1.

"When there is ignorance in the heart of a society and disorder in people's minds, laws become numerous. Men expect everything from legislation and, each new law being a further miscalculation of reality, they are led to demand incessantly what should emerge from themselves, from their education, from the condition of their manners and morals."

It was not a revolutionary who said that, or even a reformer. It was a jurisconsult, Dalloz, author of the collection of French laws which goes by the name of Repertoire de la Legislation. And his words, though written by a man who himself was a maker and admirer of laws, represent accurately the normal condition of our societies.

In contemporary States a new law is considered a remedy for all ills. Instead of themselves reforming what is wrong, people begin by demanding a law that will modify it. If the road between two villages becomes impassable, the peasants will say a law is needed regarding local roads. The rural policeman has insulted someone, taking advantage of the timidity of those who show him their respect. "We need a law," says the insulted man, "that will make policemen more polite." Trade and agriculture are lagging behind. "We need a law of protection!" is the reaction of the labourer, the cattle breeder and the grain speculator; even the old clothes merchants demand a law to protect their little trade. The employer lowers wages or lengthens the working day. "We must have a law to put an end to that," clamour the fledgling deputies, instead of telling the workers that there is a more effective way of "putting an end to that," by taking from the employer whatever he has stolen from generations of workers. In brief, what is needed is a law about roads, a law about fashions, a law about mad dogs, a law about virtue, a law about a dyke to keep out all the errors and all the evils that are the result only of human idleness and cowardice.

We are all so perverted by an education that from an early age seeks to kill in us the spirit of revolt and develop that of submission to authority; we are so perverted by an existence under the rod of the law that rules all: our birth, our education, our development, our loves and our friendships, that, if this continues, we shall lose all initiative, all habit of reasoning for ourselves.

Our societies seem no longer to understand that it is possible to live otherwise than under the regime of law, elaborated by a representative government and applied by a handful of rulers; and even when they have succeeded in emancipating themselves from this yoke, their first course is to resume it immediately. "Year One of Freedom" has never lasted more than a single day, for the very day after proclaiming it, people hastened to put themselves once again under the yoke of the law, of authority.

In fact, for thousands of years those who govern us have continually repeated in every tone: "Respect for the law, obedience for authority." Fathers and mothers bring up their children with this feeling. The schools reaffirm it: they prove its necessity by inculcating into the children scraps of false science, cleverly put together; they make a cult of obedience to the law; they mingle the Deity and the law of the masters in one and the same divinity. The heroes of history that they fabricate are those who obey the law and protect it against rebellion.

When, later on, the child finds his way into public life, both society and literature, striking each day and each moment like the drop of water wearing at a stone, continue to inculcate him with the same prejudice. Books of history, of political science, of social economy abound in this respect for the law; even the physical sciences have been recruited, and, through the introduction of false language into these languages of observation borrowed from theology and authoritarianism, it has become easy to befog our intelligence with the aim of maintaining respect for the law. The press performs the same task; there is not an article in the newspapers that does not propagate obedience to the law, even when each day on the editorial page they declare the impeccability of the law and show how it is dragged through all sorts of mire, through all kinds of ordure, by those who are appointed to maintain it. Servility towards the law has become a virtue, and I doubt if there is a single revolutionary who did not begin in his youth by defending the law against what are generally called "abuses," which in fact are the inevitable consequences of the law itself.

Art sings in chorus with so-called science. The heroes of the sculptor, the painter and the musician cover the law with their shields and with eyes aflame and quivering nostrils, are ready to strike with their swords anyone who would dare to harm it. Temples were raised to such heroes, they were declared to be high priests whom even the revolutionaries did not dare to touch; and if the revolution sought to sweep aside an old institution, it was again by a law that it would attempt to consecrate its work.

This jumble of rules of conduct, inherited from slavery, serfdom, feudalism and royalty, which we call the law, has replaced those monsters of stone before whom human victims were sacrificed, and whom men in servitude did not dare even to flout for fear of being killed by the fires of heaven.

It is since the advent of the bourgeoisie -- since the Great French Revolution -- that this cult of the law has been established with especial success. Under the old regime little was said about it, except among men like Montesquieu Montesquieu, Charles-Louis, Baron de. (1669-1755). French political philosopher, whose main and most influential work, L'Esprit des Lois was 14 years in preparation, although it took only 2 years before an English translation appeared in 1750. Trans. ⁵⁵, Rousseau and Voltaire, who posed the law in opposition to royal caprice by which one was expected to obey the good pleasure of the king and his flunkies, under the penalty of being hanged or thrown into prison. But during and after the revolution, the lawyers who came to power did their best to affirm this principle, on which they sought to establish their power. The bourgeoisie accepted it without hesitation, as a means of salvation, to establish a dam that would hold back the popular torrent. The priesthood hastened to sanctify it to save its own ship that was foundering in the waves of the torrent. The people finally accepted it as an improvement on the caprice and violence of the past.

