Kant’s criticism, imperfect and too metaphysical though it be, which had demolished
the objectivity or reality of the divine ideas — tried to replace these divine ideas upon their
transcendental or celestial throne. It is true that Hegel went about his work of restoration in so
impolite a manner that he killed the good God for ever. He took away from these ideas their
divine halo, by showing to whoever will read him that they were never anything more than
a creation of the human mind running through history in search of itself. To put an end to all
religious insanities and the divine mirage, he left nothing lacking but the utterance of those grand
words which were said after him, almost at the same time, by two great minds who had never
heard of each other — Ludwig Feuerbach, the disciple and demolisher of Hegel, in Germany, and
Auguste Comte, the founder of positive philosophy, in France. These words were as follows:
“Metaphysics are reduced to psychology.” All the metaphysical systems have been nothing
else than human psychology developing itself in history.
To-day it is no longer difficult to understand how the divine ideas were born, how they were
created in succession by the abstractive faculty of man. Man made the gods. But in the time of
Plato this knowledge was impossible. The collective mind, and consequently the individual mind
as well, even that of the greatest genius, was not ripe for that. Scarcely had it said with Socrates:
“Know thyself!” This self-knowledge existed only in a state of intuition; in fact, it amounted to
nothing. Hence it was impossible for the human mind to suspect that it was itself the sole creator
of the divine world. It found the divine world before it; it found it as history, as tradition, as a
sentiment, as a habit of thought; and it necessarily made it the object of its loftiest speculations.
Thus was born metaphysics, and thus were developed and perfected the divine ideas, the basis
of Spiritualism.
It is true that after Plato there was a sort of inverse movement in the development of the mind.
Aristotle, the true father of science and positive philosophy, did not deny the divine world, but
concerned himself with it as little as possible. He was the first to study, like the analyst and
experimenter that he was, logic, the laws of human thought, and at the same time the physical
world, not in its ideal, illusory essence, but in its real aspect. After him the Greeks of Alexandria
established the first school of the positive scientists. They were atheists. But their atheism left no
mark on their contemporaries. Science tended more and more to separate itself from life. After
Plato, divine ideas were rejected in metaphysics themselves; this was done by the Epicureans
and Sceptics, two sects who contributed much to the degradation of human aristocracy, but they
had no effect upon the masses.
Another school, infinitely more influential, was formed at Alexandria. This was the school
of neo-Platonists. These, confounding in an impure mixture the monstrous imaginations of the
Orient with the ideas of Plato, were the true originators, and later the elaborators, of the Christian
dogmas.
Thus the personal and gross egoism of Jehovah, the not less brutal and gross Roman conquest,
and the metaphysical ideal speculation of the Greeks, materialised by contact with the Orient,
were the three historical elements which made up the spiritualistic religion of the Christians.

