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The Idea of Progress, An inguiry into its origin and growth

J.B. Bury

Section 19 of 21 - Table of Contents
CHAPTER XVII

"PROGRESS" IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT (1830-1851)

1.

In 1850 there appeared at Paris a small book by M. A. Javary, with
the title DE L'IDEE DU PROGRES. Its interest lies in the express
recognition that Progress was the characteristic idea of the age,
ardently received by some, hotly denounced by others. [Footnote:
Lamartine denounced in his monthly journal Le Conseiller du peuple,
vol. i. (1849), all the progressive gospels of the day, socialist,
communist, Saint-Simonian, Fourierist, Icarian--in fact every school
of social reform since the First Republic--as purely materialistic,
sprung from the "cold seed of the century of Helvetius" (pp. 224,
287).]

"If there is any idea," he says, "that belongs properly to one
century, at least by the importance accorded to it, and that,
whether accepted or not, is familiar to all minds, it is the idea of
Progress conceived as the general law of history and the future of
humanity."

He observes that some, intoxicated by the spectacle of the material
improvements of modern civilisation and the results of science, set
no limits to man's power or his hopes; while others, unable to deny
the facts, say that this progress serves only the lower part of
human nature, and refuse to look with complacency on a movement
which means, they assert, a continuous decadence of the nobler part.
To which it is replied that, If moral decadence is a fact, it is
only transient; it is a necessary phase of a development which means
moral progress in the end, for it is due to the process by which the
beliefs, ideas, and institutions of the past disappear and make way
for new and better principles.

And Javary notes a prevailing tendency in France to interpret every
contemporary movement as progressive, while all the social
doctrinaires justify their particular reforms by invoking the law of
Progress. It was quite true that during the July monarchy nearly all
serious speculations on society and history were related to that
idea. It was common to Michelet and Quinet, who saw in the march of
civilisation the gradual triumph of liberty; to Leroux and Cabet,
who preached humanitarian communism; to Louis Blanc and to Proudhon;
to the bourgeois, who were satisfied with the regime of Louis
Philippe and grew rich, following the precept of Guizot, as well as
to the workers who overthrew it. It is significant that the journal
of Louis Blanc, in which he published his book on the ORGANISATION
OF WORK (1839), was entitled REVUS DES PROGRES. The political
question as to the due limits between government and individual
freedom was discussed in terms of Progress: is personal liberty or
state authority the efficient means of progressing? The metaphysical
question of necessity and freewill acquired a new interest: is
Progress a fatality, independent of human purposes, determined by
general, ineluctable, historical laws? Quinet and Michelet argued
vigorously against the optimism of Cousin, who with Hegel held that
history is just what it ought to be and could not be improved.

2.

Among the competing theories of the time, and sharply opposed to the
views of Comte, was the idea, derived from the Revolution, that the
world is moving towards universal equality and the obliteration of
class distinctions, that this is the true direction of Progress.
This view, represented by leaders of the popular movement against
the bourgeois ascendency, derived powerful reinforcement from one of
the most enlightened political thinkers of the day. The appearance
of de Tocqueville's renowned study of American democracy was the
event of 1834. He was convinced that he had discovered on the other
side of the Atlantic the answer to the question whither the world is
tending. In American society he found that equality of conditions is
the generating fact on which every other fact depends. He concluded
that equality is the goal of humanity, providentially designed.

"The gradual development of equality of conditions has the principal
characteristics of a providential fact. It is universal, it is
permanent, it eludes human power; all events and all men serve this
development. . . . This whole book has been written under the
impression of a sort of religious terror produced in the author's
soul by the view of this irresistible revolution which for so many
centuries has been marching across all obstacles, and which is to-
day seen still advancing in the midst of the ruins it has made. ...
If the men of our time were brought to see that the gradual and
progressive development of equality is at once the past and the
future of their history, this single discovery would give that
development the sacred character of the will of the sovran master."

Here we have a view of the direction of Progress and the meaning of
history, pretending to be based upon the study of facts and
announced with the most intense conviction. And behind it is the
fatalistic doctrine that the movement cannot be arrested or
diverted; that it is useless to struggle against it; that men,
whatever they may do, cannot deflect the clock-like motion regulated
by a power which de Tocqueville calls Providence but to which his
readers might give some other name.

