Speech given in Villepreux on Saturday September 8th, 2007. Originally translated by the Institute for National Revolutionary Studies in 2017. Thoroughly edited, then reposted here, by Transnotitia.
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In the past, up until the end of the 70s, the word bourgeois was considered an insult, as much by the commoner as by the artist or fallen aristocrat. Today, it has disappeared from common usage, all to the benefit of the rich, or the jetsetters, which proves that money and the values that go with it are no longer shameful nor suspect – at least to members of high society, whose vulgarity matches that of the well-to-do entertainers at Gala. The lower classes do not view it as shameful or suspect either, for they themselves dream of meteoric individual success as they buy lottery scratch cards and watch “Saga” or “Nouvelle Star.” The same idea not only applies to an immigrant lumpenproletariat that dreams of “money, cars, and bitches”, but also to formerly wealthy merchants, poor middle classes, the new poor, and the list goes on… The point here is that the rise of the bourgeoisie goes together with the triumph of liberal ideologies.
Part One: What is the Bourgeois World?
We’re talking here about a human community, a social class gone global after gaining power over the Earth and over the spirits through liberalism. To understand what the bourgeoisie really is, to know how to recognize and attack it, first we must grasp the story of liberalism: namely, its rise, its domination, its lies, its contradictions, and its decadence.
Like any society or group of humans, the bourgeois-liberal world is based on two pillars: one spiritual, the other material. Knowing which pillar is inferior to the other – what distinguishes the idealist thesis and the materialist thesis – is less important than understanding that they go together. In this context, the two pillars are:
- The individualism inaugurated and theorized by Descartes’ “Cogito” argument (“I think therefore I am”), which marked a radical break from the old world’s emphasis on community and fatum. Modern man’s freedom and arrogance stem from this pillar.
- The Market, which, in a world dominated by the ‘I’ culture, has become this “nous” governing relations between men-individuals, in God’s place.
With the dual advent of, on the one hand, “rational” natural sciences going against the divine order, and, on the other, self-interest guiding motive shifts in a quantifiable way, the bourgeois era can be characterized as an era where reason, individual freedom, and self-interest reign supreme. The “ascendant liberal” is a free man who is conscious of his rights and who seeks to satisfy his own well-defined self-interest. The ironic Voltaire was and remains the most perfect example in France of this “ascendant liberal” figure.
Despite his honest facade, the bourgeois man is a doubly speculative figure: he is at once speculative in the spiritual realm – the cogito of Descartes comes from dubito: dubito ergo sum res cogitens – as well as in the economic or business realm, such that he is also an arms trafficker and slave merchant, i.e., a liberal in the Anglo-Saxon, Thatcherite sense of the term.
The Bourgeois Left and Right
The left-right political spectrum is based on beautifully abstract and universal ideas, but made possible by ugly material conditions of possibilities. The problem is that one is at once a free-thinker and a bourgeois, which explains why “liberal” means both “open-spirited man” and “cold businessman.” In other words, nowadays, the public imagination is pushed to equate right-wing and left-wing man. It makes sense: after all, liberal rationalist epistemology comes as much from “The Rights of Man” of a Rousseau as from the transgressive egoism of a Marquis de Sade. We should note that the Marquis de Sade never did anything other than use literary provocation to push the intrinsic immoralism of liberal thought to its ultimate conclusions.
The Liberal Epic: Right/Left Battle
The war between the left and right underscores the inherent duality in the liberal rationalist man’s conception of things, behind which the man of the Market stands. The market is, for its part, considered as the only rational – and thus natural – social bond between men, who, at this point, have all become homo economicus.
In hindsight, this duality at once formed the bourgeoisie’s collective epic, based on how its contradictions would develop, and determined the history of both the bourgeois left and right, i.e., the liberal economic right’s fight against the “human rightist” left within that little bourgeois theater called “democratic debate.”
This problematic duality also ended up constituting the “bourgeois sensibility.” Beneath the history of bourgeois cultural sensibility is the notion of “painful consciousness”, rooted in the bourgeoisie’s awareness of its internal contradictions, as expressed and realized in a new, con-substantial artistic category called the “bourgeois novel”.
