1. It is God who gives us "life, movement and being". Life comes from Him, the life of future generations, and from Him comes the liking and the desire to have children! The raw materials and natural wealth of the earth, the sea and the air, the energy of the sun, its power and light, depend on His generous providence. On Him depend favourable weather, climates and seasons, as well as international and moral circumstances, whether peaceful or disturbed. The bent of men’s hearts and the strength of their virtues also come from Him, the Sun of souls and minds.
On so many divine gifts depends the destiny of each one of us.
2. It is therefore right and fitting, just and salutary, that every fraternal community of the land should say together: "Our Father who art in Heaven, give us this day our daily bread." Public piety will spontaneously coincide with the French national Catholic restoration. And since this can only come about through a miracle even more dazzling than that whereby Saint Joan of Arc delivered Orleans and conducted the king to Rheims for his anointing, acts of thanksgiving will inevitably spring forth from the mouth of all true Frenchmen.
3. Our God will be publicly and legally recognised and honoured. The public liturgies of national feasts, the Sunday rest, and the divine natural law will form the basis of the "communitarian contract" tacitly defining the conditions of the new French desire to live in harmony. Our national Revolution will be the first to be known, admired and loved through its feasts, with their divine worship, speeches, recreation and joy.
4. Faith in Providence will impregnate the whole of temporal life. Manifested by prayer, it will give to the new ecology its surest law, and to its natural prudence a superior guarantee. Thus our people will recover the sense of reality, of the possible and of the desirable, as opposed to the illusory utopia, the subversive criticism, the belief in an all-providing State and its demagogy, abusive claims and social parasitism. The "return to reality" marks the exact measure of fundamental human virtue, which is humility, but it is only our trust in God, who is love, that gives it its incontestable nobility.
5. The legitimacy of authorities, the solidity of communities, the honesty and fidelity of contracts, and consequently the whole complex and happy sum of reciprocal rights and duties between persons, will thus find their solid support in the nation’s Catholic faith, the keystone of France’s order, both old and new.
1. For a national community whose essential bond is the true religion, there is no need for any materialist, gnostic or racist "mystique". France is not a goddess, neither is the State a god, nor any man an absolute. The goal and the centre of everything is not economics, politics or humanity, it is God! And that is what simplifies, pacifies and quietens life.
2. The national community, in all its natural circles, welcomes, educates and protects its members, in the first place out of pure natural generosity, then in accordance with this "immense reciprocity of services" (Charles Maurras) where each one’s rights and duties are spontaneously determined, without too much egalitarian calculation, for the greatest good of all, account being taken of the recognised supernatural vocation of each person and of the service required of him by the nation.
3. The law of work is sacred: "In the sweat of your brow shall you earn your bread." Consequently, every duty fulfilled, all honest work, any service, becomes a source of merit and of right. Work and social service are protected, that is to say aided and favoured, and guaranteed as far as possible by the social authority, because they are the first and principal source of wealth, honour and authority in the nation, in contrast to speculation, intrigue and favouritism.
This law of work and of social service forbids the parasitism of rich and poor alike. It forbids claims to rights without duties and the excesses of a degrading social welfare system.
4. The charitable services needed by the national community will be created by individual initiative. "You are all brothers, you all have but one Father", Jesus Christ taught. Our common is not the State, but God. Any deficiencies in institutions and social systems will be corrected, or at least attenuated and mollified, by charitable creations initiated by the best, by the Church in the first place, and, as an exception, by the State provisionally making up for a lack of spontaneous devotion, but more normally by the local and professional communities in direct contact with the hardships to be relieved, such as: the welcoming of immigrants, the reclassification of those on the fringes of society, assistance for the unemployed, aid for the poor, and generally every possible care for those who have fallen through the net of the social fabric and are thereby deprived of all help.
For "the poor you will have always with you" and, perhaps you too will be one of those poor people who ask for help. It is for each to do to others as he would have done to himself in a similar distress, not out of justice nor for political reasons, but through charity.
