SOME CRITICS OF AUTHORITARIANISM
These letters show his real anxiety lest war, for whatever
cause it was waged, should divert the attention of the workers
from the real problem of the social revolution* His impatience
with nationalism was due doubtless to a real scepticism as to
its inherent moral value; but very largely to the fact that it
opened the door to endless claims and counter-claims, incap-
able of real juridical objective proof, all of them mutually
irreconcilable and therefore certain to make for endless conflict.
Peace was therefore the great and essential need,1 and it is
in the name of peace that Proudhon wants to see the principle
of State sovereignty give way in international relations to the
Federalism which he believed would also solve the problems of
internal government. " Europe," he wrote in the Philosophie du
Progres, " is really a Federation of States bound into solidarity
by their common interests; this Federation is sure to become
realized by the development of trade and industry, and in this
the West is sure to have the initiative and to play the chief
part.'*
This dread of nationalism as a factor of war springs in fact
from a vigilant patriotism afraid lest a disastrous war should
lead to the dismemberment of France. " And yet," he goes on
to say,<c might not our people be saved and once more become
something at that price? I see no other way of saving the
nation, and freedom, emancipating the people, creating peace,
developing the principles of Revolution in Europe, than to divide
France into twelve independent states and to suppress Paris." 2
If we have stressed at some length Proudhon's exposition
of Federalist philosophy it is just because it ran so completely
1 We are purposely saying nothing here of Proudhon's paradoxical work,
Guerre et Paix (1860), in which he manages both to extol war and the rights
of force and to show that war is now an anachronism, resting on an inadequate
conception of right. War has been really due to economic disturbances and
will disappear with economic justice. See Bourgeois, Les Theories du Droit
international chez Proudhon (1927) ; Duprat, La Conception Proudhonienne des
Facteurs Iconomiques de la Guerre et de la Paix (1922).
2 Letter, 4th April 1862, Years before, in 1841, he foretold that one of
the results of any European war would be the return of Alsace to the German
federation. He also said, many years later, that the Rhine was German
(Desjardins, op, cit., i., p. 69; ii., p. 78).
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