Ascendance, Ideas, The Enlighteners
The bourgeois ethic of liberty and formal equality, founded on Natural Law and Reason, allowed the bourgeoisie to rise to power, woo the world with its Enlightenment ideology, and finally seize power from an old fate-driven and divine right-driven regime (the Ancien Régime). Yet, it was bourgeois profit – i.e., the bourgeoisie’s ability to dominate via money
– that increasingly made it the most powerful class, to such an extent that the more its contradictions became untenable, the more it was able do away with its humanist ethics. When it started to prioritize rationalist humanism over scientism, the bourgeois ethic was soon reduced to as dry a rhetoric as the scholasticism of the Ancien Régime. Scientific progress had the big advantage of testifying to the superiority of the bourgeois spirit, not only by providing concrete proof of its domination over Nature, but above all by constituting, through technological progress, one of the keys to renewed and growing profits. Thus, progressively, the social class that promoted “creative doubt” and legal equality became the social class that also promoted technical expansionism for profit-driven motives. Valorising “Capital” (another name for the Market) and its corollary, free-market capitalism, became the new religion of philistines, who, after two centuries of total power, now lament the old order and the nobility of the Ancien Régime! In hindsight, the above-mentioned bourgeois epic did not triumph without its issues – it was a bumpy ride, and this bumpy ride now embodies, and serves as concrete proof of, the bourgeoisie’s moral and practical contradictions.
The Proletariat, Proof of the Bourgeois Lie
If the bourgeois class overtook the aristocracy of the Ancien Régime, then it also created the proletariat and all the working-class misery that goes with it. In other words, History and concrete reality prove that there is always a speculator, a person that exploits and creates inequalities, lurking behind the hard-working entrepreneur, who creates wealth, jobs, and progress through capitalistic valorisation of technique. The history of the struggle – driven by its victims – against this violence likewise constitutes the history of the workers’ movement. Hence Marxism… The material and moral misery of the working class totally contradicts the promises of the Enlightenment and its concomitant “invisible hand” economic ideology, which is said to bring collective well-being through individual selfishness. Denouncing this ideology is at the heart of the Marxist and communist project – a project driven by the combative ideology of a reformist, radical left, eager to point fingers at the dominant class, just as the ascendant bourgeoisie did with the nobility. This combative ideology, which rejects formal egalitarianism as well as divine fate, has a dual strategy: either it pursues a compromising syndicalism, or it pursues a revolutionary syndicalism. The former is a scientistic, positivistic leftism that tries to surpass the bourgeoisie all the while retaining its achievements; whereas the latter is a more romantic, radical form of leftism according to which ethics and epistemology are one, and to escape one, we must also question the other. Revolutionary syndicalism is an anti-bourgeois leftism; it stands against social-democratic compromises which aim to increase purchasing power; it tried to surpass (but to no avail) the bourgeois-liberal era, both epistemologically and ethically-speaking, either through the “New Man” ideology”, which led to some of the harshest forms of communism, or by resorting in part to the values of the old world, such as valorizing the family as Proudhon did and/or promoting the ascetic Greco-Roman heroism so dear to Georges Sorel, even it meant making tactical alliances with anti-bourgeois forces coming from the Ancien Régime and right-wing ideas…
We are thus dealing with three very different paths. The first path leads to the Social-Democratic leftism of today’s Socialist Party. This brand of leftism triumphed everywhere in Europe by collaborating with the bourgeoisie. The second path leads to the Soviet Communist epic and the history of the French Communism Party, which, as you know, no longer exists. The third path is at once revolutionary and conservative. While it is nothing but embryonic and experimental, this third path is nevertheless the most fertile and hopeful one today, featuring thinkers like Latouche, Michéa, and de Benoist…
Other Attempted Alternatives to the Bourgeois World
The Marxist-Leninist epic is the most important attempted alternative to the bourgeois world, both in its duration and ambition to create a new man and a classless society. However, its importance should not conceal the fact that there have been other attempts to escape liberal-bourgeois domination and its purely capitalist logic, which, after the failure of Sovietism and the triumph of the social-democratic left, was reduced to a means of satisfying consumers by constantly increasing their purchasing power, permitted by the notion of Growth…
Idealization of the Past, Exoticism…
Romanticism was the individual, poetic flight into a mythologized past rooted in the idealization of the Middle Ages – an individual, exotic flight, not in time but in space, which consisted of fleeing the Western bourgeois world to go live in other societies, often more traditional, caste-based societies like in India, more tribal societies like in Africa, etc… We should not forget that this approach, which aims to break [with bourgeois society] by trying to escape it, was at the origins of the hippie movement, even though, in hindsight, the hippie movement was in turn transformed by the market.