39
 Before the altar of a unique and supreme God was raised on the ruins of the numerous altars of
the pagan gods, the autonomy of the various nations composing the pagan or ancient world had
to be destroyed first. This was very brutally done by the Romans who, by conquering the greatest
part of the globe known to the ancients, laid the first foundations, quite gross and negative ones
no doubt, of humanity. A God thus raised above the national differences, material and social, of
all countries, and in a certain sense the direct negation of them, must necessarily be an immaterial
and abstract being. But faith in the existence of such a being, so difficult a matter, could not spring
into existence suddenly. Consequently, as I have demonstrated in the Appendix, it went through
a long course of preparation and development at the hands of Greek metaphysics, which were
the first to establish in a philosophical manner the notion of the divine idea, a model eternally
creative and always reproduced by the visible world. But the divinity conceived and created by
Greek philosophy was an impersonal divinity. No logical and serious metaphysics being able
to rise, or, rather, to descend, to the idea of a personal God, it became necessary, therefore, to
imagine a God who was one and very personal at once. He was found in the very brutal, selfish,
and cruel person of Jehovah, the national God of the Jews. But the Jews, in spite of that exclusive
national spirit which distinguishes them even to-day, had become in fact, long before the birth
of Christ, the most international people of the world. Some of them carried away as captives,
but many more even urged on by that mercantile passion which constitutes one of the principal
traits of their character, they had spread through all countries, carrying everywhere the worship
of their Jehovah, to whom they remained all the more faithful the more he abandoned them.
In Alexandria this terrible god of the Jews made the personal acquaintance of the metaphysical
divinity of Plato, already much corrupted by Oriental contact, and corrupted her still more by
his own. In spite of his national, jealous, and ferocious exclusivism, he could not long resist
the graces of this ideal and impersonal divinity of the Greeks. He married her, and from this
marriage was born the spiritualistic — but not spirited — God of the Christians. The neoplatonists
of Alexandria are known to have been the principal creators of the Christian theology.
Nevertheless theology alone does not make a religion, any more than historical elements suf-
fice to create history. By historical elements I mean the general conditions of any real devel-
opment whatsoever — for example in this case the conquest of the world by the Romans and
the meeting of the God of the Jews with the ideal of divinity of the Greeks. To impregnate the
historical elements, to cause them to run through a series of new historical transformations, a
living, spontaneous fact was needed, without which they might have remained many centuries
longer in the state of unproductive elements. This fact was not lacking in Christianity: it was
the propagandism, martyrdom, and death of Jesus Christ.
We know almost nothing of this great and saintly personage, all that the gospels tell us being
contradictory, and so fabulous that we can scarcely seize upon a few real and vital traits. But it
is certain that he was the preacher of the poor, the friend and consoler of the wretched, of the
ignorant, of the slaves, and of the women, and that by these last he was much loved. He promised
eternal life to all who are oppressed, to all who suffer here below; and the number is immense. He
was hanged, as a matter of course, by the representatives of the official morality and public order
of that period. His disciples and the disciples of his disciples succeeded in spreading, thanks to the
destruction of the national barriers by the Roman conquest, and propagated the Gospel in all the
countries known to the ancients. Everywhere they were received with open arms by the slaves
and the women, the two most oppressed, most suffering, and naturally also the most ignorant
classes of the ancient world. For even such few proselytes as they made in the privileged and

40
learned world they were indebted in great part to the influence of women. Their most extensive
propagandism was directed almost exclusively among the people, unfortunate and degraded by
slavery. This was the first awakening, the first intellectual revolt of the proletariat.
The great honour of Christianity, its incontestable merit, and the whole secret of its unprece-
dented and yet thoroughly legitimate triumph, lay in the fact that it appealed to that suffering
and immense public to which the ancient world, a strict and cruel intellectual and political aris-
tocracy, denied even the simplest rights of humanity. Otherwise it never could have spread. The
doctrine taught by the apostles of Christ, wholly consoling as it may have seemed to the unfor-
tunate, was too revolting, too absurd from the standpoint of human reason, ever to have been
accepted by enlightened men According with what joy the apostle Paul speaks of the scandale
de la foi; and of the triumph of that divine folie; rejected by the powerful and wise of the century,
but all the more passionately accepted by the simple, the ignorant, and the weak-minded!
Indeed there must have been a very deep-seated dissatisfaction with life, a very intense thirst
of heart, and an almost absolute poverty of thought, to secure the acceptance of the Christian
absurdity, the most audacious and monstrous of all religious absurdities.
This was not only the negation of all the political, social, and religious institutions of antiquity:
it was the absolute overturn of common sense, of all human reason. The living being, the real
world, were considered thereafter as nothing; whereas the product of man’s abstractive faculty,
the last and supreme abstraction in which this faculty, far beyond existing things, even beyond
the most general determinations of the living being, the ideas of space and time. having nothing
left to advance beyond, rests in contemplation of his emptiness and absolute immobility.
That abstraction, that caput mortuum, absolutely void of all contents the true nothing, God, is
proclaimed the only real, eternal, all-powerful being. The real All is declared nothing and the
absolute nothing the All. The shadow becomes the substance and the substance vanishes like a
shadow.4
All this was audacity and absurdity unspeakable, the true scandale de la foi, the triumph of
credulous stupidity over the mind for the masses; and — for a few — the triumphant irony of
a mind wearied, corrupted, disillusioned, and disgusted in honest and serious search for truth;
it was that necessity of shaking off thought and becoming brutally stupid so frequently felt by
surfeited minds:

4
I am well aware that in the theological and metaphysical systems of the Orient, and especially in those of India,
including Buddhism, we find the principle of the annihilation of the real world in favour of the ideal and of absolute
abstraction. But it has not the added character of voluntary and deliberate negation which distinguishes Christianity;
when those systems were conceived. The world of human thought of will and of liberty, had not reached that stage
of development which was afterwards seen in the Greek and Roman civilisation.