1. Founded on belief and trust in God, Creator and Providence, benevolent and beneficent, and strengthened by the lessons of the past which 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 try to rebuild what has disappeared and continue to construct human civilisation in accordance with this Wisdom, which is more divine and Christian than human.
This harmony consists entirely in a constant distribution and equilibrium of the three great elements of human life.
– The countryside, not polluted but preserved, cultivated and cared for: land, sea, air, fields and forests, rivers and lakes…
– 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 and adequately linked by airways, railways and roads.
– 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. Despite the senseless consequences of a century and a half of cancerous industrial development and of leprous urban concentration, the fundamental harmonies remain intact and only wait to be brought to life by a grand ecological policy decided from above, but brought to realisation enthusiastically by the unanimous national community.
3. That was the mission entrusted by the expiring 3rd Republic to the French State of Marshal Pétain: "Work, Family, and Country". In other words, land, home, and civilisation. Or again, our countries, our corporations, and our traditions. All this, which must be supported and developed wisely, in accordance with a thousand subtle correlations, cannot be the technocratic and economically planned creation of an omnipotent and omniscient State. It must be a spontaneous and prudent work of patience and of love, the work of families and of communities, of the nation’s corporations and great bodies restored to their true vocation: France. And if they dedicate themselves to this exalting task, they will reap without delay the finest fruit: Beauty.
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, had to destroy this solid edifice. It took it two centuries to do so. The whole of family law, considered as an order regulated by institutions and protected by laws for the blossoming of the family community, is necessarily revoked by the declaration and the insistence on the rights of man, the sum of the anarchic and egoistic demands of the individual, "born an orphan and dying celibate" (Renan). Thus it is that democratic principles corrupt morals, and governments declare 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 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. Furthermore, this sacred principle of family, law and state, "Infans in utero conceptus pro nato habetur", is now mocked. The right to abortion undermines the very foundations of civilisation. The political power knows it is homicide, but not only refuses to punish it, but recognises, authorises, encourages and codifies it. If the Constitution can permit this, it can permit anything. Tyrannicide becomes a virtuous act when the crime of murdering an innocent by his own mother is protected by the Prince and understood by the Pastor.
2. The Church alone can undertake this necessary and urgent rectification of morals, which remains the deepest wish of our 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 which 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.
3. 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. These faculties will no longer be simply claims lodged with an all-providing 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, whose natural prudence 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.
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. Jus fruendi, utendi, abutendi, yes, but this is not the absolute and individualist right of the liberal bourgeois who brought about the Revolution of 1789. It is a right to free possession and disposal, adjusted, 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.
The intention was to remedy this savagery by collectivism, thus falling from individualism into socialism. But there is no a priori principle, whether egalitarian or libertarian, that can challenge this appropriation and peaceful possession of property by families. There is no "social mortgage" that inevitably hangs over property. There is no universal law that makes it a duty for property owners to abandon their rights to the advantage of collectivity. There is no law whereby the State is entitled to contest these rights. To do so would be to disturb the ecological order. 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 King, in his capacity as eminent property-owner and recognised defender of the kingdom, and because he assures the peaceful possession of all property, has certain royal rights over property which justify the duties and services he is entitled to demand: taxes on property, compulsory purchase if need be, etc.
2. 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. 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.
3. 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 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. It should not be more than the tax imposed on the property belonging to the great social institutions and to the nation’s great bodies.
4. 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 monarchical 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 robbery of people’s savings and honest labour by grand financial speculators, exploiters of the people, and by the State and its ravenous organisms.
The monarchical authority will consider taxation as compensation for services rendered and not as an exorbitant privilege entitling authority to deduct a quarter or a half of individual people’s wealth for its own activities, good works or uncontrolled petty pleasures! Moreover, because it is excessive and constraining, "one tax chases another". It is prejudicial to everyone that the nation’s capital should be exhausted and that its visible wealth should be systematically hounded.
Inflation and fiscal pressure without rhyme or reason favour individual wealth, which is monetary, irresponsible, undeclared and fraudulent, to the detriment of visible wealth, which is the revenue from honest activity and family property, servants of the common good. The King will support the latter and hound the former. He will be mindful that the first and golden rule of all good public finance, as of any healthy economy, is confidence. His paternal authority alone can give this to his honest people.
