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 national security. 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.
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. The science and the art of this 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.
2. 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.
3. The phalangist posits as a principle that the family is the basis of fraternal human life and that family well-being, the foundation of social happiness, is a specific good distinct from the eternal salvation of persons, from the nation’s security, and from the individual’s interest as well as from any collective or state interest.
And he affirms that 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 Catholic religion gives full rein to the importance of the temporal 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.
Essentially different from kantian moralism, Catholic doctrine recognises the proper value of the good things of natural life. It is a humanism. It accepts the maxim of "sacred egoism", each man for himself and God for all, a provocative expression of the fundamental principle of autonomy, referred to as "subsidiarity" by our moderns: 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.
2. Nevertheless, this humanism 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 which 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 their spontaneous associations. 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 constantly remind them of the supreme demands of national security, nevertheless this initial good is no more than the external coating and highest guarantee of the realities of domestic life and the prosperity of thousands of families, without which national security 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 most Christian King, 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.
3. That which royal 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 Prince should however stimulate, codify, control and arbitrate. Thus State interventionism is not always a bad thing. But, in his concern for the animation and perfecting of the material and spiritual life of families, it would not be good that the Prince should come to dominate and rule this life entirely. Thus State liberalism also 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.
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, something that is barbarous and inhuman. 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 seek to transpose God’s beatitude to man, Heaven to earth, the future to the present, and the spiritual to the carnal. And 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 constitutes an absolute negation of the objective reality of the ecological life, the primary condition for all prosperity, which is the family. It contradicts the idea 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. Democratic economy reveals itself to be a contradiction in terms. It 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.
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. But they 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 its impositions –, 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). But 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. To this he must accommodate himself, including his moods and his religion, under penalty of crime and of deserved exclusion.
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 all patriotic sentiment by methodically cutting 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. In its eyes, things like war, diplomacy and the police, etc. should not exist and feature as intolerable parasites in the quest for the economic optimum. The democratic economy is radically destructive of the nation, of patriotism and of all civic sense.
And 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. But 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, from which function it must not for a moment divert its attention in order to pursue a national policy!
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, 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. And 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 religion 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. The family community is the primary object of ecological theory and the primary economic agent. This is because it exists and assumes its destiny as a moral person, a unity of conjugal and parental love, and not as a place of encounter, profit, commerce and competition. The family unit is anterior to all relationships based on interest, over which the law of market forces presides.
The family is a complete ecological cell, with its own stable biological, material and moral interests, its complete round of activities, its labours directed to its own consumption, its savings for its shared long-term projects, its constant and assured desire for fecundity and balanced prosperity: its spontaneous prudence. For thousands of years, domestic economy in its pure state has reigned almost exclusively over the whole world. It is domestic economy that reconstitutes itself, defends and adapts itself, and prospers the most securely. It is truly the basis of every more complex system, for want of which nothing will ever be in conformity with nature or capable of lasting.
2. The first thing necessary, therefore, is to authorise and restore family liberty, to allow it to live and to expand. Such a liberty implies authority, property and responsibility. In other words: decision, capability, and prudence. The family has needs which it endeavours to satisfy by means of its capability to produce and exchange goods, in accordance with its autonomous faculties of decision. It is up to the family to balance work and consumption, expenditure and saving, conservation and exchange, so as to enjoy the good life today in moral security. In accordance with its own discretion, it leads its own interior life and engages its members and possessions, its honour and its future, in its external relationships. No power can replace this first seat of decision and responsibility without fatally affecting the basic ecological equilibrium of human society.
3. It is here that the first "utopia" or ideal norm for the ecology becomes apparent: the prudence of family communities is the first and most indispensable remedy for all the economic crises encountered by mankind through history. The more solid and the more wholesome the family institution, the better will society face up to its difficulties. This sacred principle implies absolute respect for the three elements of family ecology: the power of decision for this community, or authority, the power to make use of its possessions in a lasting manner, or property, and the power to contract stable commitments, or responsibility.
The family is the first sanctuary of a concerted ecological life, whose reality can never be totally penetrated by any scientific or mathematical analysis. It lies outside the supervision and intrusion of other economic powers, which must serve it rather than enslave it.
1. Wherever there is lack of stable equilibrium among families, they tend to make free associations together in order to collaborate in the production and consumption of goods. The benefit of this understanding prevails over any antagonism of interests and leads to their harmony. This is the whole area of spontaneous contracts whence results the second ecological equilibrium; sale, rent, lease; salaries, businesses, credit, commerce.
These economic relationships are marked by their origin, by the proximity of the contracting parties, the families of the proprietor and of the tenant, of the lender and of the borrower, of the merchant and of the client, etc. It is one factor of the humanist equilibrium, object of the second "utopia" or ideal ecological norm: the rigorous pursuit of profit is again tempered or governed by spontaneous elements relating to prudence, tranquillity of the neighbourhood, security of the future, simplicity of agreement, the advantages of friendship, etc.
2. There is every advantage in granting these contracts and associations the greatest freedom, before any intrusion by the authorities and administrative regulations, since the ecological equilibrium here finds its own level and maintains itself unaided. Where family responsibility comes first, mutual justice proceeds from a prudence which constructs a fraternity, and the honest advantage of all parties results in stability.
These associations, the fruits of freedom, still remain based on a natural harmony, for any excess or any injustice rapidly finds itself sanctioned by an opposing violence resulting in the dissolution of society. Antagonism, therefore, is a lack of ecological prudence; solidarity, on the other hand, is wisdom.
3. Human organisation and civilisation grow in proportion to the development of these agreements in free association and collaboration. These agreements yield more for the strong than for the weak and are said to develop inequality. But it is a protective inequality, for antagonism corrupts social relationships, doing more harm to the weak than to the strong. It is the fate of the weak to be crushed in conflicts. Finally, inequality is tempered by fraternal human relationships and by human wisdom.
An ecological order more than a thousand years old was established on the foundations of these social relationships where justice, resulting from the prudence of the contracting parties, became the law ruling the institution. In this way, great nations and very high civilisations were able to live and prosper in a spontaneous economy, morally regulated by religion, protected by the political powers, but self-managed and conserved in a general balance that was human rather than mathematical, natural and not technocratic, spontaneous rather than planned. It was an equilibrium where the virtue of prudence prevailed over the barbarous law of profit.
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.