Contrary to Jacques Maritain’s personalism, which forms the metaphysical basis for the social doctrine of the Church that is an attempt to baptise the political, social and economic institutions born of the Revolution, relational metaphysics defines the individual being as a creature to whom God gives existence in order to answer a vocation in the universe. God makes us son of such and such a father, of such and such a mother, members of the human race, in such and such a society, in such and such a nation and confides us the task to receive, to preserve and to transmit the heritage of the lineage.
The family thus existed before each person. It is not the limited framework of the nuclear family dear to personalists; it is also the extended family with all its heritage of experiences, of tradition and civilisation. Unlike the young animal whose conduct is guided by instincts, the human infant, who is absolutely powerless, needs an immediate circle that protects and educates him. Moreover, most of our innate traits are in fact hereditary; they, too, are a family heritage for good or for evil.
The Phalangist thus posits as a principle that the family is the basis of fraternal human life and that family welfare, the foundation of social happiness, is a specific good distinct from the eternal salvation of persons, from national security, and from the individual’s interest as well as from any collective or state interest.
1. As a Catholic, the Phalangist works at his own personal salvation and that of his neighbour. Revealed dogma and morality are the science and the art of this eternal life, and the Church its means, its providential setting and its ultimate end in glory. In this religious toil the saints are our models.
As a Frenchman, the Phalangist puts himself at the service of his nation. The object of political science and art is the tranquillity of the temporal order and the safeguarding of the common good, the deepest desire of the whole nation. The heroes of our history give us an example of this dedication.
But as a member of a family to which he owes all, the Phalangist naturally and daily devotes himself to the bodily and spiritual prosperity of this family, where the fate of each depends on all. Such is the object of communitarian ecology.
The science and the art of common life – a family, inter-family and human life – is called, or ought to be called, communitarian ecology and economy. The learned men who made our civilisation are our guides here.
The supreme law for regulating this family well-being is neither biological, mathematical, metaphysical, moral nor religious. It is specific to and characterises ecological science. It is prudence, a natural virtue, a practical wisdom, applied to creation, to the extension and conservation of the material and spiritual heritage of families, the prime object, in the temporal order, of men’s desires.
1. Our ecology and our economy are defined as the speculative science and the practical art of the ideal conditions and of the possible realisations of family prosperity, through the virtue of prudence and for the purpose of a happy life involving fraternal human communities.
Such a definition, very modern, ties in with those of Aristotle and Saint Thomas (Sum., IIa-IIae qu.50 art. 3; cf. Ad 2!). It is opposed to individualist or collectivist definitions of the social reality and to any materialist conception of the end sought. It opposes even its ideal of « family prudence » to the personalist and spiritualist conception of the economy very much in vogue in contemporary Catholicism.
2. Essentially different from kantian moralism, Catholic doctrine recognises the proper value of the good things of natural life. It is a humanism in the sense that it accepts the fundamental principle of autonomy, also referred to as « subsidiarity »: let each first be concerned for himself; each family for its own life and its own prosperity.
The Church, therefore, recognises the natural autonomy of temporal communities, and she recognises their authority to determine their ends and means, their rights and duties, through a science and an art that come under reason alone.
1. Our Catholic religion gives full rein to the temporal interest of the family, by recognising its correct place and its positive moral value, which stems from social justice and fraternal charity. If the morality of the Gospel calls Christ’s disciples to renounce themselves and to leave all in order to follow their Master, it is so that they may devote themselves, after His example, to the service of God and of neighbour, each in accordance with his natural situation and commitments.
2. Although ecology is a humanism, it nevertheless remains profoundly and almost necessarily Christian. It subordinates ecology to theology, economy to Catholic morality, inasmuch as the good family life finds its light and its strength, its necessary goal and rule, in the love of God and of one’s neighbour, in the quest for eternal salvation and the spirit of sacrifice, all with a view to a supernatural good. The Christian spirit and the life of religion are, therefore, not part and parcel of ecological science and economic practice, but they are indispensable external aids.