41
IV Credo quod absurdum
I believe in the absurd; I believe in it, precisely and mainly, because it is absurd. In the same way
many distinguished and enlightened minds in our day believe in animal magnetism, spiritualism,
tipping tables, and — why go so far? — believe still in Christianity, in idealism, in God.
The belief of the ancient proletariat, like that of the modern, was more robust and simple, less
haut goût. The Christian propagandism appealed to its heart, not to its mind; to its eternal aspi-
rations, its necessities, its sufferings, its slavery, not to its reason, which still slept and therefore
could know nothing about logical contradictions and the evidence of the absurd. It was inter-
ested solely in knowing when the hour of promised deliverance would strike, when the kingdom
of God would come. As for theological dogmas, it did not trouble itself about them because it
understood nothing about them The proletariat converted to Christianity constituted its growing
material but not its intellectual strength.
As for the Christian dogmas, it is known that they were elaborated in a series of theological
and literary works and in the Councils, principally by the converted neo-Platonists of the Orient.
The Greek mind had fallen so low that, in the fourth century of the Christian era, the period of
the first Council, the idea of a personal God, pure, eternal, absolute mind, creator and supreme
master, existing outside of the world, was unanimously accepted by the Church Fathers; as a
logical consequence of this absolute absurdity, it then became natural and necessary to believe
in the immateriality and immortality of the human soul, lodged and imprisoned in a body only
partially mortal, there being in this body itself a portion which, while material is immortal like
the soul, and must be resurrected with it. We see how difficult it was, even for the Church Fathers;
to conceive pure minds outside of any material form. It should be added that, in general, it is the
character of every metaphysical and theological argument to seek to explain one absurdity by
another.
It was very fortunate for Christianity that it met a world of slaves. It had another piece of
good luck in the invasion of the Barbarians. The latter were worthy people, full of natural force,
and, above all, urged on by a great necessity of life and a great capacity for it; brigands who
had stood every test, capable of devastating and gobbling up anything, like their successors, the
Germans of today; but they were much less systematic and pedantic than these last, much less
moralistic, less learned, and on the other hand much more independent and proud, capable of
science and not incapable of liberty, as are the bourgeois of modern Germany. But, in spite of all
their great qualities, they were nothing but barbarians — that is, as indifferent to all questions of
theology and metaphysics as the ancient slaves, a great number of whom, moreover, belonged
to their race. So that, their practical repugnance once overcome, it was not difficult to convert
them theoretically to Christianity.
For ten centuries Christianity, armed with the omnipotence of Church and State and opposed
by no competition, was able to deprave, debase, and falsify the mind of Europe It had no com-
petitors, because outside of the Church there were neither thinkers nor educated persons. It
alone though„ it alone spoke and wrote, it alone taught. Though heresies arose in its bosom,

