Social Institutions, introduction
Enriching ourselves from our differences through the practice of solidarity through political decision-making prepared by the Life Networks management centers, our reader is now ready to agree, does not pose any difficulties at the local level of a free city and its political and economic institutions. On a social level, the consequence of the practice of political and economic institutions in the Networks of Life results in a society without social class since citizens develop their management of common property through common goods and a full currency, without debts. .
Social classes, in principle, do not appear on the program of the liberal capitalist system since according to its dogma, there is no society but only markets. Human beings produce and consume according to their functions in the system and the income they obtain from their work. Marketing offers satisfaction of needs by personalizing the offer according to the different levels of needs whether a person is rich or poor, young or old, healthy or disabled. Of course the offer will not be the same since it adapts to the ability to pay or pay very little.
On the other hand and this is not surprising, the war of social classes is indeed on the program of the system which serves as opposition to capitalism and which has been selected and financed to serve precisely as a counter-example to capitalism that citizens must not in principle to support and defend except to serve as a pretext for wars organized by the Anglo-Saxon financial oligarchy with its arms dealers who thus obtain miraculous profits impossible in peacetime. We are of course talking about the communist system of power. Communist activists have since mostly abandoned the dogma of the dictatorship of the proletariat so that this dictatorship eliminates the social classes of the bourgeoisie without seeking to harm the sect of Puritans which directs the Anglo-Saxon financial oligarchy. Don’t touch the grisbi!
The class struggle propagated by the communist doctrine on all the continents of the Earth nevertheless makes it possible to make it clear to a citizen that social classes exist and are certainly inevitable. Conflicts between social classes are thus inevitable, especially when these conflicts are maintained to justify the well-known principle of divide and rule or to apply the political principle already stated by Aristotle: “It is also in the interest of a tyrant to keep his poor people, so that they are so busy with their daily tasks that they have no time for rebellion.”
However, through the presentation of the political and economic institutions of the Networks of Life as among our chapters of the file Our dear enemies in Part 5, we have often shown that the medieval period in Europe was the last flourishing period in the West and that free cities , the countryside with their abbeys and monasteries, experienced for several centuries not only a flourishing economy, a booming population but also an absence of social classes. The climate which has become more favorable explains this remarkable development. In France, the king and the monarchy, around 1300, only managed 10% of the land of France and he had to constantly borrow money to try to show a royal standard of living. This pushed Philip the Fair to appoint his pope to Rome and with this ally, to destroy the Order of the Temple to seize its wealth. Riches that the kings of France never found in the coffers and Templar commanderies.
We will therefore seek to understand how this flourishing medieval period disappeared from the knowledge of the French people after Friday October 13, 1307 to the point that the Age of Enlightenment, four centuries later, made no mention of it and ignored everything about the political functioning. , economic and social of this political regime in participatory local direct democracy which developed the time of the cathedrals. Some scholars, authors, historians and scientists in the years preceding the Revolution of 1789 and then during the 19th century, looked into this political debate of a society with or without social classes. We will cite several of them even if their writings and statements had little success during the phenomenal development of global industrial society.
Because we must reestablish the direct link which unites this medieval period on the one hand and on the other hand, this political regime without monarchy, without system of power and therefore without state and without social classes that we call today and here Our Networks of Life.
Eliminating the founding myth of power systems:
the obligation of the hierarchy of power in a social group.
In our beliefs, we have great difficulty in eliminating this founding myth of systems of power, which claims that power is exercised at the top of a pyramid by a minority, if not a single human being elected by God, an elite predestined to govern the peoples, a providential man or woman. Otherwise, for citizens who love rationalism, it is the bureaucratic function that organizes political power in a democracy that has distanced itself from theocratic systems. But blind submission to authority has yet to be eliminated.
A local, communal, cantonal experience in participatory local direct democracy be it! But there is no question of a national, continental or global society!
The end of the flourishing civilizations in humanity.
