exerpt from John Ralston Saul "Voltaire's Bastards"
ISBN 014015373x
...
One hundred and fifty years later, in 1844, very little had changed.
Six hundred thousand of the 912,000 residents of Paris lived in slums. 3
At Montfaucon, in the north of the city, transporters of excrement, who
had been collecting door-to-door during the night, dumped their loads
into great swamps of the same matter. Men spent their lives living on
these shores and wading out every day in search of small objects they
might sell. At Lille, in the 1860s, in the working-class district of
Saint-Sauveur, 95 percent of the children died before the age of five.
The famed Paris sewer system was created over a long period in the
second half of the last century. The long delays were largely due to the
virulent opposition of the property owners, who did not want to pay to
install sanitary piping in their buildings. These people were the New
Right of their day. The Prefect of Paris, Monsieur Poubelle, succeeded
in forcing garbage cans on the property owners in 1887 only after a
ferocious public battle. This governmental interference in the
individual's right to throw his garbage into the street -- which was, in reality,
the property owner's right to leave his tenants no other option -- made
Poubelle into the "cryptosocialist" of the hour. In 1900 the owners were
still fighting against the obligations both to put their buildings on the
public sewer system and to cooperate in the collection of garbage. In
1904 in the eleventh arrondissement, a working-class district, only two
thousand out of eleven thousand buildings had been piped into the
sewer system. By 1910 a little over half the city's buildings were on the
sewers and only half the cities in France had any sewers at all.
Photos of early-twentieth-century Marseilles show great piles of
refuse and excrement down the centre of the streets. Cholera outbreaks
were common and ravaged the population. In 1954 the last city without,
St. Remy de Provence, installed sewers.
It was the gradual creation of an effective bureaucracy which brought
an end to all this filth and disease, and the public servants did so against
the desires of the mass of the middle and upper classes. The free market
opposed sanitation. The rich opposed it. The civilized opposed it. Most
of the educated opposed it. That was why it took a century to finish
what could have been done in ten years. Put in contemporary terms, the
market economy angrily and persistently opposed clean public water,
sanitation, garbage collection and improved public health because they
appeared to be unprofitable enterprises which, in addition, put limits on
the individual's freedoms. These are simple historic truths which have
been forgotten today
thus permitting the fashionable belief that even public water services should be privatised
in order that they night benefit from the free-market system.
It was the property owners, with their unbelievably narrow
selfinterest, who made Marx a man to follow. That there was not some
sort of abrupt social revolution in Western Europe and America in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was due almost
entirely to the devotion and gradual success of the
administrative class. In effect they saved the property, rights
and privileges of those who opposed their reforms. And they did
so, despite being poorly paid, only half supported by the
politicians, and resented as they are still today by those
who had to contribute from their pockets.
How then, if the battle fought and won was both just and popular,
have the old elites been able to convince so many citizens that
public servants and the services they offer are to be looked upon
with contempt? In part the explanation has been a spreading
realization among those elites who oppose universal services that
reason is just a method. It was therefore only a matter of time
before people who opposed such things as public sanitation learned
how to use the relevant skills, as one might learn how to use a new
weapon. More to the point, the men of reason, like Chinese
mandarins, have always been for hire. And pools of large capital
lying where they do, the bulk of new rational argument is now
provided by corporate-sponsored think tanks and foundations. Two
centuries after the Encyclopédistes, their victims are busy paying
for their own version of the truth to be written.
Citizens are nevertheless surprised by the facility with which
the rational mechanism is being used to do exactly the opposite
of what the eighteenth-century philosophers intended. This
inversion has been facilitated by a natural division between
elected representatives and administrative elites. Their
on-again, off-again cooperation lasted through much of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For the last quarter
century, it has been definitively off. At the best of times it
was a fragile alliance which involved temporarily putting aside
opposing values and different origins.
The main line of reason was always the creation of a new man
one who would revolutionise the governing of all men, thanks to a new
process, The result of this public-private revolution would be a fair
society. Democratic control was not part of the process. And moral
belief was there only indirectly, because many eighteenth-century
philosophers were convinced their rational structures would fin ally
release the full force of morality into the public place.
"I sincerely believe," Jefferson wrote in 1814, while Napoleon was
still raging across Europe and everything seemed to have gone wrong
"in the general existence of a moral instinct. I think it is the
brightest gem with which the human character is studded."(4) Almost
thirty years before, in 1787, Jefferson had been American ambassador
in Paris. In those last moments before the cataclysm, he was the only
man of reason on the scene to have applied his ideas to a successful
revolution. His house was constantly filled with French thinkers and
politicians seeking advice. In that atmosphere, he wrote to a young
American:
Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed
in this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely
relative to this. The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of
man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings in a stronger or
weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less
degree. It may be strengthened by exercise.(5)
There is no suggestion here that reason and morality were linked. As
for the new systems, both American and French, they were
experiments, but the idea of representative government had been neither
assumed nor sought. Reason was to provide a process thanks to which
new, properly trained elites would be able to create a better society. The
result would be a just form of authoritarian government. Men of power
would be expected to exercise self-control. Failing that, the system itself
would limit them.(5)
Democracy was an unexpected participant that somehow crashed the
events. While the origins of modern reason lay with men principally
interested in the uses of power, many of them royal or papal advisers
seeking more effective ways to rule, those of democracy stretched back
to the freemen of tribal northern Europe living in extended families.
Little is known of this period after the decline of Rome. From the
beginning, however, the concept of an association among equals runs
through the evolution of democracy. The early attempts to reach beyond
kinship resulted in gilds in Scandinavia and Germany. These gatherings
of freemen began with little more than banquets and the swearing of
oaths, but quickly evolved into self-protection, self-help groups. By the
eighth century they were widespread in England. The earliest surviving
gild statutes date from the first part of the eleventh century. Members
swore faithful brotherhood to each other. "If one misdo, let all bear it;
let all share the same lot," was the way the Cambridge Gild put it.
By the tenth century one could see the next stage -- representative
assemblies -- emerging slowly in England with the delegates to the local
Courts of Shire and the Hundred. Elsewhere in Europe, somewhat the
same process was underway. There was a representative Cortes in
Aragon in 1133 and Castile in 1162.
....
(4) Jefferson, "The Life". letter to the writer Thomas Law, 13 June 1814, 636
(5) Ibid., Letter to Peter Carr from Paris, 10 August 1787, 429