And so, 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.
Family freedom cannot be maintained as an autarchy, isolated within a system of institutions that are hostile or alien to it. For the family, the life of the community is a benevolent framework, a help and protection. But it is necessary that the community should have an effective autonomy, a self-administering capacity, property and responsibility, and should not be permanently assisted and protected by the State and its administrative controls. It must also be free of any colonisation by the political parties, otherwise any local reform will be in vain.
The Revolution killed the living parishes, manors and communes of the past and replaced them with a centralised system. Under the 3rd Republic, and afterwards too, instead of strengthening local freedoms, democracy corrupted the life of the community through the politicisation of municipal elections and the introduction of the war of religion. The schoolmaster became the preacher of the secular and republican religion, and very often the parish priest began to play the part of the revolutionary agitator! Thus the peaceful parish of the Ancien Regime became a Clochemerle, with its absurd quarrels falling under the thumb of the prefectural administration of the parties.
Municipal government is in many cases a means of domination and exploitation for one man and his party, a springboard for a political career. To which must be added the fact that any freedom granted to communities in the present administrative setting too often ends in transforming the community into an administrative and bureaucratic rung on the electoral ladder and in debasing municipal government even further, entailing debt for communities, as the candidates outbid one another to get elected, and thus subjecting them still further to the state-controlled organisations of credit.
1. In a well-conceived ecology, the community enjoys the widest autonomy compatible with the general interest and order. It is better for the State to supervise rather than to directly administer these local communities which, composed of families, preserve something of the understanding and prudence that spontaneously rule within families. The ideal is that they should administer themselves as so many little "republics" through their elected councillors and mayor, under the eye and protection of the regional administrative authorities and, if necessary, of the national authorities for public services in the common interest. But liberty is not licence, and it will be remembered that in the past the royal authority had to intervene, on several occasions and in a rigorous manner, in order to put an end to the abuses and disorders which lay hidden beneath the pretext of local freedoms and exemptions, and which were harmful to the common interest or the people’s interest.
2. The community will therefore fulfil its own tasks: in religion, by the choice of churchwardens responsible for relations with the clergy and for the administration of parish property; in education, by the building and maintenance of schools, the appointment of teachers, and the supervision of the education of the young; in municipal administration, by highway maintenance, public transport, social aid, hygiene services, leisure activities, hospitals and hospices, etc.; and finally, in justice and municipal policing, by acting within the prescribed limits of competence.
3. Benevolently administered, the community will have its own resources: taxes and revenues from communal property. It will be good to revise the aberrant and unanimously criticised system of local taxation in order to simplify it and in particular to give it a sounder basis. The provincial assemblies, the chambers of state for the provinces, will naturally be called upon to pronounce on this question in agreement with the fiscal services of the king. The budget will be controlled by the provincial public authority, especially loans. The community must balance its budget and reduce its requests for borrowing and grants from outside. This requirement must be upheld, leaving small "non-viable" depopulated rural communities the choice between an economically desirable regrouping or a survival that is certainly more difficult, poorer, and more courageous, but, ecologically and humanly speaking, far preferable. For multa renascentur quae iam cecidere.
Anything that is capable of rebirth must be saved. For as Maurice Jallut wrote: "The community is the most natural territorial division. It is truly a cell, and can be big or small without losing its character and its raison d’être. In the community, the administration remains in contact with those who are administered, the one elected with those who elected him. Fuse these living cells into a much vaster unit and this warmth of contact disappears, the administration of local interests becomes much more distant, more impersonal, and those administered become more isolated. The community, especially the rural community, is the only place where the French do not feel absorbed by the bureaucratic Moloch. To redesign France by commencing with the suppression of half of it would truly be a gamble." Let us add that the community is the place where families have their roots. It is the setting wherein their history, their customs, their religious and social traditions are perpetuated.
Furthermore, there are many possible forms of association that can provide an intermediary solution guaranteeing the freedom of each and yet allowing financial and technical regroupings for more onerous investments.