42
they affected only the theological or practical developments of the fundamental dogma never
that dogma itself. The belief in God, pure spirit and creator of the world, and the belief in the
immateriality of the soul remained untouched. This double belief became the ideal basis of the
whole Occidental and Oriental civilization of Europe; it penetrated and became incarnate in all
the institutions, all the details of the public and private life of all classes, and the masses as well.
After that, is it surprising that this belief has lived until the present day, continuing to exercise
its disastrous influence even upon select minds, such as those of Mazzini, Michelet, Quinet, and
so many others? We have seen that the first attack upon it came from the renaissance; of the
free mind in the fifteenth century, which produced heroes and martyrs like Vanini, Giordano
Bruno, and Galileo. Although drowned in the noise, tumult, and passions of the Reformation, it
noiselessly continued its invisible work, bequeathing to the noblest minds of each generation its
task of human emancipation by the destruction of the absurd, until at last, in the latter half of
the eighteenth century, it again reappeared in broad day, boldly waving the flag of atheism and
materialism.
The human mind, then, one might have supposed, was at last about to deliver itself from all the
divine obsessions. Not at all. The divine falsehood upon which humanity had been feeding for
eighteen centuries (speaking of Christianity only) was once more to show itself more powerful
than human truth. No longer able to make use of the black tribe, of the ravens consecrated by the
Church, of the Catholic or Protestant priests, all confidence in whom had been lost, it made use
of lay priests, short-robed liars and sophists. among whom the principal rôles devolved upon two
fatal men, one the falsest mind, the other the most doctrinally despotic will, of the last century
— J. J. Rousseau and Robespierre.
The first is the perfect type of narrowness and suspicious meanness, of exaltation without
other object than his own person, of cold enthusiasm and hypocrisy at once sentimental and
implacable, of the falsehood of modern idealism. He may be considered as the real creator of
modern reaction. To all appearance the most democratic writer of the eighteenth century, he
bred within himself the pitiless despotism of the statesman. He was the prophet of the doctrinaire
State, as Robespierre, his worthy and faithful disciple, tried to become its high priest. Having
heard the saying of Voltaire that, if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him, J.
J. Rousseau invented the Supreme Being, the abstract and sterile God of the deists. And It was
in the name of the Supreme Being, and of the hypocritical virtue commanded by this Supreme
Being, that Robespierre guillotined first the Hébertists and then the very genius of the Revolution,
Danton, in whose person he assassinated the Republic, thus preparing the way for the thenceforth
necessary triumph of the dictatorship of Bonaparte I. After this great triumph, the idealistic
reaction sought and found servants less fanatical, less terrible nearer to the diminished stature of
the actual bourgeoisie. In France, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and — shall I say it? Why not? All
must be said if it is truth — Victor Hugo himself, the democrat, the republican, the quasi-socialist
of today! and after them the whole melancholy and sentimental company of poor and pallid
minds who, under the leadership of these masters, established the modern romantic school in
Germany, the Schlegels, the Tiecks, the Novalis, the Werners, the Schellings, and so many others
besides, whose names do not even deserve to be recalled.
The literature created by this school was the very reign of ghosts and phantoms. It could not
stand the sunlight; the twilight alone permitted it to live. No more could it stand the brutal
contact of the masses. It was the literature of the tender, delicate, distinguished souls, aspiring
to heaven, and living on earth as if in spite of themselves. It had a horror and contempt for

43
the politics and questions of the day; but when perchance it referred to them, it showed itself
frankly reactionary, took the side of the Church against the insolence of the freethinkers, of the
kings against the peoples, and of all the aristocrats against the vile rabble of the streets. For the
rest, as I have just said, the dominant feature of the school of romanticism was a quasi-complete
indifference to politics. Amid the clouds in which it lived could be distinguished two real points
— the rapid development of bourgeois materialism and the ungovernable outburst of individual
vanities.
To understand this romantic literature, the reason for its existence must be sought in the trans-
formation which had been effected in the bosom of the bourgeois class since the revolution of
1793.
From the Renaissance and the Reformation down to the Revolution, the bourgeoisie, if not
in Germany, at least in Italy, in France, in Switzerland, in England, in Holland, was the hero
and representative of the revolutionary genius of history. From its bosom sprang most of the
freethinkers of the fifteenth century, the religious reformers of the two following centuries, and
the apostles of human emancipation, including this time those of Germany, of the past century.
It alone, naturally supported by the powerful arm of the people, who had faith in it, made the
revolution of 1789 and ’93. It proclaimed the downfall of royalty and of the Church, the fraternity
of the peoples, the rights of man and of the citizen. Those are its titles to glory; they are immortal!
Soon it split. A considerable portion of the purchasers of national property having become
rich, and supporting themselves no longer on the proletariat of the cities, but on the major por-
tion of the peasants of France, these also having become landed proprietors, had no aspiration
left but for peace, the re-establishment of public order, and the foundation of a strong and reg-
ular government. It therefore welcomed with joy the dictatorship of the first Bonaparte, and,
although always Voltairean, did not view with displeasure the Concordat with the Pope and the
re-establishment of the official Church in France: “Religion is so necessary to the people!” Which
means that, satiated themselves, this portion of the bourgeoisie then began to see that it was
needful to the maintenance of their situation and the preservation of their newly-acquired es-
tates to appease the unsatisfied hunger of the people by promises of heavenly manna. Then it
was that Chateaubriand began to preach.1
Napoleon fell and the Restoration brought back into France the legitimate monarchy, and
with it the power of the Church and of the nobles, who regained, if not the whole, at least a
considerable portion of their former influence. This reaction threw the bourgeoisie back into the
Revolution, and with the revolutionary spirit that of scepticism also was re-awakened in it. It
set Chateaubriand aside and began to read Voltaire again; but it did not go so far as Diderot: its
debilitated nerves could not stand nourishment so strong. Voltaire, on the contrary, at once a
freethinker and a deist, suited it very well. Béranger and P.L. Courier expressed this new ten-
dency perfectly. “The God of the good people” and the ideal of the bourgeois king, at once liberal
and democratic, sketched against the majestic and thenceforth inoffensive background of the