Not everything that can be done in the material interest of families is necessarily good or permissible for the salvation of souls. In this respect, economics and morality can be in opposition. But more often, it is morality that aids and supports economics. The superior light of faith, the energies of hope and charity, recourse to the Church’s prayer and sacraments, are necessary if individual egoism and the frenzy of passion are to yield to the interest of families, to the ideal of a happy communitarian life, defined and necessitated by a scientific ecology and economy! Further proof that there is no humanism that is not Christian!
3. That is why « the social revolution that we desire will be moral or it will not be at all » (Soloviev, Péguy). It will be ecological, and therefore humanist, independent and open to every civilised man. It will nonetheless require supernatural light and Christian virtue for it to be defined and brought to fulfilment. Otherwise it will fail.
1. Our traditional, monarchist, Catholic nationalism, stemming from a noble millenary civilisation, certainly does not abolish the free common life of families and of their spontaneous associations either. Rather, it acknowledges, guarantees and protects this life, and if necessary encourages and controls it, or arbitrates for the sake of peace. If the royal power requires to call everyone to the service of their country, sometimes to the extent of the greatest sacrifices, even if it has to remind them constantly of the supreme demands of the nation’s common good and above all of its security, nevertheless this initial good is no more than the external coating and highest guarantee of both the realities of domestic life and the thousands of forms of family prosperity, without which this initial good would be nothing.
The monarchy therefore recognises the priority, the immediate end-value and the autonomous action of families. Their very existence is the basis of the monarchy’s role and justifies its authority and its demands, including the most onerous. The immediate end of national politics is none other than domestic ecology itself; national security must be assured for the sake of the prosperity of families.
2. Our nationalism has, however, learned from the harsh experience of the centuries and from the reasoning of our masters that, without the framework of the nation, without the protection and regulation of the State, and without the encouragement and solicitude of the Sovereign, the father of fathers amongst the kingdom’s families, freedom is but an empty concept, the begetter of anarchy and of inertial, and families can neither define the general ecological ideal nor determine the economic conditions of their prosperity. Prudence cannot be said to reign when political authority is lacking. Unlike the “social doctrine of the Church”, our Catholic ecology does not therefore separate the social question from the question of political institutions.
3. That which public authority does not create, it must however protect by guaranteeing and imposing political order, stability, independence and peace, both internal and external. « Public safety », or national security, is the necessary condition for any real and stable family prosperity. That which he does not command, the Sovereign should however stimulate, codify, control and arbitrate. Thus State interventionism is not always a bad thing. The principle of provisional replacement is the necessary corollary to the principle of subsidiarity.
But, in its concern for the animation and perfecting of the material and spiritual life of families, it would not be good that sovereign public authority should come to dominate and rule this life entirely. Thus State liberalism has its own raison d’être. The ideal is that every family should maintain itself, grow and prosper spontaneously, habitually and happily, according to its own laws, under the distant and benevolent cover of the Church and the King.
If our ecology has no intention other than “to restore Christian civilisation on its natural and divine foundations”, the economic and social system of our time, which is meant to be an economic democracy, is born of the Revolution, of “unsavoury utopia, revolt, and impiety”. Schumpeter, the Austro-American economist, admits so:
1. « The capitalist evolution has annihilated, or pushed close to destruction, the institutional developments of the feudal world – the manor, the village, the artisans’ guild. The world of the artisans has been crushed... The world of lords and of villagers has been destroyed, by political measures in the first instance and, in some cases, by revolutionary measures... Along with the disappearance of the old economic organisation there have also disappeared the economic and political privileges of those classes and groups who had been used to holding the dominant role, in particular the landed gentry and the clergy.
« Economically, this evolution has been interpreted by the bourgeoisie as the breaking of so many shackles and the removal of so many barriers. Politically, this evolution has been interpreted as the replacing of one regime, where the bourgeoisie held a humble position, by another regime much more sympathetic to their rationalist mentality and much more favourable to their immediate interests. Nevertheless… the observer is entitled to wonder whether, in the final analysis, such a wholesale emancipation has been of benefit to the middle class and to bourgeois society. The fact is that the shackles which have disappeared were not only a constraint but also a protection…
« The king, the centre piece of the system, was king by the grace of God, and, considerable though the economic advantages inherent in the capitalist system may have been for him, the roots of his power remained feudal, not only in the historical sense, but even more in the sociological meaning of the term. We are dealing therefore with more than just a case of dynastic survival. We are dealing with the symbiosis of two social layers, one of which clearly supported the other economically and was in its turn supported politically by the second… This symbiosis was the very essence of monarchical society… »
2. « I have described the bourgeois class as rationalist and anti-heroic. In order to defend its position or bend a nation to its will, it can only use rationalist and anti-heroic means… An economic command cannot so easily be transformed into a political command, as could the military command of the mediaeval lord. On the contrary, the ledger book and the calculation of cost prices absorb and isolate those who serve such interests.