Fascism, Nazism…
Two ways of idealizing the past, Marxism-Leninism and Romanticism, are not to be confused with the mixed, half-reactionary, half-futuristic social and political experiences of Fascism and Nazism, which sought to retain bourgeois technology but in the service of an ethic drawn from the pre-bourgeois period, totally at odds with the Enlightenment. Nazism and fascism mixed technological rationalism and ethical irrationalism, but to no avail as well. Today, the Left often holds onto its moral leadership by pretending to confuse Nazism and Fascism with these very subtle constructions of the spirit that were the “troisième voie” ideologies [Translator’s Note: I kept troisième voie in the original as “third way” in Anglophone countries refers left-liberal policies popularized by Bill Clinton or Tony Blair]. These revolutionary, conservative projects seriously pondered the limits of the idea of Progress, notably in Russia, Germany, and France.
The “Troisième Voie”: Cercle Proudhon
An attempt at the troisième voie was realized in the margins of the Cercle Proudhon in France, where a dialogue between nationalist monarchists and anti-reformist syndicalists took place – i.e., where men of good will, men capable of transcending their different origins by binding themselves to the same values of nobility of heart, honor, combat, and love of country, tried to form an improbable, anti-bourgeois “sacred union” of good-willed men, to which the system responded by forming its own sacred union against the Germans.
Germans Yesterday, Arabs today…
Today, as in the past, the same system is trying to form a sacred union against Arabs, to prevent victims of the Market – small businessmen, artisans, employees, proletarians of all origins – from forming their own sacred union against the Market. These bourgeois in power make us hate the very North Africans that they themselves import to France in massive numbers.
The Clash of Civilizations Trap…
Despite the failures of past trans-current attempts, I think that this troisième voie – this broad and subversive sacred union, vilified as much by the liberal right as the Trotskyite left, at the polar opposite of today’s “clash of civilizations” theory – still presents the most interesting alternatives to the bourgeois world. Since it is so out of touch with the current “clash of civilizations” theory, I think that this troisième voie has the responsibility to find for itself both the salvation of France and an alternative to the bourgeois world fully embodied today by the American imperium and its tribal [translator’s note: in the sense of identity politics, communautarisme, in French], inegalitarian values, through which the global Usurocracy – the destroyer of spirituality, cultures, difference in identity – hides its desire for omnipotence. This generalized, essentially Judeo-Anglo-Saxon mercantile spirit promoted by the Usurocracy has absolutely nothing to do with our Hellenic-Christian, Celtic, and Gallic-Roman values, nor with our Euro-Mediterranean destiny.
On Bookkeeping Totalitarianism
After the failure, often in blood and fire, of all regimes that opposed it, we must very well admit that free-market capitalism – i.e., democracy as a mere tool of the Market – has only been scoring points and extending itself since the 80s. It has extended from where it was born, in Western Europe, to all domains of life, including those of the spirit, by the intimate commercialization of the body, of culture, of medicine, and even religion, itself also reduced to the liberal law of Human Rights, far from any transcendence. Today, liberal free-market capitalism carries on scoring points and is geographically extending itself to India, China, etc. One exception is Africa, which only manages to escape it by way of misery. Contrary to Hannah Arendt’s naïve view of totalitarianism, the only truly real totalitarianism is free-market capitalism.