1
It seems to me useful to recall at this point an anecdote — one, by the way, well known and thoroughly
authentic — which sheds a very clear light on the personal value of this warmed-over of the Catholic beliefs and on
the religious sincerity of that period. Chateaubriand submitted to a publisher a work attacking faith. The publisher
called his attention to the fact that atheism had gone out of fashion, that the reading public cared no more for it, and
that the demand, on the contrary, was for religious works. Chateaubriand withdrew, but a few months later came
back with his Genius of Christianity.

44
Empire’s gigantic victories such was at that period the daily intellectual food of the bourgeoisie
of France.
Lamartine, to be sure, excited by a vain and ridiculously envious desire to rise to the poetic
height of the great Byron, had begun his coldly delirious hymns in honour of the God of the
nobles and of the legitimate monarchy. But his songs resounded only in aristocratic salons. The
bourgeoisie did not hear them. Béranger was its poet and Courier was its political writer.
The revolution of July resulted in lifting its tastes. We know that every bourgeois in France
carries within him the imperishable type of the bourgeois gentleman, a type which never fails
to appear immediately the parvenu acquires a little wealth and power. In 1830 the wealthy bour-
geoisie had definitely replaced the old nobility in the seats of power. It naturally tended to estab-
lish a new aristocracy. An aristocracy of capital first of all, but also an aristocracy of intellect, of
good manners and delicate sentiments. It began to feel religious.
This was not on its part simply an aping of aristocratic customs. It was also a necessity of
its position. The proletariat had rendered it a final service in once more aiding it to overthrow
the nobility. The bourgeoisie now had no further need of its co-operation, for it felt itself firmly
seated in the shadow of the throne of July, and the alliance with the people, thenceforth useless,
began to become inconvenient. It was necessary to remand it to its place, which naturally could
not be done without provoking great indignation among the masses. It became necessary to
restrain this indignation. In the name of what? In the name of the bourgeois interest bluntly
confessed ? That would have been much too cynical. The more unjust and inhuman an interest
is, the greater need it has of sanction. Now, where find it if not in religion, that good protectress
of al I the well-fed and the useful consoler of the hungry? And more than ever the triumphant
bourgeoisie saw that religion was indispensable to the people.
After having won all its titles to glory in religious, philosophical, and political opposition, in
protest and in revolution, it at last became the dominant class and thereby even the defender and
preserver of the State, thenceforth the regular institution of the exclusive power of that class. The
State is force, and for it, first of all, is the right of force, the triumphant argument of the needle-
gun, of the chassepot. But man is so singularly constituted that this argument, wholly eloquent
as it may appear, is not sufficient in the long run. Some moral sanction or other is absolutely
necessary to enforce his respect. Further, this sanction must be at once so simple and so plain
that it may convince the masses, who, after having been reduced by the power of the State. must
also be induced to morally recognise its right.
There are only two ways of convincing the masses of the goodness of any social institution
whatever. The first, the only real one, but also the most difficult to adopt — because it implies
the abolition of the State, or, in other words, the abolition of the organised political exploitation
of the majority by any minority whatsoever — would be the direct and complete satisfaction of
the needs and aspirations of the people, which would be equivalent to the complete liquidation
of the political and economical existence of the bourgeois class, or, again, to the abolition of the
State. Beneficial means for the masses, but detrimental to bourgeois interests; hence it is useless
to talk about them.
The only way, on the contrary, harmful only to the people, precious in its salvation of bourgeois
privileges, is no other than religion. That is the eternal mirage; which leads away the masses in
a search for divine treasures, while much more reserved, the governing class contents itself with
dividing among all its members — very unequally, moreover and always giving most to him who