« The conclusion is self-evident:… The bourgeois class is ill equipped to confront either internal or international problems, such as any country of importance must normally expect. The bourgeoisie themselves are well aware of this inadequacy, despite all the phraseology used to disguise the fact, and the same goes for the masses. Within a protective framework, not composed of bourgeois materials, the bourgeoisie can gain political success… especially in opposition… But for want of being protected by some non-bourgeois group, the bourgeoisie is politically disarmed and incapable, not only of directing the nation, but even of defending its own class interests: which amounts to saying that it needs a master. »
3. « Now, the capitalist process, as much by its economic mechanism as by its psycho-socio-biological consequences, has eliminated this protective master or, as in the United States, has never given it, or any institution filling the same role, the chance of affirming itself.
« The capitalist evolution causes not only the disappearance of the King by the Grace of God but also of the political ramparts which, had they been able to have been maintained, would have been constituted by the village and the artisan’s guild. Of course, neither of these institutions could have been maintained in the exact form in which they were found by capitalism. All the same, capitalist politics pushed their destruction much further than was necessary… The peasant had no choice but to accept the benefits of primitive liberalism… and all the individualist rope necessary for him to hang himself.
« By breaking the pre-capitalist social framework, capitalism therefore broke not only the barriers that hindered its progress, but also the buttresses that prevented it from collapsing. This process of destruction, deeply disturbing in its character of inexorable fatality, consisted not only in pruning the institutional dead wood, but also in eliminating those partners of the capitalist class whose symbiosis with it was an essential element in stabilising capitalism…
« I am inclined to consider this symbiosis of the classes as the rule rather than the exception… At the very least this rule operated for six thousand years, that is, from the day when the first labourers became the subjects of the nomadic horsemen… »
(Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 12. The walls are crumbling, 2. The destruction of the protective layers)
It is because all its power is based on the 1789 Revolution and the destruction of religion – as well as of the monarchy, the elites, the military class, trade and village communities – that capitalism is unable to carry out reforms that would change its nature. Faced with increasingly serious crises that follow each other, it is unable to do anything other than to feed the monster who will devour it, in order to push back the fatal day of reckoning.
Political democracy, impious, absurd and ruinous as it is for nations, is even more catastrophic for the prosperity and stability of fundamental human communities. For families it is calamity and death.
1. The modern economy is an anti-ecology. This is primarily because it proclaims itself to be, and indeed is, fundamentally democratic. It knowingly tends to replace the real needs of individuals with illusory desires, the compelling necessities of their condition with their arbitrary and passing wishes, their certain duties with their self-styled rights, and finally their true good with the pleasures of the moment. Its major act of imprudence, erected into the supreme law of every economic democracy, is to transpose God’s beatitude to man, Heaven to earth, the future to the present, and the spiritual to the carnal. Christ’s Mystical Body, the fraternity of the sons of God, is transposed to the individual, a solitary, monopolising and jealous divinity.
2. This utopian claim to immediate material happiness for all provokes the dissolution of society due to the fact that each individual now acquires the supreme rule of turning everything to his own individual advantage, with no respect for anything, no fear of any sanction, nor love for anyone. He now acts in the stupid or savage cult of his immediate pleasure alone. It constitutes an absolute negation of the objective reality of the ecological life, which is the family and of the practical art of the family prudently pursuing a certain achievable prosperity common to all its members, whilst also showing respect for the well-being of other families.