The civilizations that have flourished up to now, as we have said, have been only regional, and when they have developed over larger expanses, in reality it has been through ‘classical’ military conquests. Moreover, they have always been more or less quickly destroyed by “barbarians,” their less educated and developed neighbors who, using the military power system and destructive weapons, came to plunder their wealth.
Archeological discoveries explain the end of civilizations because of climatic or natural disasters.
Except here our beliefs are also wrong. Ethnologists and archeologists show that these remarkable civilizations have mostly disappeared due to climatic changes in their environment or natural disasters.
There is also the hypothesis that a generation has understood that its social culture, its values are no longer shared by the social group and that jealousies, rivalries to appropriate all or part of the wealth, crises of authoritarianism led by minorities who love fanaticism if not madness. Reasons enough to disperse the social group and attempt the project that a subgroup succeed elsewhere to develop again a humanist culture capable of an equally flourishing civilization.
Recent archeological discoveries show, however, that there have been times when, on all continents, humanity has used technological discoveries and traded to share a similar standard of living and artistic productions, often with know-how that we do not yet understand today or that supposes scientific and cultural knowledge, social and political practices in flagrant contradiction with our myths of the good savages, intellectually limited ancestors barely emerging from their caves…
We have presented on fileane.com the rock art of the Andes and other remains of these extinct civilizations such as that of Tiahuanaco. Each time, the testimonies come back about the intervention of aliens who came to rescue the development of Life on planet Earth, essentially after the destruction of Life by cosmic events or the great cataclysms following the so unstable life of our planet in the solar system.
We also presented the contributions of our first source of knowledge, the personal and initiatory, spiritual source: the fact that after the light well, we are offered to go and resume a life similar to the human condition on one or a second planet much more stable to civilization much more advanced than ours and allowing an immeasurable art of living compared to what the Earth can offer. Let us leave for the moment these questions that we will develop in the Cultural Institutions of the Networks of Life.
The historical explanation and destruction of life networks by the systems of power.
Through the recurrent conflicts between power systems and organizations in networks of life, we have shown the European history and especially that of the last flourishing medieval period. Since the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Middle Ages in 476, it was the monastic orders, mainly Benedictine, that after the year 500, saved, taught and disseminated the vestiges of the knowledge of the temples of Egypt, notably that of the oldest temple on the banks of the Nile in Denderah. The medieval period, either the central or classical Middle Ages from the beginning of the 11th century to the end of the 13th century, corresponds to the time of the cathedrals with the intervention of the Knights Templar. The destruction of this medieval organization by Philippe le Bel in 1307 opened the beginnings of royal absolutism, the conquest by marriage or war of the present space of France, the centralization of power that the revolution of 1789 preserved and strengthened until the republican periods of fascism and tyranny.
Abandoning the systems of power in order to use our Networks of Life again, means putting back in place the knowledge that allowed the development of humanistic civilizations flourishing, without minorities leading a system of power.
We now know this knowledge politically and economically. It is up to us to present this knowledge socially and culturally. They did not completely disappear after 1307, just as architectural works from the time of the cathedrals remained and are often appreciated as the most beautiful villages in France. The knowledge that makes up a humanist society will first be drawn from contemporary historical analysis and especially from the historical analysis of the revolution of 1789, when too many mistakes were made to jeopardize a return to the flourishing medieval period, with the updating of this analysis according to the knowledge available in 1789 as well as today.
The policy mistakes made during the French Revolution in 1789.
We use a “classic” document on this passage between the Old Regime and the Republican political regime established in 1790.
In the preamble to this analysis, we repeat the words of our professor of Constitutional Law in Strasbourg during our first hour of course in the first year of Law. The only rule that should be retained from the Old Regime was the obligation on the king to convene the States General when the coffers of the kingdom were empty.