45
possesses most — the miserable goods of earth and the plunder taken from the people, including
their political and social liberty.
There is not, there cannot be, a State without religion. Take the freest States in the world — the
United States of America or the Swiss Confederation, for instance — and see what an important
part is played in all official discourses by divine Providence, that supreme sanction of all States.
But whenever a chief of State speaks of God, be he William I., the Knouto-Germanic emperor,
or Grant, the president of the great republic, be sure that he is getting ready to shear once more
his people-flock.
The French liberal and Voltairean bourgeoisie, driven by temperament to a positivism (not
to say a materialism) singularly narrow and brutal, having become the governing class of the
State by its triumph of 1830, had to give itself an official religion. It was not an easy thing. The
bourgeoisie could not abruptly go back under the yoke of Roman Catholicism. Between it and the
Church of Rome was an abyss of blood and hatred, and, however practical and wise one becomes,
it is never possible to repress a passion developed by history. Moreover, the French bourgeoisie
would have covered itself with ridicule if it had gone back to the Church to take part in the pious
ceremonies of its worship, an essential condition of a meritorious and sincere conversion. Several
attempted it, it is true, but their heroism was rewarded by no other result than a fruitless scandal.
Finally, a return to Catholicism was impossible on account of the insolvable contradiction which
separates the invariable politics of Rome from the development of the economical and political
interests of the middle class.
In this respect Protestantism is much more advantageous. It is the bourgeois religion par ex-
cellence. It accords just as much liberty as is necessary to the bourgeois, and finds a way of
reconciling celestial aspirations with the respect which terrestrial conditions demand. Conse-
quently it is especially in Protestant countries that commerce and industry have been developed.
But it was impossible for the French bourgeoisie to become Protestant. To pass from one religion
to another — unless it be done deliberately, as sometimes in the case of the Jews of Russia and
Poland, who get baptised three or four times in order to receive each time the remuneration al-
lowed them — to seriously change one’s religion, a little faith is necessary. Now, in the exclusive
positive heart of the French bourgeois there is no room for faith. He professes the most profound
indifference for all questions which touch neither his pocket first nor his social vanity afterwards.
He is as indifferent to Protestantism as to Catholicism. On the other hand, the French bourgeois
could not go over to Protestantism without putting himself in conflict with the Catholic routine
of the majority of the French people, which would have been great imprudence on the part of a
class pretending to govern the nation.
There was still one way left — to return to the humanitarian and revolutionary religion of the
eighteenth century. But that would have led too far. So the bourgeoisie was obliged, in order to
sanction its new State, to create a new religion which might be boldly proclaimed, without too
much ridicule and scandal, by the whole bourgeois class.
Thus was born doctrinaire Deism.
Others have told, much better than I could tell it, the story of the birth and development of
this school, which had so decisive and — we may well add — so fatal an influence on the politi-
cal, intellectual, and moral education of the bourgeois youth of France. It dates from Benjamin
Constant and Madame de StaÎl; its real founder was Royer-Collard; its apostles, Guizot, Cousin,
Villemain, and many others. Its boldly avowed object was the reconciliation of Revolution with

46
Reaction, or, to use the language of the school, of the principle of liberty with that of authority,
and naturally to the advantage of the latter.
This reconciliation signified: in politics, the taking away of popular liberty for the benefit
of bourgeois rule, represented by the monarchical and constitutional State; in philosophy, the
deliberate submission of free reason to the eternal principles of faith. We have only to deal here
with the latter.
We know that this philosophy was specially elaborated by M. Cousin, the father of French
eclecticism. A superficial and pedantic talker, incapable of any original conception, of any idea
peculiar to himself, but very strong on commonplace, which he confounded with common sense,
this illustrious philosopher learnedly prepared, for the use of the studious youth of France, a
metaphysical dish of his own making the use of which, made compulsory in all schools of the
State under the University, condemned several generations one after the other to a cerebral in-
digestion. Imagine a philosophical vinegar sauce of the most opposed systems, a mixture of
Fathers of the Church, scholastic philosophers, Descartes and Pascal, Kant and Scotch psychol-
ogists all this a superstructure on the divine and innate ideas of Plato, and covered up with a
layer of Hegelian immanence accompanied, of course, by an ignorance, as contemptuous as it
is complete, of natural science, and proving just as two times two make five; the existence of a
personal God….

47
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Anti-Copyright

Michail Bakunin
God and the State
1882

Retrieved on February 14th , 2009 from Marxists.org and Anarchist Archives.

Written: February-March, 1871. Published by Mother Earth Publishing Association, New York,
1916. First Published: 1882 (Discovered posthumously by Carlo Cafiero and Elisée Reclus).
Translated by Benjamin R. Tucker

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