3. Alas, through a distressing correspondence of views, contemporary Catholic economists have rallied to this system, establishing a Christian (!) democratic economy. They have kept the monumental error of the system, which is individualism. They, however, have thought to remedy it by calling it « personalism » and by transfiguring it into the profound search – too profound! – for the person’s dignity, his well-being, and his spiritual and moral rights in this temporal life! Thus the whole economy should be in the service, not indeed of the individual – who, according to them, comes under society and is therefore subject to being exploited at will –, but of the person, the possessor of sacred, inviolable and imprescriptible rights, who is therefore superior to any common law.
No! Economic society is not for the person, nor for his salvation (theory of the years 1930-1960), nor for his liberation (theory of the years 1960-1980). The truth is that man, who receives everything from his family and who owes it everything, only finds his proper ecological finality in the common good of family prosperity. Any system, be it a religion, denying this fundamental truth will trigger the collapse of the society and of families. It is therefore a crime to deny it.
1. The dissolution of family ties and consequently of natural communities and traditional societies, under the pressure of individualism, leads inevitably to a total disaffection for even the most perfect political community, the work of the time-honoured virtues of a whole people – the nation. Societies that are based on profit, production and consumerism are societies without frontiers, without laws, and without a destiny.
The monstrous science of economics and in particular modern « political economics » so-called, studiously ignores the most important political reality, the vital fact of the nation and its peculiar, almost infinite, capacity for security, order and cohesion… Such systems invincibly tend to discredit patriotic sentiment and, in its calculations, methodically cut contemporary man off from his roots in the past, by giving him free rein in the present to all his dreams of emancipation and to his passion for change, and by exalting the current moment and its immediate success without looking ahead to the future or providing for the good of future generations.
2. Economic democracy, therefore, knows nothing of the real vocation of political power. Because the common good does not exist for it – except in cases of international crisis or of phenomenal danger! It contests all sovereign public authority and excludes it from intervening in the life of the economy.
The democratic economy is radically destructive of the nation, of patriotism and of all civic sense unless it subjects them to the defence of economic interests. The democratic economy necessarily entails the disappearance of the sense of a nation’s true common good.
3. Yet it calls on the State! It multiplies the state’s interventions to the point where we have a system of total interventionism and until economic democracy is transformed into a regime of economic dictatorship, highly centralised and controlled. Such behaviour is always accompanied by the negation of political power as the supreme function of the nation’s government for the common good. In this system the State is no more than an agent of the economic system, at the service of the individual who is its exclusive centre of interest. The State is the all powerful and all-knowing pilot of economic growth, the strict administrator of individual and collective goods!
Under whatever guise it may take, economic democracy always entails the subjection of the public to the private, of the common well-being to particular interests, of the State to individuals, of politics to economics, to ego-nomics.
1. Emancipation from every social framework for the supreme satisfaction of his egoism, which economic democracy preaches as his primary right and greatest duty, provokes in modern man a radical rejection, total and definitive, full of hatred or, worse still, cold and hard-hearted, of God, of Jesus Christ, and of the Church. By an implicit but reinforced social pact, every religion is forbidden any claim to intervene in the life of the economy in any way whatsoever, whether by doctrinal and moral teaching, by ecclesiastical laws, canonical sanctions or threats of eternal torments. Modern economy is atheist, or rather atheistic.
2. Refusing to be imbued with Christianity, it becomes inhuman, and monstrously so. Man freed from God – or rather chased away from Him, hounded from Him – finds himself impoverished, reduced, and emptied of his own substance, of all the thoughts, traditions, morality and customs of his heredity, of his spiritual patrimony. He is made a slave to the superstructures of the modern economy, to the driving illusions of the materialist ego-nomy: advertising, cultural myths, gastronomy, eroticism… Man becomes a stomach without brain or heart, without a thought other than technical, and without powers of decision other than commercial. For the first time in the history of the world he is an irreligious animal.
3. If economic democracy then appeals to the Churches, to spiritual values, to Christian inspiration, these divine realities are thereby basely prostituted and degraded for a vile purpose simply because of their market value and the returns they are calculated to yield by making the commercial wheels turn faster.
For the remaining members of the faithful to lend themselves to such a return of religions to the modern world would be to hasten their fall through the most abject of calculations.