3.

It has been conjectured, [Footnote: Georges Sorel, Les Illusions du
progres, pp. 247-8 (1908).] and seems probable enough, that de
Tocqueville's book was one of the influences which wrought upon the
mind of Proudhon. The speculations of this remarkable man, who, like
Saint-Simon and Comte, sought to found a new science of society,
attracted general attention in the middle of the century. [Footnote:
Compare the appreciation by Weill in Histoire du mouvement social en
France 1852-1910 (1911, ed. 2), p. 41: "Le grande ecrivain
revolutionnaire et anarchiste n'etait au fond ni un revolutionnaire
ni un anarchiste, mais un reformateur pratique et modere qui a fait
illusion par le ton vibrant de ses pamphlets centre la societe
capitaliste."]His hostility to religion, his notorious dictum that
"property is theft," his gospel of "anarchy," and the defiant,
precipitous phrases in which he clothed his ideas, created an
impression that he was a dangerous anti-social revolutionary. But
when his ideas are studied in their context and translated into
sober language, they are not so unreasonable. Notwithstanding his
communistic theory of property and his ideal of equality, he was a
strong individualist. He held that the future of civilisation
depends on the energy of individuals, that liberty is a condition of
its advance, and that the end to be kept in view is the
establishment of justice, which means equality. He saw the
difficulty of reconciling liberty with complete equality, but hoped
that the incompatibility would be overcome by a gradual reduction of
the natural differences in men's capacities. He said, "I am an
anarchist," but his anarchy only meant that the time would come when
government would be superfluous, when every human being could be
trusted to act wisely and morally without a restraining authority or
external sanctions. Nor was he a Utopian. He comprehended that such
a transformation of society would be a long, slow process, and he
condemned the schools of Saint-Simon and Fourier for imagining that
a millennium might be realised immediately by a change of
organisation.

He tells us that all his speculations and controversial activities
are penetrated with the idea of Progress, which he described as "the
railway of liberty"; and his radical criticism on current social
theories, whether conservative or democratic, was that they did not
take Progress seriously though they invoked it.

"What dominates in all my studies, what forms their beginning and
end, their summit and their base, their reason, what makes my
originality as a thinker (if I have any), is that I affirm Progress
resolutely, irrevocably, and everywhere, and deny the Absolute. All
that I have ever written, all I have denied or affirmed, I have
written, denied or affirmed in the name of one unique idea,
Progress. My adversaries, on the other hand, are all partisans of
the Absolute, IN OMNI GENERE, CASU, ET NUMERO, to use the phrase of
Sganarelle." [Footnote: Philosophie du progres, Premiere lettre
(1851).]

4.

A vague confidence in Progress had lain behind and encouraged the
revolution of 1789, but in the revolution of 1848 the idea was
definitely enthroned as the regnant principle. It presided over the
session of the Committee which drew up the Constitution of the
second Republic. Armand Marrast, the most important of the men who
framed that document, based the measure of universal suffrage upon
"the invisible law which rules societies," the law of progress which
has been so long denied but which is rooted in the nature of man.
His argument was this: Revolutions are due to the repression of
progress, and are the expression and triumph of a progress which has
been achieved. But such convulsions are an undesirable method of
progressing; how can they be avoided? Only by organising elastic
institutions in which new ideas of amelioration can easily be
incorporated, and laws which can be accommodated without struggle or
friction to the rise of new opinions. What is needed is a flexible
government open to the penetration of ideas, and the key to such a
government is universal suffrage.

[Footnote: Marrast, "the invisible law"; "Oui," he continues, "toute
societe est progressive, parce que tout individu est educable,
perfectible; on peut mesurer, limiter, peut-etre les facultes d'un
individu; on ne saurait limiter, mesurer ce que peuvent, dans
l'ordre des idees, les intelligences dont les produits ne s'ajoutent
pas seulement mais se fecondent et se multiplient dans une
progression indefinie." No. 393 Republique francoise. Assemblee
nationale. Projet de Constitution ... precede par un rapport fait au
nom de la Commission par le citoyen Armand Marrast. Seance du 30
aout, 1848.]

