In the society of his Christian brethren, the phalangist finds the most vast and most perfect human community there is – that to which he owes everything and to which he is primarily devoted. All these men redeemed in Christ’s Blood who have become members of one body, the Church, and therefore members of one another, find the principle and rule of their mutual esteem, love and service in their worship, love and service of God, whence results an intense and perpetual communication of temporal and spiritual benefits. This fraternal charity has formed in the world throughout the centuries a supernatural community based on the true religion, the fruits of which are the same thoughts, the same social habits and the same customs. Such is Christendom, where not only divine benefits but also human benefits are communicable and offered to all.
1. Christian thought, now two thousand years old and inherited from biblical wisdom and Greek philosophy, is and will remain the necessary intellectual preparation for all fraternal, human communication, allowing us to proceed beyond the walls and iron curtains erected by barbarian ideologies, ancient as well as modern.
2. Christian politics, inherited from biblical theocracy and from Roman order, is also a human and divine wisdom, a practical art serving as a model, offered to all peoples to permit them to attain a strong, just, peaceful and stable internal order, and at the same time to enter the concert of the civilised nations who are determined to hold in check any belligerent revival of savagery.
3. Christian civilisation, inherited from the Gospel, preserved from century to century and enriched by the many contributions and traditions of different peoples, but perhaps raised to its highest degree of perfection by "la doulce France", is finally the inspired means, blessed and protected by God down to our day, for spreading and laying the foundations of Christendom among all the peoples of the earth, in that harmony made possible by admirable and incomparable common customs.
The phalangist regards universal human brotherhood as a possibility, a right, a hope, and consequently a duty.
1. Universal brotherhood is based on the unity of the human race, a unity which testifies to the common origin of all men in accordance with the certain data of philosophy and the most probable scientific hypotheses, a unity which is anterior to all inequality of race or civilisation as well as to all diversity of language and custom. The human race forms one family which stems – in accordance with divine revelation, philosophical reason, and the greatest anthropological probability – from one single couple. That is why God, who is strictly speaking their Creator, can analogically or metaphorically be called the Father of all men. By His providential will He gives men’s natural fraternity a sacred character, a moral value of truth, an ideal goodness and beauty.
2. This brotherhood, however, has been rejected, violated and destroyed by men’s refusal and crimes, the fatal consequence of original sin, man’s first rebellion against God the Father. This brotherhood nevertheless remains a natural duty; it remains in all its breadth and all its truth, even though its observance may seem heroic in our broken world or even impossible without help from On High.
3. But even though other men may renounce this brotherhood in order to accommodate their religions, their philosophies, and their laws to their passions and fratricidal customs, Christians nevertheless proclaim that JESUS CHRIST by His Cross has destroyed every barrier of pride, egoism and hatred, reconciling all men with God, who in Him and through Him reveals Himself as truly their Father, thus reconciling them among themselves, absolutely all of them, by virtue of their common adoption as sons of God.
Thus the universal human brotherhood – so admirably constituted by the Creator and founded on the unity of nature and the community of original grace and justice, restored even more admirably by Christ – has already been won for all men by right, whilst it waits to be lived in fact by those in the Church through the medium of the faith. For it is the mission of the Church to fulfil the work of redemption by bringing to realisation this universal brotherhood for which Christ died. Thus the phalangist will be, in accordance with the expression and example of Father de Foucauld, "the universal brother".
The murder of Abel by Cain his brother, the Tower of Babel and the dispersion of the peoples all illustrate, from the very beginning, how the human community became fragmented and its world destroyed by sin. On the other hand, as soon as God inaugurates His saving work and makes a covenant with mankind, He begins to restore mankind’s unity and gradually to reveal to men their universal common good: the gifts of eternal life, divine grace, and the law. The God of the Jewish Bible foretells, the Christ of the Gospel proclaims and inaugurates, and the Church finally realises this universal common good, which assumes all conditions, all differences and inequalities, all particularities of races, peoples, classes and cultures, making them concur peacefully in the same aim, forbidding them to hate, despise or devour one another, and giving them the commandment of fraternal charity.
1. Thus the Church stigmatises and condemns all ideologies and political systems which, locking themselves up in this world of sin instead of redeeming it, advocate racism or other forms of moral, religious and philosophical elitism. These systems falsely conclude from the inequality of individuals, peoples and races that there exist essential differences of nature, final purpose and moral law, the supermen or superior races being destined to wield knowledge, power, and possessions, whilst the inferior races, the subhumans, are biologically doomed to slavery and annihilation.