4. For these three reasons, the Phalangist has a hatred and a horror of this modern economic democracy wherein he is nevertheless forced to live and survive with other men, his brothers. He knows that « well-ordered Charity begins with oneself ». Because it is necessary to be and to live in order to act, to act in order to serve, and to serve in order to attain one’s own end, which is of a transcendent order and of which God is the master and the judge. But that the whole of life should be a matter of loving oneself and serving oneself, he can neither conceive nor accept that this should become the unique sovereign principle of all order, human disorder!
1. Always in pursuit of a more stable equilibrium, families form trade groupings or coalitions with a view to improving and regulating the production, flow and distribution of their produce and the maintenance of its currency value, in a prudent manner and for their own best advantage. Such an agreement is naturally internal and leads to self-management and mutual aid among members of the same trade, regulating their activities, imposing its demands of competence and of honesty, apportioning work and limiting competition, and tending in the end to make the corporation share in the human perfection of the fundamental ecological unit: the family.
2. Such an organisation of free initiative, of great creativity, of practically unlimited expansion, seeks of its own accord to maintain a spirit of fraternal community and service that is quite remarkable. It is therefore a factor of civilisation and of human equilibrium: our third "utopia" or ecological ideal is to conserve this living and free institution of the corporations.
Such strong organisations can, however, depart considerably from their original intention, can break with that prudence which was their primary perfection and yield to violent acts of injustice. When that happens, a profession, a class, an oligarchy seizes hold of the institution to bend it to its own exclusive and brutal advantage. For the first time, the problem of economic order and of social justice is posed but can find no solution within the economic community itself nor within its natural tendency to harmony.
3. The necessary conclusion is that once a certain stage of organisation has been reached, economic life tends to free itself from the natural rules of ecological prudence and harmony. Profit, private interests and malignant coalitions can dominate an institution and make it the instrument of their injustice. It is then that the intervention of a superior moderating authority proves to be necessary. Such an authority must be capable of watching over the honesty of corporative and professional agreements, of arbitrating in conflicts, of re-establishing any compromised equilibrium, and will therefore need an ecological science and an economic art which hitherto society had managed without. It is the law of all progress that it should ever more necessarily call on the aid of systematic intelligence.
Thus the organisation of society into corporative groupings will require another form of "prudence", no longer spontaneous but scientific, no longer internal but external, and this will be the harmonious work, just and intelligent, of an authority guided by reason.
1. In ancient societies the elementary ecological balances sufficiently imposed their rules of spontaneous prudence so as to maintain a certain harmony, a certain justice. There existed a natural proportion between productive work and the satisfaction of needs. In mediaeval Christian society, the corporations and guilds guaranteed, in the same spirit of family prudence, the distribution of work and revenues with a certain equity, as did the feudal bond for the land. But with the formation of professional coalitions of commerce, of finance and finally of industry, all the natural cadres broke up. In a society totally emancipated from its age-old instincts of natural balance and prudence, this resulted in the unhinged zest for economic life that today threatens – unless channelled by a superior power – to sweep away the world in a folly of unregulated profit and catastrophe. Where the national community still exists, it is the ultimate ecological force, today at least, capable of mastering this wild phenomenon and of recalling the unchained economic forces to prudence.
2. The nation is the vastest of communitarian cadres still to have the "family" spirit, where it is possible to recover and impose, by way of paternal authority, this more ample "prudence", which will be our fourth "utopia". In this unity of superior, political essence, the necessary balances can be safeguarded or restored – such as those of agriculture and industry, of town and country, of expenditure and investment, of production and consumption, of capital and work, of export and import – as well as the indispensable social harmonies among classes, regions and peoples.
3. Beyond that, at the present time, there exists no international ecological community that is not illusory, and there is no effective sovereign authority. Each nation, therefore, is forced to try to extend its organising power beyond its own frontiers in order to control its supplies of raw materials, the balance of its exchanges, the maintenance of its currency in the international market, etc. As among families, the virtue of prudence among nations is still the best guarantee of ecological equilibrium!
In conclusion, knowing that the struggle for life is the natural condition of men on earth, the safeguarding of the prosperity of families is by degrees relegated to the nation whose essential function is peace, the maintenance of peace, the eminent form of economic war brought under control by the royal prudence which, in conjunction with its force, ensures the temperance of the national community, the mother of all justice.