1. Founded on belief and trust in God, Creator and Providence, benevolent and beneficent, and strengthened by the lessons of the past that show what the French people, once liberated and made fraternal, are capable of, our national restoration will have as its sovereign rule the fundamental principle of ecological science and art: the harmony of the land, the village and work. It is the most precious heritage of our thousand-year-old civilisation. We must save what remains of it. We must save what remains of it, try to rebuild what has disappeared and continue to construct human civilisation in accordance with this Wisdom, which is even more divine and Christian than human.
This harmony consists entirely in a constant distribution and equilibrium of the three great elements of human life.
– Territory, not polluted but preserved, cultivated and cared for: land, sea, air, fields and forests, water ressources…
– Housing, distributed throughout the land in accordance with a reasonable population density and corresponding to civilised and natural norms: family homes grouped in villages, market towns and provincial cities, regional and national capitals, suitably dispersed.
– Work, conceived for the sake of civilisation and not the other way round: agriculture, forestry and fishing first of all, skilled craftsmanship and commerce; light and medium industry, and ultimately heavy industry, made especially subordinate to ecological needs; and the service sector itself, inseparable from human balances, to be safeguarded and enriched.
2. The geography of France shows the incomparable predestination of this country for the all so varied perfections of ecological balance. Nevertheless, the senseless consequences of a century and a half of cancerous industrial development and of leprous urban concentration have widely destroyed the fundamental harmonies. It will be a long-term work to rebuild them, requiring a grand ecological policy decided from above, but brought to realisation enthusiastically by the unanimous national community.
3. This return to « ecological balance » will not be the technocratic and planned creation of an omnipotent and omniscient State. It will be the spontaneous and prudent work of patience and of love carried out by the four « pillars » of ecology: the family, the associations of mutual agreement that families might form, the associations of mutual agreement with publicly recognised legal rights and, at last, the national community. These fundamental institutions of all civilised human societies must support each other and wisely develop according to a thousand subtle forms of correlation. Their restoration and smooth running thus form the essential of our ecology.
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 that 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 prudence, 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, once freed from capitalo-socialist propaganda, 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, the reality of which 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. French family law was formerly none other than ecclesiastical law, making marriage a stable and civilised institution, founded on a sacrament and an irrevocable commitment, defining the family as a natural and sacred hierarchy, a reciprocity of services, a balance of duties and rights. It assured a thousand years of family vitality and consequently the nation’s fecundity and vigour. The Revolution, in accordance with its very principles, was bound to destroy this solid edifice. It took it two centuries to do so. Family law was not able to resist the declaration and the insistence on the rights of man, the sum of the anarchic and egoistic demands of the individual, « born a foundling and dying celibate » (Renan). Moreover, democratic principles have corrupted morals, and governments declared themselves constrained to adapt legislation to morals! Such indeed is the profile of all decadence.
The indissoluble family has given way to the free encounter of two individuals who may soon be separated by a divorce of mutual consent. The husband’s authority, which maintained the natural authority of the head of the family, no longer exists. The spouses are independent and set one against the other by law. Paternal and parental authority has been dissolved by law, and has practically disappeared following the emancipation of the children and the frenzied collectivisation of their whole existence. The legitimate family has been demolished by concubinage and homosexual unions being put on the same civil level as marriage, no distinction being made any longer between legitimate children and children born out of wedlock or from adulterous unions. The judge, the only authority to survive amidst this wreckage, is constantly called on to settle every legal dispute. He makes and unmakes families, as passions and family conflicts dictate. Juridically, economically and socially, free union, favoured by all sorts of statutes, has become a recognised status, preferable to the state of marriage. Having children had already become, thanks to the regulations of the civil code, a considerable inconvenience, but now it has become a matter for shame, an affront to the rights of those who are presently enjoying life. The masonic Republic organises propaganda in favour of contraception, paid for out of State money. It methodically delivers the youth of the schools to depravity and, in collusion with financial trusts who exploit this industry and commerce, brings to perfection an immense labour for the general corruption of society. Homosexuality is legitimated and protected. Furthermore freedom of abortion undermines the very foundations of civilisation. So much is this so that today the traditional conception of the family is alien to the experience of a great part of the youth in our societies.