Universal suffrage was practical politics, but the success of the
revolution fluttered agreeably all the mansions of Utopia, and
social reformers of every type sought to improve the occasion. In
the history of the political struggles of 1848 the names are written
of Proudhon, of Victor Considerant the disciple of Fourier, of
Pierre Leroux the humanitarian communist, and his devoted pupil
George Sand. The chief title of Leroux to be remembered is just his
influence over the soul of the great novelist. Her later romances
are pervaded by ideas derived from his teaching. His communism was
vague and ineffectual, but he was one of the minor forces in the
thought of the period, and there are some features in his theory
which deserve to be pointed out.

Leroux had begun as a member of the Saint-Simonian school, but he
diverged into a path of his own. He reinstated the ideal of equality
which Saint-Simon rejected, and made the approach to that ideal the
measure of Progress. The most significant process in history, he
held, is the gradual breaking down of caste and class: the process
is now approaching its completion; "today MAN is synonymous with
EQUAL."

In order to advance to the city of the future we must have a force
and a lever. Man is the force, and the lever is the idea of
Progress. It is supplied by the study of history which displays the
improvement of our faculties, the increase of our power over nature,
the possibility of organising society more efficaciously. But the
force and the lever are not enough. A fulcrum is also required, and
this is to be found in the "solidarity" of the human race. But this
conception meant for Leroux something different from what is
ordinarily meant by the phrase, a deeper and even mystical bond.
Human "solidarity" was a corollary from the pantheistic religion of
the Saint-Simonians, but with Leroux, as with Fourier, it was
derived from the more difficult doctrine of palingenesis. We of this
generation, he believed, are not merely the sons and descendants of
past generations, we are the past generations themselves, which have
come to birth again in us.

Through many pages of the two volumes [Footnote: De l'humanite, 1840
(dedicated to Beranger).] in which he set forth his thesis, Leroux
expended much useless learning in endeavouring to establish this
doctrine, which, were it true, might be the central principle in a
new religion of humanity, a transformed Pythagoreanism. It is easy
to understand the attractiveness of palingenesis to a believer in
Progress: for it would provide a solution of the anomaly that
generations after generations are sacrificed for the sake of
posterity, and so appear to have no value in themselves. Believers
in Progress, who are sensitive to the sufferings of mankind, past
and present, need a stoical resolution to face this fact. We saw how
Herder refused to accept it. A pantheistic faith, like that of the
Saint-Simonian Church, may help some, it cannot do more, to a
stoical acquiescence. The palingenesis of Leroux or Fourier removes
the radical injustice. The men of each generation are sacrificed and
suffer for the sake of their descendants, but as their descendants
are themselves come to life again, they are really suffering in
their own interests. They will themselves reach the desirable state
to which the slow, painful process of history is tending.

But palingenesis, notwithstanding all the ancient opinions and
traditions that the researches of Leroux might muster, could carry
little conviction to those who were ceasing to believe in the
familiar doctrine of a future life detached from earth, and Madame
Dudevant was his only distinguished convert.

5.

The ascendency of the idea of Progress among thoughtful people in
France in the middle of the last century is illustrated by the work
which Ernest Renan composed under the immediate impression of the
events of 1848. He desired to understand the significance of the
current revolutionary doctrines, and was at once involved in
speculation on the future of humanity. This is the purport of
L'AVENIR DE LA SCIENCE. [Footnote: L'Avenir de la science--Pensees
de (1848). Published in 1890.]

[Footnote: The ascendency of the idea of Progress at this epoch may
be further illustrated by E. Pelletan's Profession de foi du dix-
neuvieme siecle, 1852 (4th ed., 1857), where Progress is described
as the general law of the universe; and by Jean Reynaud's
Philosophie religieuse: Terre et ciel (3rd ed., 1858), a religious
but not orthodox book, which acclaims the "sovran principle of
perfectibility" (cp. p. 138). I may refer also to the rhetorical
pages of E. Vacherot on the Doctrine du progres, printed (as part of
an essay on the Philosophy of History) in his Essais de philosophie
critique (1864).]