4. It is from communities that have been allowed to be themselves, depoliticised, pacified and revitalised, that we must expect the solution to so many irksome ideological questions, such as the "school question". Once they are rid of political colonisation and the prefectural stranglehold, the communities will no longer know any class conflicts or religious wars and will once again become powerhouses of the communitarian life.
The king of France will respect the roots and social relations of French families by giving the greatest autonomy to local ecological cells which harmonise population, land and work in a close synthesis. They are the natural and traditional homes of an honest, just and fraternal life without "problems". Just such – beyond the communities – are the regions, this venerable historical unity, which neither time nor revolution has succeeded in abolishing, and which survive more or less as they always were, fundamental units of economic and human geography. Then, there are the provinces, equally ancient and lasting.
On the other hand, the department remains the wild invention of the Revolution, strictly realised under the Empire and ever since maintained by our electoral regimes. These are units of police surveillance, administrative control, and Jacobin centralisation. They are not organic structures, but a deliberate dismemberment of the old French provinces, obliging all business to be brought to Paris. The function of the prefect, the agent of the central power, is to extend government control to everything, to organise the electoral masses, and to see that the law is applied. Prefects and sub-prefects crush local life rather than animate it, acting without imagination, soul or interest. They will consequently disappear without leaving a trace, a ripple or the least regret.
1. The French provinces, both metropolitan and overseas, as well as the lands of the Empire, both ancient and recent, are ecological units that are part of our soil, history and civilisation, units that are powerful and ever relevant, their prestigious past guaranteeing a noble future. Characterised more by their age-old customs than by modern economic data – to use the very words of those economists most conversant with the problem of the regions – the restoration of the provinces remains a major element in restoring the nation’s birth-rate, vitality and civilisation.
With the coming of a new monarchical order, it will be necessary to carry out the legitimist programme of men like Villèle, La Tour du Pin, Maurras, and that remarkable theorist of French decentralisation, J.-M. Raudot, adviser to the Comte de Chambord. We are not speaking of republican plans for regionalisation with their creation of monstrous "balanced metropolises" such as Lyons and Marseilles, or their setting up by decree of deliberative assemblies and regional commissions without any real budget, without their own revenue, with no real powers and consequently no efficacy. When will they ever cease adding rungs to the bureaucratic ladder! For more than a hundred years now the democrats have been calling themselves regionalists when they are in opposition, but when they are in power they centralise as did all their predecessors, because any natural, strong power cannot but be suspect to them. Furthermore, the ultimate aim of their plan is to introduce democracy everywhere, since they imagine that decentralisation consists in no more than the setting up of deliberative assemblies, which, at every level, will simply redouble an already top-heavy administration in which sinecures are found for party men and where partisan ideology, preoccupation and influence prevail over the region’s real interests, to the extent of threatening the nation’s very unity. This is the systematisation of chaos, conflicting powers and irresponsibility, which will inevitably end, if the nation survives, in the reinforcement of State centralisation.
2. The province or the overseas "colony" is a strong human community, jointly influenced by the autonomy of the peoples who make it up and the monarchical authority which is sovereignly exercised over it. It is the point of contact and agreement where the region’s organic interests and the superior interests of the nation meet. Only the king, the absolute monarch and father of his peoples, can restore the autonomy and self-government of the provinces and of the lands of the empire in a united and decentralised national community, without fear of secession.
3. The governor of the province, the successor to both the governor and the administrator of the ancient monarchy, assumes two interlocking functions: that of the representative of the king, strong in the king’s authority and answerable to him, head of the royal administration, and that of the representative of the peoples of the province before the central power, with the responsibility of defending their interests and their rights in the State and, if necessary, before the Council of ministers and the Council of State.
For this heavy and enthralling task, full of initiative and responsibility, he surrounds himself with a council formed of persons chosen from among the most competent and most honourable known in the province.