The phalangist cannot be suspected or accused of nazism for such an ideology is completely alien to him. Because of its Lutheran ancestry – whence its excessive Germanism and frantic antisemitism – because of its inept, scientifically pretentious racism, and because of its Nietzschean morality, nazism is essentially anti-Christian. This collective German madness put a formidable politico-military power into the hands of a Prussian party, which Hitler’s dictatorship knew how to exploit fully to wage a world war. All of this has nothing in common with our faith, our morality and our Christian customs.
The phalangist rejects even more – in so far as it is universal and shows itself to be the most appalling totalitarian barbarity of all time – marxist-leninist-stalinist communism, which transposes biological racism into economic classism, where class warfare is seen stirring up hatred and conflict in the heart of nations and we are constantly presented with the same historical dialectic, making the suppression of those who stand in the way – tens of millions of them! – the condition for mankind’s future happiness.
2. These ideologies are a resumption in modern times of the religious racism and fanaticism of the Jews and the caste system of the pagans, both of them believing that the domination of man by man is the only reason for living, and that revolt, genocide and enslavement are the means of obtaining and perpetuating it.
Before Christ, philosophies – pantheist, it should be noted – had already claimed to regard the world as a whole, to consider mankind as a fraternal and unified body. But lacking even the least beginnings of practical realisation, they simply reinforced the pride of the philosophers and the despotism of princes. During the times of Christendom, visionaries – heretics, it should be noted – have announced the imminent advent of a new world order of universal brotherhood to be born of the spiritual and social revolution which they were preaching. In our "postchristian" times, the religion of a unified and fraternal mankind has become one of the dominant ideologies of the modern world.
1. When not yielding to their openly fratricidal racism or classism, our contemporaries claim to build a new world order on the single foundation of universal nature, a political order of liberty, equality and fraternity. Better, infinitely better, than Christendom, without any need for the Christian faith, this new world will be the work of man’s reason and goodness.
2. Rejecting the past and establishing itself in the absolute future, this frontierless philanthropy rejects both sin and grace, the physical and moral miseries of yesterday’s humanity as well as the religious and social constraints that sought to remedy them. All this is rejected and viewed as obsolete. In the future there will no longer exist a God or a devil, original sin or redemption, but only a natural human order, scientifically defined, rigorously established, impeccable and perfect. Then among all men without distinction there will reign total equality, boundless freedom directed to the good of all, and consequently full brotherhood.
3. God is excluded from this plan not only as a stranger but even more as the baneful creator of evil through His law which, by forbidding evil, makes it known to men. He is excluded as the unjust originator of inequalities, constraints and discrimination through His predestination, His grace and His salvation. Christ, all His thought and works, are detested and opposed, because they condemn any fresh attempt at constructing the Tower of Babel. Christianity must be annihilated and forgotten if this humanism is to succeed! Man himself – individual concrete man as he really is, and not man constructed in the abstract – is also excluded, mutilated and sacrificed to the necessity of a total and universal order. And with man the spontaneous life of traditional civilised societies – in their charming diversity of law and custom – will be sacrificed to the totalitarianism of Grand Principles and to the cold monster of the world State.
1. The phalangist does not allow himself to be caught up in the fierce wars waged by the racisms and classisms, such as yesterday’s nazism versus communism, or today’s capitalism versus socialism, nor is he surprised by their sudden, but ever precarious, reconciliations against a common enemy. All these systems are fundamentally antihuman, antichristian, and intrinsically perverse. That is why they are always found to be in association for the destruction of the ancient, Christian order, and for the construction of their new order, human and diabolic. Just such are the capitalist and socialist countries, which are secretly accomplices. Ideologues and utopians, they know themselves and wish to be the master thinkers of the world, the lords of other men and all peoples, whom they must recreate in a new form, by reason and by force.
2. The integral revolution primarily demanded by all these ideologies and political utopias is the integral caricature of the Christian redemption. What Christian redemption could not or dared not do, revolution will do without sparing anything and without respecting anything of the past. It is right, therefore, proclaim the master thinkers, that Christian Redemption should today disappear before the human Revolution.
For Christ has destroyed sin, moral evil, but not its deepest roots nor its most trying consequences: human nature remains weak and the history of men unhappy… Satan alone offers mankind the knowledge of good and evil, the "Knowledge of power" and, if mankind devotes itself to him, the "Power of knowledge", allowing mankind to triumph altogether over grace, sin and even nature, and to become equal with God, thus forming a new creation: "You shall be like gods, knowing good and evil."
That is why atheist humanism, Eastern as well as Western, racist or bolshevist, dictatorial or democratic, is persecuting, nihilist and enslaving. Persecuting, because every presence of God has to be extirpated, every lordship of Christ abolished, and Christendom annihilated. Nihilist, because the legitimate powers and age-old laws of ancient civilisation are doomed to the same destruction. Enslaving finally, because all nobility, all property, every difference and every independence is to be planed down and to disappear.