The author was then convinced that history has a goal, and that
mankind tends perpetually, though in an oscillating line, towards a
more perfect state, through the growing dominion of reason over
instinct and caprice. He takes the French Revolution as the critical
moment in which humanity first came to know itself. That revolution
was the first attempt of man to take the reins into his own hands.
All that went before we may call, with Owen, the irrational period
of human existence.

We have now come to a point at which we must choose between two
faiths. If we despair of reason, we may find a refuge from utter
scepticism in a belief in the external authority of the Roman
Church. If we trust reason, we must accept the march of the human
mind and justify the modern spirit. And it can be justified only by
proving that it is a necessary step towards perfection. Renan
affirmed his belief in the second alternative, and felt confident
that science--including philology, on the human bearings of which he
enlarged,--philosophy, and art would ultimately enable men to
realise an ideal civilisation, in which all would be equal. The
state, he said, is the machine of Progress, and the Socialists are
right in formulating the problem which man has to solve, though
their solution is a bad one. For individual liberty, which socialism
would seriously limit, is a definite conquest, and ought to be
preserved inviolate.

Renan wrote this work in 1848 and 1849, but did not publish it at
the time. He gave it to the world forty years later. Those forty
years had robbed him of his early optimism. He continues to believe
that the unfortunate conditions of our race might be ameliorated by
science, but he denounces the view that men can ever be equal.
Inequality is written in nature; it is not only a necessary
consequence of liberty, but a necessary postulate of Progress. There
will always be a superior minority. He criticises himself too for
having fallen into the error of Hegel, and assigned to man an unduly
important place in the universe.

[Footnote: Renan, speaking of the Socialists, paid a high tribute to
Bazard (L'Avenir de la science, p. 104). On the other hand, he
criticised Comte severely (p. 149).

Renan returned to speculation on the future in 1863, in a letter to
M. Marcellin-Berthelot (published in Dialogues et fragments
philosophiques, 1876): "Que sera Ie monde quand un million de fois
se sera reproduit ce qui s'est passe depuis 1763 quand la chimie, au
lieu de quatre-vingt ans de progres, en aura cent millions?" (p.
183). And again in the Dialogues written in 1871 (ib.), where it is
laid down that the end of humanity is to produce great men: "le
grand oeuvre s'accomplira par la science, non par la democratic.
Rien sans grands hommes; le salut se fera par des grands hommes" (p.
103).]

In 1890 there was nothing left of the sentimental socialism which he
had studied in 1848; it had been blown away by the cold wind of
scientific socialism which Marx and Engels created. And Renan had
come to think that in this new form socialism would triumph.
[Footnote: He reckoned without the new forces, opposed to socialism
as well as to parliamentary democracy, represented by Bakunin and
men like Georges Sorel.] He had criticised Comte for believing that
"man lives exclusively by science, or rather little verbal tags,
like geometrical theorems, dry formulae." Was he satisfied by the
concrete doctrine of Marx that all the phenomena of civilisation at
a given period are determined by the methods of production and
distribution which then prevail? But the future of socialism is a
minor issue, and the ultimate goal of humanity is quite uncertain.
"Ce qu'il y a de consolant, c'est qu'on arrive necessairement
quelque part." We may console ourselves with the certainty that we
must get somewhere.

6.

Proudhon described the idea of Progress as the railway of liberty.
It certainly supplied motive power to social ideals which were
repugnant and alarming to the authorities of the Catholic Church. At
the Vatican it was clearly seen that the idea was a powerful engine
driven by an enemy; and in the famous SYLLABUS of errors which Pope
Pius IX. flung in the face of the modern world at the end of 1864,
Progress had the honour of being censured. The eightieth error,
which closes the list, runs thus:

Romanus Pontifex potest ac debet cum progressu, cum liberalismo et
cum recenti civilitate sese reconciliare et componere.

"The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, be reconciled and come to
terms with progress, with liberalism, and with modern civilisation."

No wonder, seeing that Progress was invoked to justify every
movement that offended the nostrils of the Vatican--liberalism,
toleration, democracy, and socialism. And the Roman Church well
understood the intimate connection of the idea with the advance of
rationalism.
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