2. The Church alone can undertake this necessary and urgent rectification of morals, which, however, remains the deepest wish of the peoples, corrupted by democratic propaganda and institutions. The civil law must aid in this rectification by the restoration, at least optional and gradual, of the former French Law, natural and Christian. Its principal agenda will be indissoluble monogamous marriage, paternal and parental authority in the legitimate family community, and the absolute banning of abortion.
Given our pluralist society, and taking into account the decadence of morals, other kinds of family law will be recognised, Orthodox, Muslim, Jewish, etc. with the exception of individualist anarchy that claims to know nothing of any mutual commitment, any natural law or morality. The State will oblige everyone to be loyal to his commitments in accordance with his particular law. Thus Catholics will be judged according to ecclesiastical law and the recognised obligations of sacramental marriage freely contracted by them. Of their own accord, families will commit themselves to the path of the desired restoration.
To restore the family structure is not sufficient; families must also be endowed with means that enable them to exercise their ecologic function. The economic and social liberties, both material and spiritual, of families will be recognised to the extent of their stability. Heads of families will have wide scope to make decisions of their own choosing and to exert their will according to their capacity, free from all state control or collective pressure. This right must be a fundamental norm of the new order. Freedom and responsibility will govern childbearing, education and instruction, career guidance, health, leisure, culture, housing, savings and investments, retirement, and the rules of inheritance, all contained within the bounds of law and custom.
All these faculties will no longer be simply claims lodged with a welfare state, but will be real rights, and they will manifestly be counter-balanced by fidelity, subjection and responsibility. The disengagement of the State will thus be happily compensated for by the enhanced responsibility of family authority, the natural prudence of which can never be over-estimated. For every family has a store of wisdom and energy for seeking and safeguarding its own “human capital”, which is composed of spiritual values even more than of material goods and advantages.
The disengagement of public authorities, however, cannot be total. In certain cases, their interventions or their financial aid are indispensable, especially on matters of health. Whether this engagement comes within the framework of local or of national policies, they will always aim – directly or indirectly – at helping families, and their modes will have to respect family authority, except in obvious cases where the public interest is at stake.
In the event of shortcomings in family authority, guardianship procedures will be provided for and may be ordered by the legal authorities. Rather than relying on State organisms, guardianship could be exercised « as a good father would do » in the framework of the extended family or of local charitable institutions, under the control of responsible local authorities. This will enable the guardianship to be exercised in very flexible conditions.
In a capitalo-socialist democracy « property is theft », just as power is usurpation. It is very true: the liberal Revolution has transformed these two social functions, which form the basis and the rule for all civilised human order, into instruments for destabilising the French heritage and into ways whereby financial and political oligarchies can rob the country of its wealth. It is institutionalised violence. Liberal capitalism, by its abusive and intensive commercialisation of all wealth and by making monetary or commercial tokens prevail over real wealth, has forcibly destabilised every class in society, and the latter are looted and despoiled by inflation, speculation and monetary agitation in exact proportion to their stability and entrenchment, their steadiness and honesty. Socialism completes this ruin by arrogating to itself the exorbitant function of a great avenger, charged with the redistribution of wealth by transferring the property of private persons to the State and from the State to its own favourites, judging itself to be the principal beneficiary.
1. Ecological science posits as a principle that property is an element of the natural freedom of families and one of the bases of order, vitality and stability for any society. All property is recognised as legitimate once it is inherited or acquired in accordance with custom and law, whether it be the capital accumulated by families or the fruits of an honest income, of savings, work, services rendered, an exchange or a normal gift, the intention and use of which is not for society to discuss.
No a priori principle, whether egalitarian or libertarian can challenge this appropriation and peaceful possession of property by families. To claim the contrary to the advantage of the State or of the collectivity in the name of a « social mortgage » – as socialists do – or of a universal law, would be tantamount to disturbing the ecological order.