Part Two: What Is To Be Done?
Then what is to be done? Without returning to past experiences, we shall try to see, today, here, through reality and the present forces, what are the possible alternatives to the bourgeois world, to this market which is heading towards a bookkeeping totalitarianism that never stops mutating to reinforce itself and survive.
From Moralism to Pornography
The law of profit forces the bourgeoisie to constantly find new markets to maintain its hold on the balance of power, which the bourgeoisie achieves by constantly undergoing mutations, to such an extent that it denies the values that permitted it to impose itself. At first, the bourgeoisie was entrepreneurial and parsimonious. Today, the opposite is true: the bourgeoisie paralyzes all entrepreneurial ambitions by way of speculating on finance and commercializing desires, which is contrary to the bourgeois moralism of the 19th century, and therefore demonstrates that the Holy Profit is the first, ultimate principle of the bourgeois world, for which it can sacrifice all the others.
From Libertarian Liberalism to Securitarian Liberalism
After and thanks to May 68, a puritan form of liberalism turned into a libertarian form of liberalism. And since Sarkozy’s election, it again evolved and mutated, this time into a securitarian form of liberalism. Securitarian liberalism is the implementation, not only of a liberal regime for the globalist bourgeoisie and everyone who favors a weakened Nation, but also a securitarian regime, one which does not clamp down on violent delinquents or illegal immigrants, but rather the middle classes and workers, who might want to revolt against the liberal elite. We can also confidently define this liberal-securitarian regime as a form of libertarian liberalism which, because it feels outdated, pretends to solve problems that it itself created, and aggravates them by passing two or three gimmick laws that always end up penalizing the petty bourgeois and lower-class whites. We are dealing here with a securitarian regime that clamps down on working people, without ever really dealing with the delinquency of lumpen-proletariat or elite predators. Therefore, a liberal-securitarian society also qualifies as a “society of policed consumption”, both permissive for the half-wit consumer and repressive for the productive citizen, based on the American model.
The Anglo-Saxon World… Against Europe and France
This totalitarianism against which we must resist, despite the disproportion of forces at play, is, I repeat, an Anglo-Saxon import. Today, the American empire embodies this totalitarianism, as did the British empire last century. I am’ talking about an essentially Judeo-Protestant, inegalitarian, and Thalassocratic totalitarian power, which has always been hostile towards Catholic and Christian France, towards its Euro-Mediterranean destiny, and, in partnership, has only ever offered it a dominant/submissive relationship. Unfortunately, such a relationship is often formed with the complicity of the French elites, whether it was Philippe Égalité during the French Revolution, Pascal Lamy via the European Community, or of course, a certain President Sarkozy today.
The Mystical Ultra-Liberalism of Neo-Conservatives
Were dealing here with a brutal type of liberalism that turned its back on Enlightenment morality and was forced to find refuge in mysticism, the vetero-testamentary God of the Chosen People, as it was no longer capable of justifying its domineering and militarist abuses through Reason. Ever since 9/11, this mystical ultra-liberalism has been driving us towards a pseudo “conflict of civilizations” in which Europe is at odds with the West, to a) prevent a Europe of the peoples and nations that is in our interest, and b) favor a West that is only the false name of Anglo-Saxon American domination.
Escaping Anglo-Saxon Domination, as this Nation’s Economic, Cultural, and Geopolitical Model
Today, outside the mystical-liberal ideology shared by neo-conservatives, liberal globalization is what allows the Anglo-Saxon capitalist empire to carry on inflicting damage on France. The global hegemony of the Market, and of those who control it, necessarily happens by destroying nations and notably the French nation, which is systematically likened to the flag-waving and warmongering France under Barrès; and this is done to undermine and ultimately liquidate that which guarantees our sovereignty, our freedom of conscience, and our social benefits: namely, the French model’s progressive, egalitarian, secular, and assimilationist nature. Today, in the name of the fight against archaism, the liberal right is working alongside the Trotskyist left, in the name of the fight against nationalism, to liquidate the French nation. This collaboration undoubtedly explains why the little postman from Neuilly [Translator’s note: Referring here to Olivier Besancenot, extreme left politician and Neuilly-sur-Seine, a wealthy suburb of Paris] is on the good side of the mainstream media and of native liberal decision-makers, who are also from Neuilly!