To understand all this, we must transport ourselves imaginatively into the eighteenth century. One's heart must have bled from hearing of the atrocities which in those times were perpetrated on men and women of the people, by the all-powerful nobles, if one is to appreciate the magic influence that these words: "Equality before the law, obedience to the law, without distinction of birth or fortune," exercised a century ago on the peasant mind. Having been treated in the past more cruelly than an animal, having never had any rights and having never obtained justice against the most revolting acts of the nobility, unless he avenged himself by killing the lord and getting himself hanged, he saw himself recognized in this maxim, at least in theory and in regard to his personal rights, as the equal of the lord. Whatever that law might be, it promised to extend itself equally to the lord and the labourer, and it proclaimed the equality, before the law, of the poor and the rich. That promise, as we know today, was a lie; but at that time it seemed to be a progress, a homage paid to truth. That is why, when the saviours of the threatened bourgeoisie, the Robespierres and the Dantons, basing themselves on the writings of the bourgeois philosophers, the Rousseaus and the Voltaires, proclaimed "respect for the law, equally and for all" -- the people, whose revolutionary urge was already dying down in the face of an enemy more and more solidly organized, accepted the compromise. It placed its neck under the yoke of the law, so as to save itself from the arbitrary rule of the aristocracy.

Since then the bourgeoisie has not ceased to exploit this maxim which, with that other principle, representative government, comprises the philosophy of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. It has preached it in the schools, it has created its arts and sciences with that aim in view, it has pushed it everywhere, like those devout English ladies who slip their religious tracts under our doors. And it has worked so well, that today we see the emergence of this appalling fact: that on the very day when the spirit of rebellion is reawakened, men who wish to be free demand of their masters to be so good as to protect them by modifying the laws created by the same masters.

But times and minds have nevertheless changed during the past century. Everywhere one finds rebels who do not wish to obey the law unless they know where it originates, what its use may be, whence came the obligation to obey it and the respect with which it is surrounded. The revolution that is approaching will be a true revolution and not a simple uprising, precisely because the rebels of our day submit to their criticism all those foundations of society that have been venerated up to the present, and above all, the great fetish of the law.

They analyze its origins, and they find there, either a god -- product of the terror of savages, and stupid, mean and spiteful like the priests who lay claim to its supernatural origin -- or a heritage of bloodshed, of conquest by iron and fire. They study its character, and they find its distinctive characteristic in immobility, as opposed to the continuing development of humanity. They ask how the law is sustained, and they see the atrocities of Byzantinism and the cruelties of the Inquisition; the tortures of the Middle Ages, living flesh cut into ribbons by the executioner's whip, and the chains, clubs and axes that are put at the service of the law; the dark dungeons of the prisons, and the sufferings, tears and curses they conceal. Even today they are still there, the axe, the rope, the rifle, and the prisons; on one hand the brutalization of the prisoner reduced to the condition of an animal in a cage, and on the other the judge, stripped of all the feelings that form the better part of human nature, living a kind of dream in a world of juridical fictions, and applying with a voluptuous pleasure the penalty of the guillotine, which is bloody or dry according to the pleasure of this coldly wicked fool, who is the only one unaware of the abyss of degradation into which he has fallen in comparison with those he condemns.

We see a race of law-makers who know nothing of the areas on which they legislate, voting today on a law regarding city sanitation, without the least knowledge of hygiene, and tomorrow regulating the arming of the troops without having handled a rifle, making laws on education without giving an honest education to their own children, legislating in every direction, but never forgetting the penalties that will strike with imprisonment and worse men who are a thousand times less immoral than these same law-makers. Finally we see the jailor who has lost almost all human feeling, the gendarme trained as a bloodhound, the complacent stool-pigeon, informing turned into a virtue, corruption transformed into a system; all the vices, all the worst sides of human nature, nurtured and favoured by the triumph of the law.

We see all this, and because of it, instead of repeating idiotically, "Respect the law!" we cry out "Despise the law and all its attributes." That cowardly maxim, "Obedience to the law," we replace by "Revolt against all laws!" Merely compare the crimes committed in the name of each law and what good it may have produced, weigh the good against the bad -- and you will see whether we are right.