The Constituents in 1789 took great care to dismiss this rule which threatened their power and therefore all the Constitutions since 1790 are closed, blocked. In order to change constitutions, it was necessary to find military or civil wars and civil unrest, the 1958 Constitution not escaping this republican custom.
Our teacher’s message was clear: to change the constitution and the political regime, we too had to use that republican custom and go through the streets, the constituent assemblies in a gym or somewhere else. The fault lies with those who wanted to close down and keep our Constitutions blocked while making us believe in republican myths such as that of freedom, equality and fraternity.
Document, extracts:
TOCQUEVILLE AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION by François FURET
“…/… The words democracy, monarchy, democratic government can only mean one thing, according to the true meaning of the words: a government where the people have a greater or lesser share in the government. Its meaning is closely linked to the idea of political freedom.
To give the epithet of democratic government to a government where political freedom is not found is to say a palpable absurdity, according to the natural meaning of the words.”
TOCQUEVILLE ET LA RÉVOLUTION FRANÇAISE, François FURET
This note is perplexing, since Tocqueville denounces exactly the meaning he has constantly given to the word democracy: but the correction is to take the concept of the social level (equality) to the political level (participation in power, and freedom) as if the latter became fundamental in relation to the former.
Another text revealing the same shift: it is an appendix to Chapter II, 5, on centralization. Tocqueville made a remarkable comparison between French colonization in Canada and English colonization in America, noting that the colonial phenomenon grew to caricature the minds of both administrations. In Canada, no nobility, no “feudal traditions”, no predominant power of the Church, no old judicial institutions rooted in morals — in short, nothing of the civil society of the old Europe, nothing that opposes absolute government: “You would think you were in the middle of modern centralization, and in Algeria. On the contrary, in neighboring English America, where social conditions are comparable, “the republican element, which forms the basis of the English constitution and mores, is unimpeded and growing. The administration itself does little in England, and individuals do a lot; In America, the administration itself is out of the way, so to speak, and people by uniting do everything. The absence of upper classes, which made the Canadian inhabitant even more submissive than the French at the same time, made the English provinces increasingly independent of power. In both colonies, a fully democratic society is established, but here, at least as long as Canada remains in France, equality mingles with absolute government; there it combines with freedom.” Two ideas strike me as striking in this contemporary note of the Ancien Régime:
- Political freedom is not necessarily linked to the presence of higher classes, of an “aristocracy”, in the sense that Tocqueville gives to this word. In English America, “the absence of upper classes” makes individuals “increasingly independent of power”: Very clear break with the conceptual scheme of 1836: aristocracy/local government/political freedom;
- what is decisive in the evolution of the two societies is not, in fact, their social state — which is identically “democratic” — but their tradition and their politico-administrative practice.
This is indeed what emerges from the analysis of the essential articulations of the Ancien Régime: not that Tocqueville surrendered to a causal monism entirely alien to the very nature of his thought. Instead, it remains attentive to the intertwining of reasons and consequences revealed by empirical observation of sources. But the fact remains that civil society appears in his latest book less as a cause than as a consequence of political and moral society: and this is perhaps the fundamental intellectual originality of the Ancien Régime, both in relation to Tocqueville’s earlier works and in relation to the political sociology of the nineteenth century in general.
The central phenomenon, the essential aspect of the historical change, is therefore the growth of monarchical power and government centralization, linked themselves to the development of size. This process dislocates and unifies both civil society (“the division of classes was the crime of the former kingdom” II, 10, p. 166), cut into groups increasingly rival to increasingly similar individuals. However, the inability of some of the classes, either to maintain their former political power or to unite to find a new one, leaves the way open to administrative despotism, which in turn worsens the consequences of government centralization.
In this second part of the book, Tocqueville, a good heir to the historiography of the Restoration, speaks of “classes”: “I can be opposed, no doubt, to individuals, I am talking about classes, they alone must occupy history” (II, 12, p. 179). But he manipulates this fundamental concept with perpetual ambiguity: classes are sometimes defined as the orders of the Old Regime, and sometimes according to a combination of the law of the Old Regime, and a criterion, moreover very vague, of wealth and social dignity, which encompasses the wealthy bourgeoisie in the upper classes.