Defending the French Nation…
Therefore, resisting this imperial subjection and its mystical-bookkeeping totalitarianism means, in the first place, preserving the nation. Rather than defend an obsolete and vengeful nationalism, we must instead, in the face of criticism from the right and the left, defend a new nationalism that protects our social benefits, those brought to us by the National Council of the Resistance (CNR) [Translator’s Note: The body representing the French Resistance in World War 2 that adopted a strongly socialist program], as well as our industries, our jobs, and our political independence. What we really need is an alter-nationalism that can facilitate a healthy cooperation between nations and peoples – i.e., an assimilationist, but not homogenizing, French nationalism – based on a robust state capable of getting its priorities straight regarding economic matters: protecting our industry, our base salaries, our small and medium-sized companies, etc… I’m talking about a strong state also equipped with a strategic vision that conforms to our national interests – interests that evidently goes against those of the Anglo-Saxon empire, which has always shown great disdain for our values, and has always gone about weakening our radiance abroad: be it with Perfidious Albion in Canada and India, or more recently, with the United States, when we saw right through the perverse game they were playing in Indochina and Algeria.
A Sacred Union of the Non-Aligned: Chavez, Putin, Nasrallah…
Put briefly, to defend a social and non-aligned France requires partnering with all regimes that resist the “New World Order,” from Chavez’s Venezuela to Putin’s Russia, without forgetting our remaining prestige and place in the Mediterranean, where, in the Maghreb, in Lebanon, for instance, they still speak French and respect France’s past. I’m taking here about a sacred union of all societies that place themselves on the side of a certain heroism, of a certain poetic existence in relation to Time, utility, and calculation. The Slavic and Arab worlds are there to remind us of our vision of Catholicism from the Middle Ages, or of the socialism romanticized by both Sorel and Proudhon.
Reactionaries and Progressives Against the Liberals
Considering Soviet socialism’s failure, its rejection by the peoples, as well as that of social-democratic reformism, which was entirely submissive to the capitalist diktat, I would say, to conclude, that the only possible alternative to the bourgeois world must stem from the sacred union of reactionaries and progressives. We need a union of reactionaries – be it monarchists, Catholics, Hellenists, Muslims – who are attached to a certain classical order, and of progressives who are hated by the bourgeois world, whether they come from Marchais’ PCF, today’s Worker’s Party, the Serbian resistance, or Venezuelan Chavism. Put differently, reactionaries who are often right must unite with progressives who have often been screwed over, against liberals who dominate the world today and always apply divide and conquer tactics to consolidate their rule; against this empire seeking to destroy human societies and nature; against this empire’s devotion to the cult of Mammon, which causes such catastrophic problems as overproduction, pollution, inequalities.
What Project, What Hope?
Of course, we cannot start a revolution overnight. To fight this globalist, bookkeeping dictatorship without harming our selves or our chances, we should instead come together in solidarity and wait for a more favorable relation of forces. Without acting like a religious cult, we must organize in networks, continue to produce necessary and relevant critiques of our constantly changing world. In the end, to escape, at least conscientiously and personally, a system that reduces us to precariousness, solitude, and depression – provided that it has not yet brainwashed some of us – means elaborating a doctrine of action and resistance, without falling into scholasticism or sterile nostalgia. In short, we must participate in a collective project, find hope, and try to hold our heads high.
That’s why we’re gathered here!
Alain Soral is a Franco-Swiss author, journalist, essayist, and film maker. In 2007, he founded his own political association, Égalité & Réconciliation. At the same time he also launched a publishing company, KontreKulture, which he uses to publish contemporary controversial authors and to reissue out of print public domain books that are of historical importance.