2. This right to private property, however, cannot be the absolute and individualist right of the liberal bourgeois who brought about the Revolution of 1789. The necessity of living in society implies that this right to free possession and disposal is adjusted and therefore limited and relativised by every communitarian convention and mutual agreement, establishing the balance of social relations. Such in former times were the various controls regulating family, feudal or common goods. It is because this counterbalance no longer existed, that property – especially industrial and commercial property – acquired such a savage character in the 19th century.
Nevertheless – and here we have a second limitation naturally encountered by property, this time by virtue of the higher common good – the State, or more precisely the sovereign authority, in its capacity as recognised defender of the nation, and because it assures the peaceful possession of all property, has certain royal rights over property that justify the duties and services it is entitled to demand: taxes on property, compulsory purchase if need be, etc.
1. The new order will honour and respect property all the more if it is of patrimonial value and entails services to society. In every profound civilisation there exists a bond between property and persons, between wealth and its social function, between the prestige of the property owner and his moral obligations. On the contrary, in abolishing « privilege », the Revolution discredited property, freed it from all honour and service, and thus made of it a purely material wealth exclusively for individual and vulgar enjoyment.
2. Consequently, every family community, or every local community, professional, moral or religious, with an important responsibility of service and great stability, needs to feel that it is the master of its own work and revenue, its savings and patrimonial or mortmain wealth, for perpetuity, without any threat of confiscation troubling it and tempting its management to indulge in fraudulent concealment or speculation in an attempt to guard their property from any unjust erosion.
A return to a greater freedom of donations and a relaxation of the rule of succession will give the final desirable guarantees to communitarian and family property rights. The State will consider it as a certain ecological advantage not to impose unreasonable taxation on family capital and inheritance or on property belonging to the great social institutions and to the nation’s great bodies.
3. In order to respect and to honour property, the State itself must correct the two fundamental vices of the capitalo-socialist modern economy: inflation and the tax system.
The sovereign authority will consider it its duty to ensure that the nation has a sound currency, one that corresponds to the wealth and genuine activity of the nation. It will see to it that this currency keeps a stable value for decades, in contrast to all the theories and bad habits of modern societies. For inflation is a disguised despoliation of savers and honest workers by big business financial speculators, exploiters of the people, and by the State and its ravenous organisms.
The sovereign authority will consider taxation as compensation for services rendered but in accord with the common good of the nation. Unless there are serious necessities, the authority will thus attend to limiting its services according to its real financial capacities. It will manage its budget extremely well so that tax levy does not break into the capital of the nation.
Wanton and unregulated inflation and fiscal pressure actually favour individual wealth, which is monetary, irresponsible, undeclared and fraudulent, to the detriment of visible wealth – which cannot be concealed to the tax authorities –, consisting in the revenue from honest activity and family property, servants of the common good. The sovereign authority will support the latter and hound the former. It will be mindful that the first and golden rule of all good public finance, as of any healthy economy, is confidence. Its paternal authority alone can give this to his honest people.
4. The intellectual heritage, the talents and the experience that may be found in a family will be also preserved and fostered. For example, the transfer of the occupational activity and its apprenticeship to the members of a same family will be facilitated.
Thus, the restoration of property rights will be warmly approved by every father of a family, and it will reanimate the birth-rate, vitality, and energy of the nation.
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 that 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 and injustice. This is true when the society is based on individualist principles but if it is governed by a sovereign and paternal authority, inequality is naturally protective. These agreements are one of the means to prevent the weak from being crushed for inequality is tempered here by fraternal human relationships and by family 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, self-regulated rather than planned. It was an equilibrium where the virtue of prudence prevailed over the barbarous law of profit.
Contrary to an impression too widely diffused amongst public opinion by politicians, most Frenchmen – and most other men too! – earn their living in companies and enterprises of small or medium importance. It is these that we should first be concerned to free from capitalist, trade unionist and state control, and so restore them to their spontaneous ecological balance, to their fraternity. Large scale industry will have to follow. On the other hand, regulating everything on the model of large scale industry necessarily leads to the systematic destruction of the smaller enterprises.