What really underlies this ambiguity, this constant passage from one direction to the other, is the central question that Tocqueville asks about this French society of the eighteenth century: how could it not move, without revolution, from the rigid hierarchy of orders to the modern dichotomy of notables/people, upper classes/lower classes? But if that is the crux of his question, as I believe it is, then we are also measuring the progress made since Democracy in America. Tocqueville went from a problem of social equality and political democracy to a problem of the upper classes and the elites. It is true that, as he suggested in Democracy (at the end of chapter IX, t. I), he is no longer studying a society formed ex nihilo by republican and egalitarian emigrants, but rather a world rooted in aristocratic tradition, and that he cannot transpose the same analyzes from one society to another.
…/…
By parodying Bainville, one could summarize Tocqueville’s dialectic by saying: French society in the 18th century had become too democratic for what it retained of nobility, and too nobiliary for what it had of democracy.
Too democratic: These are chapters VII to X of book II, describing the processes of unification of minds and isolation of the upper classes from one another, and chapter XII, where Tocqueville deals separately (as at the beginning of book I) the peasant problem. Too noble: This is the curious chapter XI, in which Tocqueville analyzes to celebrate and oppose them to the “democratic” mediocrity, the spirit of independence and the sense of freedom that aristocratic traditions had imprinted on the French society of the former regime, while stressing that this spirit, linked to the idea of privilege, was not such as to survive democratic institutions, let alone to found them.
…/…
« Democracy » in the Old Regime is less a state of society than a state of mind. » François FURET
source:
https://www.persee.fr/doc/ahess_0395-2649_1970_num_25_2_422226
François FURET is recognized as a historian who departs from ideologies as the first source of events. It is the actions of individuals that animate the event history and only afterwards, other individuals seek to use these events by attaching them to an ideology in order to justify a long-term enterprise to conquer and defend a system of power, as after 1945 the communist system and the various fascists, two camps that oppose each other through incessant military or civil wars.
In the text that we have chosen, factual events and myths, utopias, fictions whose ideologies feed attempt to clarify a crucial historical situation, the passage from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1789. The issue concerns the cultural elements, if not the legal rules of the Old Regime which reflect the vestiges of a society without social classes and which the revolutionaries after 1789 will ignore, will forget to merge themselves in myths and sterious and destructive utopias. One point is certain, both Tocqueville and Furet miss or forget the medieval period before the development of royal absolutism. Furet, however, will admit that democracy remained in the Old Regime as a state of mind.
Where does this “democracy” mindset come from?
TOCQUEVILLE provides an explanation of the facts that characterize the Ancien Régime in the 18th century shortly before 1789. But he and FURET could not trace back to the functioning of the medieval period, which was thrown into oblivion and taboo by the monarchy on the one hand, but also by the secular organization of the Catholic church as well as by the Protestant movement.
Today we have found this political, economic, social and cultural functioning of this last flourishing period in Europe and we can better respond to Tocqueville and Furet to define the conditions for a society without social classes and without Marxist, fascist ideologies to divide the peoples and strengthen the ruling elites of the systems of power.
They remained in the monarchy’s system of power and the centralization of power taken over by the republics. They did not question the form of property rights that was selected by political leaders: common property for the medieval period and the flourishing civilizations of the past, collective property managed by the monarchy or the communist system of power through its exclusive political party, private property selected by revolutionaries and republicans including that of the means of production. What we do on fileane.com with our readers who have understood this question.
In the Ancien Régime Tocqueville had clearly understood that the aristocracy had retained its traditions of independence. Furet notes that Tocqueville is entangled between orders, classes, a spirit of independence and a sense of freedom, and therefore fails to clarify the notion of democracy, of government by the people.