4. A Chamber of States of the province, an enlargement and modernised form of the "States" of the Ancien Régime, composed of representatives elected by the communities, the great orders and the trade and professional bodies, will debate all the important affairs of the province. It will resolve all problems in mutual consultation with the various chambers for trade, agriculture, commerce and industry, and the communities. It will propose and carry out, under the governor’s authority, and by its own commissions, the plans for the general development of the province and the improvement of the territory. It will assume, establish, enhance, protect, and defend if need be, the customs of the province and its ecological, economic and historical patrimony. It will take an interest in local justice, education, town planning, communication chananels, hygiene, etc. Nothing regional is alien to it.
It will support and audit the regional and corporative banks, and the credit and insurance companies, in order to deliver the peoples from domination by the great Jewish international banks. It will bring morality to bear on lending at interest, humanise credit companies, and reduce the power of speculators. It will protect small-scale economic societies against dangerous financial, industrial and commercial concentrations. And – why not? – it will restore or set up provincial stock exchanges, which will arrange capital on the spot for local investments and will be able to draw on these investments in order to revitalise run-down areas. Financial backing will thus be given to industrial and agricultural policies that are decidedly regionalist, and savings will no longer be channelled further and further away towards the great financial centres, towards national and international markets that are vast, unknown and often of no human value.
It will establish a provincial budget and decide how the money is to be apportioned and how the province’s taxes are to be collected. In addition, it will acquire the management and the revenue of part of the Crown domains and of the regional public funds. It will be responsible for meeting the obligations of collective costs and investments, and for maintaining the government of the province and raising the royal taxes.
5. The governor will be the automatic president of the provincial Chamber. It is he who will determine the order of the day and will fix what matters are submitted for the deliberation of the assembly, concerning its autonomous life and administration, and what matters are proposed for its consultation, concerning the application of national laws to the province. With regard to the latter, should any dispute arise, the decision will be handed over to royal authority, which will intervene with sovereign ordinances.
The province will be able to choose its own officials for all administrative matters within its competence. With the enormous republican "civil service" dismembered, this will be an elegant solution to the problem of the "democratisation" of the civil service, hitherto unresolved because of the hidden opposition of those in power;
The disequilibrium between "Paris and the French desert" (Gravier), and in the world generally between the great cities and the bush, is the direct consequence of a liberal profit economy, an egalitarian socialist ideology, and their common success in reducing the goals of life, valued in monetary terms, to immediate pleasure and the excitements of modern life.
Far from being a natural fact or inevitable necessity of progress, the development of towns to the detriment of the country, and of great desert-creating cities, is the result of this twofold enticement and economic and administrative duress, with which the social and national revolution must make an absolute break.
1. A return to the natural laws of social life will be sufficient to reverse this disastrous movement. It was the profit of industrial capitalism that demanded the rural exodus, urban concentration, intensified transport networks and the transfer of entire populations. Socialist claims merely accelerated the progress of this system by reducing the individual costs of collective life; allowances were granted to salaried workers, subsidies were given to industry, and the State underwrote the senseless increase in "collective costs". It is well known that the "induced effects" of urban concentration in today’s great cities have reached an unacceptable and irrational level.
In the end, it is the province that pays for the capital, those who do not count in modern life who pay for its happy beneficiaries. Both morality and economics agree on condemning this system.
2. The reversal of this tendency, which must be radical in theory, will have to be done at a carefully studied slow rhythm, so as not to be catastrophic. It will consist in:
– making everyone pay his own public costs, by suppressing State subsidies, allowances, fare reductions, and tax relief, all too widely granted in the cities;
– rejecting the lazy, state-sponsored, socialist solution of subsidies to support the transfer of industries and their return to the land, which never truly benefit those for whom such subsidies are destined, but merely increase the weight of administrative machinery;
– restoring the inequality of living conditions, in a realistic and positive psychological climate. To the great advantages, high returns and high salaries of those in areas of heavy population density, there must correspond equivalent financial charges. For regions of average financial stability, there will be fewer charges. For depopulated areas, the exemption from all collective charges will seem a sufficient incentive to the free and proud native populations, who are attached to their land, to live there in their preferred austerity. It will also act as an incentive for the entrepreneurs willing to risk independence and poverty, and capable of repopulating these regions within a few years.
And if no one answers this call, then once again the monks will be there to make the French desert blossom anew!