1. The solution to the social problem begins with the restoration of the basic economic community, the small and medium sized enterprise, which provides the essential of economic activity, and the rehabilitation of its responsible head, the entrepreneur. The enterprise must be solid, so that the entrepreneur may have the freedom to be a true manager, enterprising, honest and human. At the present time, these enterprises are crushed by so many burdens and have become such a battleground, that no stability, prudence or justice is possible for them.
The banks absorb the principal part of their profits and decide on their survival or their death by releasing or blocking credit. Bureaucracy, with its excessive rules and regulations, its fiscal pressure, its extravagant social charges, work inspections that are enslaved to the letter of regulations, social assessments, factory politics, etc., has made life intolerable for them, damping all initiative, effort and progress. The trade unions add to the insecurity and deterioration of the social climate with their political strikes, inopportune demands, and working to rule, the goal of which is alien to the interests of their own members.
2. All these intruders must be chased out of enterprise; and to whom should enterprise be given if not to the entrepreneur, to its patron and to its collaborators of all professional levels, whose work is needed for their own families?
The enterprise may, in fact, be defined as a business project, the real end of which is to ensure the livelihoods of the families that find themselves associated with it by work or heritage. If the owner alone has the legitimacy to draft or to alter the project, the other collaborators will adhere to it more or less explicitly, according to their responsibilities. The work contract will define the conditions of this association.
The first person in charge of the enterprise – its « father » is the one who has launched this plan or who assumes its management – is the entrepreneur, the patron. Because he is the most interested in the success of the enterprise and in its durability, he is ideally placed to defend the common interest and entertain the reasonable claims of all its members. So much the better if this patron is also the owner of the company, for he is then the most reliable person to take charge. If he is not the owner, then social law will tie his fate closely to that of the enterprise or company whose director or manager he is constituted by law.
Once he has been freed from all aberrant controls and restored to his full personal authority, the patron is, however, obliged to establish organs for mutual dialogue amongst all the members of the economic community he directs, between themselves and with him, whatever be their rank in the enterprise.
3. All this presupposes an overhaul of the laws of Labour, commercial and company laws, particularly the laws of the anonymous company of protestant capitalist origin, a type of democracy rigged by money that allows every kind of abuse, and which royalist social Catholics – and they only – have stood up against. Consequently, investment, the money market and the organisation of the stock exchange will be cleansed, so as to put also an end to anonymous financial dealings involving transfers of ownership, changes of management or even of the company itself, unscrupulous speculation, secret agreements, etc., in order to dominate and crush the markets in the interests of money without laws or frontiers.
The foundation of an enterprise as well as its management comes eminently under the virtue of prudence. Instead of pursuing the maximum profit, it is the viability and durability of the enterprise that must be sought in order to ensure the long-term prosperity of the families that depend on it. Within the enterprise, there will result development strategies and human relationships that are different from those that are in current use in capitalist enterprises.
1. Although the enterprise’s owner enjoys entire authority over the business project, for its realisation, it is competence that is the basis of the legitimacy of authority at the very heart of the enterprise. This criterion alone enables to ensure the personalisation of the various functions of management, investment in capital, and labour, and the cohesion of all around the head of the company in order to face external difficulties and, naturally, to maintain human relationships comprised of mutual respect and justice, within the work community.
In the case of enterprises that do not exclusively belong to families or that do not have owners who ensure their management, families will have to be protected against their decisions or those of the shareholders that would unjustly or unwisely jeopardise the enterprise. The management and its executives will thus have a right of recourse to arbitration and of appeal before the competent courts.
2. The role of the financier will also be supervised. Considered as a partner of the enterprise, in the same way as, for example, engineers who contribute their know-how, the financier will no longer be able to usurp either the authority of the owner as regards the business project or that of his collaborators over the management of the enterprise. His financial contribution will give him the right to draw a dividend from the profits of the enterprise. The amount of this dividend will take into account the length of his commitment to the business project.
3. The personnel will be hierarchised according to its tasks in the enterprise, but also according to its dedication and competence. Therefore, newcomers, who have to prove themselves, will be distinguished from full-fledged members of the enterprise and from the firm’s employees of long standing who, in their respective task, have developed a competence that is recognised by all. They will form a particular category that management will make every effort to consult, especially as regards improving working conditions and productivity. The business project will be submitted to them. They will also be consulted in their field as regards the definitive accepting of new associates for the enterprise. Internal promotion will also be fostered.