3. That is why the phalangist has a hatred for the internationalist, classist, racist modern Revolution, a hydra with numerous heads, whose body forms Satan’s army. Respectful, in politics, of the legitimate powers and the established order, subject to the natural authorities, and accommodating himself to the traditions and customs of the communities to which he belongs by birth and vocation, he will be reputed a counter-revolutionary. And in reality he will be one, either passively if he undergoes violence, imprisonment, slavery and martyrdom, or actively if he fights for his legitimate defence and still more for that of his brothers against the modern Revolution, "satanic in its essence" (Joseph de Maistre).
What will human society be like after the modern Revolution, the work of Reason, triumphant over the superstition, routines and privileges of the Ancien Régime? In theory, equality will be re-established among all men, freedom will be restored, and the feeling of brotherhood will give the new society its heroic elan. In fact, according to the secret design of the powers that run the world, the subjection of enslaved peoples to the power of the chosen race, to the class of overlords, will be definitive, total and implacable.
1. The phalangist rejects the apparent Humanism of the modern Revolution because it puts man in the place of God. That is enough to make him fear it and execrate it. According to this theory, endlessly taken up by the various racisms, classisms and one-worldisms, man is clearly entitled to govern himself and the world too by his own laws. Authority at every level is no more than the representation of individual liberty and governments are merely the delegates of a sovereign people, who are the only real legislative power. The State can only exist, wish, and act as the people deem fit.
The Revolution installs democracy, the political and social regime where the rights of the individual are raised to their highest degree of power. It proclaims, honours and defends the rights of every man, imposing on him no duty that his feeling of human solidarity would not make him enthusiastic for. Thus man is like God, the sovereign master of himself and of the world. The phalangist abhors these giddy heights of self-worship.
2. The phalangist rejects the real Antihumanism of the modern Revolution which hands poor men and entire disarmed peoples over to the boundless totalitarianism of one race, one class, and one party, which Dostoyevsky called by the prophetic name of "the Possessed", or more exactly "the Devils". In effect, the theory of Revolution is universal and necessary; it tolerates no exception, delay or compromise. Governments must proclaim the Rights of Man in the absolute and see that nothing opposes this. In this way, governments are armed with a formidable might and a universal role of constant intervention in both public and private life in order that they may subject everything – actions, interests and convictions – to the revolutionary ideology.
An enormous, repressive machine is put in place on the ruins of the old order’s inequalities and freedoms: an administrative machinery, of the type found in police states and jail regimes, in the service of the class of supermen, the race of overlords, who arrogate to themselves, as delegates of the people and historical leaders of the Revolution, the mission of placing and maintaining people, the nations and – why not? – the whole world in the egalitarian vice.
The phalangist holds the modern Revolution in horror because it leads mankind to the bloodbath of the concentration camp world, the consequence of and punishment for his self-worship.
Before the Revolution, in those places where its spirit had not yet penetrated, men lived under God’s law, the natural law, better still the decalogue, and best of all the law of Christ. Their brotherhood was not defined horizontally by master thinkers, nor was it founded on the dignity of human rights upheld by a totalitarian State. It was born spontaneously of their divine sonship and of its twofold law of love, for God, the Father of all, and for neighbour, the brother of all. The result was a certain social order and certain traditional regimes, where justice and peace were not a collective ideal proclaimed in the abstract and brought to realisation by state force, but the happy consequence of each individual’s virtuous efforts to observe the divine law.
1. The foundation of its order was therefore religious obedience to God, wherein each person discovers at once his duty, his daily perfection and the beginning of his eternal happiness, because such obedience is, by virtue of a wonderful disposition of divine wisdom, the best possible share that each can have in the universal common good. The role of each of God’s children in the human community is not of the order of duty opposed to rights, of means opposed to end, of alienation opposed to dignity; it is strictly of the order of divine good, of personal perfection, of love, and therefore of full and entire freedom under God’s law culminating in charity.
Natural inequalities were protective; reciprocity of commitment and service was beneficent. Privileged situations and hierarchical functions were recognised as of natural or positive right, as perfectly legitimate and, taken as a whole, favourable to the community’s wellbeing.
2. The heroic mainspring of such a society is found in Christ’s call, spontaneously heard by the best, to follow Him as disciples and to carry their daily cross with Him. The acceptance of a life of renunciation for the salvation of the world and in view of the glory to come remains – as opposed to every frigid humanism and every forced enthusiasm for racial, national or world solidarity – the secret of human justice and peace.
