CENTRALISATION 
AND FREEDOM"! 

At first sight it seems incomprehensible that in France a ministry 
like Guizot’s could last so long, that indeed it could come to power 
at all. Confronted by a Chamber with full power to appoint and 
remove ministers, by a free and influential press, by the freest 
institutions in Europe, by a concentrated public opinion strongly 
opposed to him, Guizot, Minister de l’étranger, has withstood this 
for almost two years, persecuted the press, defied public opinion, 
led the Chamber, dissolved it, convoked a new one, compromised 
France’s honour in the eyes of the great powers, and achieved in 
full measure the unpopularity which he has been courting. And 
the man who has done all this, who has robbed the French people 
of two years of their history, can boast of having such a strong 
party in the Chamber that only a forced coalition of the most 
directly opposed opinions can endanger him. 

Guizot’s Ministry is the period of full bloom of the July 
government, the triumph of Louis Philippe, and the bitterest 
humiliation for all those who had expected the July revolution to 
bring the liberation of Europe. The principles of popular 
sovereignty, of a free press, of an independent jury, of parliamen- 
tary government, have practically been destroyed in France. 
Guizot’s Ministry has set the crown on the reactionary tendencies 
which have succeeded in reasserting themselves in France, and has 
brought openly into view the impotence of French liberalism in 
the face of Europe’s legitimate authorities. 

The fact is well established. Reaction in the whole of Europe 
rejoices over it. The liberal party has continually to hear it said 

that France daily disavows her institutions, gives the lie to her 
history since 1789, elects Chambers the list of whose members is 
itself a lampoon on the July revolution, in short, that by every one 
of its actions the most liberal nation in Europe is betraying 
liberalism. And liberals, namely, the good-natured Germans, blush 
with shame and stammer a few uncouth excuses which they 
themselves do not take quite seriously, silently hope for a liberal 
Chamber, and secretly, quite stealthily, hope—for another July. 

The fact can not only be admitted without prejudice to the 
principle of freedom, it must even be put in the forefront for the 
very sake of this principle. It has two causes; one of them has 
already often been put forward as an argument against the 
reactionaries by the bolder independent thinkers, namely, the 
half-heartedness and ambiguity of the French constitution, in 
which the principle of freedom is never explicitly formulated and 
implemented; the other is centralisation. 

In spite of Cormenin’s pamphlet,’ in spite of his brilliant and 
eloquent defence of French centralisation, the latter remains the 
chief cause of the retrogression of French legislation. Cormenin 
really proves nothing at all, although almost everything in his book 
is correct and good. For he does not base centralisation on the 
general laws of reason, but excuses it on the grounds of the special 
nature of the French national spirit and of the course of history. 

Those are grounds which we can accept for the time being, for 
we have first of all to furnish the proof that such centralisation is 
irrational and therefore the cause of the effects mentioned above. 

Centralisation, in the extreme form in which it prevails in 
France at present, is the state overstepping its bounds, going 
beyond its essential nature. The state is bounded, on the one 
hand, by the individual and, on the other hand, by world history. 
Both of these are harmed by centralisation. By assuming a right 
which belongs only to history, the state destroys thé freedom of 
the individual. History has eternally had and will always retain the 
right to dispose of the life, the happiness, the freedom of the 
individual, for it is the activity of mankind as a whole, it is the life 
of the species, and as such it is sovereign; no one can revolt 
against it, for it is absolute mght. No one can complain against 
history, for whatever it allots one, one lives and shares in the 
development of mankind, which is more than any enjoyment. 
How ludicrous it would be if the subjects of a Nero or a Domitian 
were to complain that they had not been born in an age like ours, 

when beheading or roasting alive does not happen so easily, or if 
the victims of medieval religious fanaticism were to reproach 
history because they did not live after the Reformation and under 
tolerant governments! As if without the suffering of some, the 
others could have made progress! Thus, the English workers, who 
at present have to suffer bitter hunger, have indeed the right to 
protest against Sir Robert Peel and the English constitution, but 
not against history, which is making them the standard-bearers 
and representatives of a new principle of right. The same thing 
does not hold good for the state. It is always a particular state and 
can never claim the right, which mankind as a whole naturally 
possesses in its activity and the development of history, to sacrifice 
the individual for the general. 

Thus the centralised state, of course, commits an injustice when, 
as occurs in France and as Cormenin admits, it sacrifices the 
provinces to the centre and thus introduces an oligarchy, an 
aristocracy of locality which is no less unjust and irrational than 
the aristocracy of nobility and of money. Freedom is essentially 
conditioned by equality, and despite all égalité devant la loi, the 
difference between Parisians and provincials, as far as education, 
participation in popular sovereignty, and true, moral enjoyment of 
life are concerned, is nevertheless more than enough to obstruct 
the French institutions in their natural development towards 
complete freedom. 