4. Restoring the patron’s legitimate authority within the enterprise does not mean that it will be an arbitrary management, quite to the contrary. The concern for the common good of the enterprise and for effectiveness in carrying out tasks implies regular consultation of the personnel concerned. It will be organised on a regular basis and added to the right of the firm’s long-time employees to express freely their opinion at all times. This will advantageously replace Workers’ Council 1 that are subject to trade union diktats.
5. These principles of ecological management of the enterprise easily create a climate of family work that will incline the members of a same enterprise to help each other in various ways. According to the size of the enterprise, to local customs and real needs, the head of the enterprise may facilitate this mutual aid and organise it at best with the help of long-time employees in his firm.
Just as families associate themselves through mutual agreements in accordance with their needs, enterprises will act likewise in order to extend and improve their activities.
1. A very great liberty on this matter will be recognised to the heads of enterprise, whether it be to protect their industries, to improve quality, to provide adapted professional training, to protect the environment or to share services such as legal aid or computer development, etc. These organisations of free initiative, of great creativity, of practically unlimited expansion, seek of their own accord to maintain a spirit of fraternal community and service that is quite remarkable. They are therefore a factor of civilisation and of human equilibrium.
Nevertheless, it is not healthy for these associations to remain informal for a long time. They ought to be endowed with a clearly defined legal and public structure that determines the rights and duties of each member and provides for an independent arbitrating authority. It is the condition for their efficiency and durability in respecting the main principles that are at the basis of their constitution.
2. It is possible, however, that such strong organisations depart considerably from their original intention and break with that prudence that was their primary perfection. Profit, private interests and malignant coalitions can manage to dominate them and make them the instruments of their injustice, without the economic community finding in its natural tendency to harmony the means to remedy it.
That is why two precautions must be taken. First of all, as soon as an association has proved the indisputable influence it exerts and its effectiveness, local or national public authorities ought to grant it the status of a public organism that would subject it to respect for the common good and no longer only to the search for the interest of its members. This status will also have the advantage of giving its decisions a legal and not only contractual value.
Then, there must be a superior moderating authority that could intervene if necessary. This authority must be capable of watching over the honesty of corporative and professional agreements, of arbitrating in conflicts, of re-establishing any compromised equilibrium. Such an authority will therefore need an ecological science and an economic art that 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.
The classic example of these mutual agreement associations that are endowed with publicly recognised legal rights and prerogatives, is that of corporations. They did so much good before the Revolution and might easily be restored in numerous professions. They could easily be adapted to our modern economic life, by taking the inspiration from this time-honoured practice but also from the experiences of the social Catholics at the end of the 19th century, or even from Marshal Pétain’s national Revolution. The spontaneous restoration of corporations was one of its most remarkable successes.
A corporation is an organisation of members of the same trade for the purpose of better fulfilling their specific service in society and, to that end, of maintaining their internal solidarity and defending their rights and privileges. They regulate their activities, impose demands of competence and of honesty, apportion work and limit competition, and develop mutual aid institutions. This can be done on the local or regional basis and, if necessary, at the national level.
The fundamental principle of this organisation, halfway between liberalism and collectivism, is that of personal property and of professional solidarity, whereby the centre of interest in economic life is transferred away from the sphere of things to the sphere of persons, away from the products and profits of work, the object manufactured, and the dividend, to the producers themselves, in accordance with the liberating formula, « The profession unites, the product divides » (Jean Paillard), and I would add, « profits bring conflict ». The corporation unites and reconciles men, rather than mobilising and transforming materials, resources and money, all the while guaranteeing the quality of the product or the service.
This permanent combination of both social and economic roles, far from injuring anyone’s acquired rights or their situation and authority – be they employers, shareholders or workers – will on the contrary liberate them. The employers will be liberated from the crushing employers’ federation, the shareholders from the monopolising financial intermediaries, and the workers from the agitation of the trade unions. As for the consumer, he finds a guarantee of competence, of quality and of fair price.