The peaceful and the meek, in accordance with the Gospel, accept their lot without rebellion, demands, or complaints. They will even accept poverty, injustice, oppression or violence, knowing that everything turns out for the best for those whom God loves. And in so doing, they make themselves the very best servants of their brothers! They leave to the legitimate authorities the task of regulating order and justice in this world, and to God the task of bringing all justice and all order to perfection in the life eternal.
Before the Revolution of 1789, and still today in those places where its spirit has not penetrated, political power stood midway between God and the father of a family, like the light and shade figure already seen in the Old Testament, the theocratic king, become, since the Gospel, this human figure invested with a sacred aureole, the most Christian King. Just as there exists in the Church a Pope, the vicar of Christ and pastor of the flock, so in the temporal sphere there exists an authority dedicated to governing the people according to the will and by the will of God. The term "the most Christian King" is used provisionally, for in ancient Christendom there existed, with no concern for ideological uniformity, the greatest diversity of political regimes: empires, kingdoms, principalities, free cities, republics… We use the term "King" in the sense used by Saint Ignatius when he speaks of "a king of the earth chosen by Our Lord God Himself, to whom all princes and all Christians show respect and obedience." Regardless of its particular regime, it is a case of temporal authority affirming itself to be of divine right and demanding to be recognised as such.
1. The king maintains a mysterious relationship with God, who gives him supreme authority over His people in the temporal order, just as the Pope and the bishops have received such authority in the spiritual order. He is considered by all therefore as a man invested by God with the power of decision in all political matters and the power of regulating each one’s rights and duties for the general good order. Even if they are disagreeable or unjust, his decisions must be accepted and followed as the expression of a higher will, or at least as permitted by God. The only laws or commandments that would be null and void are those contrary to God and the Church.
2. The King maintains a constant natural relationship with the political common good, that is to say, with the order, peace and prosperity of the community in its entirety and within its frontiers. In this he has some mysterious affinity with divine providence above, as he does with the authority of every father of a family below. This relationship of a father to his family, of a leader to his subjects, endowing them with a natural sense, an instinct, a concern for the good of all – the common good, anterior to any individual good and distinct from the sum of particular goods – is the basis of all political order. And this authority, inscribed in nature, is recognised as providential. For this custom of the king, the leader, or the father of a family, being the man for all, is not the result of some passing desire, nor is it a moral virtue; it results from their situation, from their state. It is a fact of nature, a happy one.
Thus the king of the Christian Ancien Régime does not set himself the mission of searching for the highest degree of wellbeing, riches and culture for his subjects, for this would lead him into totalitarianism; nor is his mission to seek their virtue or their eternal salvation, for this would tip him into theocratic clericalism. He knows that he is the specific organ of the temporal common good, sovereign in his own domain by virtue of a divine legitimacy, and therefore sovereign from both a political and Christian perspective.
Before the Revolution, in places where its diabolical spirit had not penetrated, the people attended to their devotions, their affairs, their loves, their work and their leisure with an amazing freedom. Amazing for citizens of revolutionary societies, termed democratic, for whom the common rule is servitude, military, fiscal, administrative, secular, socialist and centralist constraint… By means of a far from innocent anachronism, the Christian Ancien Régime is imagined as a twofold totalitarianism, clerical and royal. Nothing could be more contrary to its reality which, when compared with democratic uniformism and revolutionary conformism, might even appear as scandalously anarchic!
1. The law governing individual existence was liberty. It resulted from the specific vocation and traditional moderation of religious authorities and Christian politics. It is true that popes and bishops, kings and princes, have historically committed many arbitrary acts, injustices and acts of violence. But unlike the case with revolutionary totalitarianism, these abuses of power and of situation have never found their justification in any absolutist theory. They were injustices; they were never the rule.
2. Within the framework of divine law necessary for salvation and of civil laws necessary for the temporal common good, each one shifts for himself and lives according to the thousand and one different occupations and cares of his own private interest. Thus is constituted, organised and extended to the utmost a society of free men – free in their families, their communes, their corporations and confraternities, whose essential rule, free from any hypocrisy, is the quest of their own interest.
The two hierarchical systems governing them from above and from afar, only intervene rarely for a small number of absolutely essential obligations; as for the rest of life, they let their subjects well alone. They arbitrate in conflicts, and encourage men to do well and to give better service.
3. This system, however, bears no resemblance to that proposed by some as the remedy for modern democratic totalitarianism: an "anarchy" controlled by a liberal power or by an easygoing monarchy: "anarchy plus one". It was a profound and absolute respect for God and His Church, it was an inviolable fidelity to the King and to his service, which provided that secure framework, that spirit of order and powerful grandeur, which allowed life to be so completely one of civil liberty and moral spontaneity. Whence, despite the thousand ordinary and particular sufferings of life, there resulted that joy to which historians testify, that sweetness of living, which the revolutionary peoples have lost.