I am not like a lot of people whom I hear bemoaning the war of Paris.  For my part, I find it more tolerable than the invasion, there is no more despair possible, and that is what proves once more our abasement.  “Ah!  God be thanked, the Prussians are there!” is the universal cry of the bourgeois.  I put messieurs the workmen into the same pack, and would have them all thrust together into the river!  Moreover they are on the way there, and then calm will return.  We are going to become a great, flat industrial country like Belgium.  The disappearance of Paris (as center of the government) will render France colorless and dull.  She will no longer have a heart, a center, nor, I think, a spirit.

As for the Commune, which is about to die out, it is the last manifestation of the Middle Ages.  The very last, let us hope!

I hate democracy (at least the kind that is understood in France), that is to say, the exaltation of mercy to the detriment of justice, the negation of right, in a word, antisociability.

The Commune rehabilitates murderers, quite as Jesus pardoned thieves, and they pillage the residences of the rich, because they have been taught to curse Lazarus, who was not a bad rich man, but simply a rich man.  “The Republic is above every criticism” is equivalent to that belief:  “The pope is infallible!” Always formulas!  Always gods!

The god before the last, which was universal suffrage, has just shown his adherents a terrible farce by nominating “the murderers of Versailles.”  What shall we believe in, then?  In nothing!  That is the beginning of wisdom.  It was time to have done with “principles” and to take up science, and investigation.  The only reasonable thing (I always come back to that) is a government by mandarins, provided the mandarins know something and even that they know many things.  The people is an eternal infant, and it will be (in the hierarchy of social elements) always in the last row, since it is number, mass, the unlimited.  It is of little matter whether many peasants know how to read and listen no longer to their cure, but it is of great matter that many men like Renan or Littre should be able to live and be listened to!  Our safety is now only in a legitimate aristocracy, I mean by that, a majority that is composed of more than mere numbers.

If they had been more enlightened, if there had been in Paris more people acquainted with history, we should not have had to endure Gambetta, nor Prussia, nor the Commune.  What did the Catholics do to meet a great danger?  They crossed themselves while consigning themselves to God and to the saints.  We, however, who are advanced, we are going to cry out, “Long live the Republic!” while recalling what happened in ’92; and there was no doubt of its success, observe that.  The Prussian existed no longer, they embraced one another with joy and restrained themselves from running to the defiles of the Argonne where there are defiles no longer; never mind, that is according to tradition.  I have a friend in Rouen who proposed to a club the manufacture of lances to fight against the breech-loaders!