1. The first activity of corporative life is of a religious, moral and human order. The personalisation of professional life restores honesty to relationships among members of the same professional community. It encourages mutual aid and disinterested service and, consequently, honest external relationships in buying and selling, for which the corporation stands guarantee. The policing of the profession is ensured by the corporation itself and its industrial tribunals, with simplicity, rapidity, discretion, moderation and justice. It prevents disorders more often than it cures or sanctions them, as is the benefit with any personal and communitarian authority.
Now, it is a great moral virtue and a capital value for economic life to be governed by honesty of service, work and product (quality), which leads in turn to honesty in allocating salaries and distributing profit.
2. The second corporative activity is of an economic order. Through the corporations, the economic life is « self-directed » (Salazar). The elected corporative councils – made up of people from every level, aided if necessary by economic advisers, and at the highest level always in the presence of a representative from public authority – discuss production plans and programmes, their time scale and placement. They discuss the creation, ordering, restructuring and restoration of business, their number and diversification; their mode of finance and capital investment; their conditions of employment, salaries and profit-sharing; the constitution and running of the communitarian bank and of the corporative patrimony.
They are all things that employers wrongly thought were their reserved domain and which, for that reason, were totally lost on them to the advantage of higher powers that trifled with their interests and their persons, as yesterday they trifled with their salaried personnel, and even with their most eminent collaborators. Standing halfway between utopian, democratic self-management and state control, corporative self-regulation is a marvel of freedom, dialogue and flexibility in order, thus of effectiveness.
3. The third corporative activity is of a social and charitable order. In addition to the natural savings of families, their organisation will be able to assume at a lower cost a large part of what the monstrous, irresponsible, anonymous and bureaucratic social security of our modern democratic States underwrites with the lamentable results we all know too well. Everything will be organised as fast, as simply and as suitably as possible, firstly at the level of the social fund of the enterprise and then at the highest level by drawing on the corporative patrimony at national and regional council level.
Thus it is that the corporation is a remarkable tool to ensure the harmonious development of the various trades and of economic life, to free enterprises from powers of money and from political unionism, finally to manage social services the most efficiently and to the best of the beneficiaries’ just interests.
1. Mutual agreements, organised to varying degrees, enable an economic and social network to be forged among families and enterprises. This very active, flexible network is thus capable of constantly adapting itself to real needs. It is the ideal framework for resolving what is called « the social problem ». It has been poisoning life in our countries ever since the Revolution transformed everyday human relationships into a perpetual and omnidirectional antagonism by bringing about the triumph of individualism.
On the contrary, communitarian ecology reconstitutes the harmony of social life by restoring work to its true end, which is family prosperity, and to its primary reality, that of the free association of heads of families for the safeguarding of their material life and their best advantage through a prudent co-operative of their goods and of their work.
2. It is by bringing the social problem down to its strictest and most human proportions, by putting it in the context of local and regional communities, trading, industrial and professional activities, instead of imprudently extending it to the national level, or even the multinational and international level, that collaboration and mutual service between the various members of the world of work will prevail in men’s minds, as they do in daily reality, over the antagonism of private interests and systematic class warfare.
To rent land or to cultivate it, to lend money or invest it in an undertaking, to employ workmen or to apply for work, are fraternal human acts, mutual agreements establishing a common interest, the success, stability and better development of which has to be ensured by the prudence of the beneficiaries. It is amazing that in our Christian political society, these myriads of human relationships in the material order have become as many sparks in one great blaze of hatred, firebrands of discord between faceless and soulless collective powers in a world suddenly struck by destructive madness.
3. The immense complexity of modern economic life must not discourage those who invoke charity in order to establish a true fraternity – which is the consequence of respect for paternity, i.e. respect for authority at every level of social life – from proposing clear ecological principles, simple corporatist solutions to the social problem, drawn from reflection on nature and on history. Such principles will in any case be truer, more just, and more likely to succeed than any of the inhuman and irrational theories of those who, in the name of liberty and equality, have piled ruin upon ruin and have led the modern world to unavoidable catastrophe.