The history of centralisation in France, as everywhere else, goes 
parallel to that of absolutism. Louis XI was the founder of both; 
the Huguenot wars were the last significant attempt of the 
provinces to revolt against the hegemony of Paris, and from then 
on the supremacy of the capital over France has been generally 
recognised.'”? For as soon as centralisation of the state takes place 
in earnest, there is bound to be local centralisation, the hegemony 
of the centre. As long as absolutism lasted only Paris profited by it, 
the provinces had to put up with the costs of the state and His 
Majesty's arbitrariness. All culture, all esprit, all science from the 
whole of France was concentrated in Paris, existed for Paris; the 
press operated only in and for Paris; the money of the provinces, 
which the court drew towards itself, was squandered in and for 
Paris. This gave rise to that great disproportion in culture between 
Paris and the rest of the country which, with the fall of absolutism, 
developed in a form extremely disadvantageous for France. 
Centralisation alone made the revolution possible, in the way in 
which it eventually happened; but centralisation also had made the 
gulf between Paris and the rest of the country so great that Paris 

felt little concern for the welfare of the provinces as long as it 
itself was not affected by the general oppression. The estates of 
the realm,’ the representation of the oppressed country, not the 
city of Paris, began the work of revolution; only when the 
problems became matters of principle and the interests of the 
capital became involved did the latter take the initiative and 
dominate the course of events. But as a result the participation of 
the country slackened, and the country, and the representatives 
elected by it gave Napoleon by their apathy the opportunity to 
raise himself gradually to the imperial throne. Under the Res- 
toration, when political parties developed, the same struggle 
between the country and the capital became evident; Paris soon 
achieved greater clarity of purpose and decided against the 
Bourbons and kingship by the grace of God; the country, with its 
lesser degree of education, put few liberals into the arena; it was 
largely apathetic and therefore favoured the existing regime or 
even fanatically supported the ancien régime. Hence the July 
revolution was made by Paris alone; the great mass of the 
indifferent were too indolent to rise against the capital and its new 
rinciple; the most uneducated regions of the country remained 
oyal to the Bourbons, but could do nothing to counter centralisa- 
tion. Since then, however, almost every Chamber has allowed itself 
to be robbed of the gains of the July revolution one after another, 
and centralisation, besides other causes, was also responsible for 
this. For all parts of the country send their deputies to the 
Chambers and, in spite of controlled elections and bribery, each 
constituency demonstrates by its choice the degree of its political 
education. He who allows himself to be bribed and dictated to is 
certainly not himself free and resolute; hence he acts quite rightly 
when, by electing a ministerial deputy, he submits to the tutelage 
that falls to his lot. The contradiction between the July revolution 
and the Chambers of 1842 is the contradiction between the capital 
and the country. Through Paris, France can indeed make revolu- 
tions and create free institutions at a single stroke, but she cannot 
keep them. Anyone who is unable to understand the 1842 
Chambers shows that he has confused Frenchmen and Parisians, 
that he has not realised the contradiction of centralisation. 

Let us not be unjust! The contradiction from which centralisa- 
tion suffers is undeniable; but let us also allow it the historical and 
rational right that is its due! Centralisation is—and this is its 
justification — the essence, the vital nerve, of the state. Every state 
must necessarily strive for centralisation; every state is centralised, 
from the absolute monarchy to the republic; America just as much 

as Russia. No state can do without centralisation, the federal state 
no more than the developed central state; as long as states exist, 
each state will have a centre, each citizen will perform his civic 
functions only by virtue of centralisation. Under this centralisation, 
communal administration, everything that affects individual citi- 
zens or corporations, can quite well be left free, and even must be 
left free, since because centralisation is concentrated in a single 
centre, because everything here forms a single unity, its activity 
must necessarily be general, its competence and powers embracing 
everything that is of general validity, but leaving free everything 
that concerns only this. or that particular individual. From this 
follows the right of the central power of the state to promulgate 
laws, to contro] the administration, to appoint state officials, etc.; 
from this follows at the same time the principle that judicial power 
must by no means be connected with the centre but must be in the 
hands of the people—courts of law with juries—and that, as 
already said, communal affairs, etc., do not come within the 
competence of the centre, and so on. 

The central nature of the state does not by the way stipulate 
that some one person must be the central point, as in an absolute 
monarchy, but only that an individual occupies the central posi- 
tion, as in a republic the president may. well do. For it should not 
be forgotten that the main thing is not the person in the centre, 
but the centre itself. 

To return to our beginning. Centralisation is the principle 
underlying the state, yet centralisation necessarily compels the 
state to reach out beyond itself, to make itself—the particu- 
lar——into something universal, ultimate and supreme, and to claim 
the authority and position that belongs only to history. The state is 
not, as it is held to be, the realisation of absolute freedom — other- 
wise the above dialectic of the state concept would be invalid — but - 
merely the realisation of objective freedom. True subjective free- 
dom, which has equal rights with absolute freedom, calls. for a 
different form of realisation than the state.