The traditions of aristocratic independence are linked to the defense of privileges that go back to feudalism, but these privileges have not been constant throughout the centuries.
In the time of the cathedrals, the management of the common property with the common property had suppressed these privileges of the aristocracy, and it was the monastic orders then knights who rejected these privileges. Once again, we meet historians, researchers who do not dare or know how to go back in history before 1307 and break the taboo posed by royal absolutism and papacy on the social networking organization of the medieval period and its political regime of direct local participatory democracy.
The privileges of the aristocracy are only a kind of delegation of power from a centralized monarchy that does not yet have the technological means of communication to ensure the daily management of its affairs through its kingdom. Independence is only de facto and as soon as the means of communication and telecommunications are developed, the centralization of power will move towards an exacerbated authoritarianism, fascism and then the domination of the world by the Anglo-Saxon financial oligarchy.
In 1789, revolutionaries and intellectuals reasoned according to ideas, the idea of freedom as if to replace the idea of God and the divine will, it was necessary to remain at this intellectual level of the management of myths and utopias. We are then in the presence of a minority that is taking over power, proclaiming the exclusivity of private property to serve its private interests and manipulating citizens with myths, utopias, legal fictions to subject them to its domination.
Then both Tocqueville and Furet remained on the quest for democracy, a state of mind because the state of medieval society had been destroyed and its wealth had been confiscated by the aristocracy, merchants and bankers who defended private property and the elimination of common property.
The comparison between the colonization of Canada by the French monarchy and that of the future United States by the English also remains very evasive as to the causes of these situations and behaviors, of these political cultures. France’s colonial bureaucracy is the result of centralized power in an absolute monarchy that, in order to manage ever-larger areas, needs a political instrument of immediate local control and decision-making.
Anglo-Saxon, German and other European settlers have a different culture and have suffered other historical events, including the Second War of the Commons in Britain.
In the colonies of the Caribbean, the deportations of Irish and Scottish Catholic Christians began in the 16th century. Then the English settlers on the coasts of North America were poor people fleeing misery or religious communities that refused to submit to the Anglo-Saxon Puritan sect that had conquered power and developed the Anglican religion to legitimize their dogma of the predestination of Puritans to rule the world and all the peoples of the reprobate. Or religious communities that have fled the hostility of the Catholic papacy or Protestant political powers.
This story is also taboo in Britain and is now known and disseminated again thanks to the Internet.
These communities were independent and developed the work together, without central administration, and when London wanted to impose an administration on the East Coast of the New World, the colonies banded together to fight for and obtain their Independence, to found the United States of North America.
Yet Tocqueville could analyze these events as well as later on Furet and us today. Links with the New World beyond the Atlantic have never ceased since ancient times. Voltaire deigned to meet once with Benjamin Franklin, who remained in Paris for a decade, but this philosopher refused to understand where the culture and institutional rules that enabled the insurgents to conquer their independence and then write their first Constitution came from.
The Age of Enlightenment was satisfied with the myth of the good savage, it did not seek to understand the Great Law that binds the Iroquois nations and whose knowledge had been passed on to these nations making nations allied by the marine monks and soldiers of the French, Norman and Viking Templar Fleet to come together in a Confederation of 6 nations.
Lavoisier was the only one to write to Benjamin Franklin shortly before his death in 1790 to ask him to return to Paris and show how to lead the Revolution towards a Constitution similar to that of the United States of America.
Later, when Victor Hugo understood the meaning and the message of the cathedrals, he put in Gavroche’s mouth these famous words: “it’s Voltaire’s fault, it’s Rousseau’s fault”.
Different democracies are possible, depending on their history and culture.
As Furet points out, the explanation for this difference between the two ways in which Canada and the United States have developed lies in their history and culture. It is this knowledge, it is these experiences that determine the political system, the will to organize to live together.
We then come to admit, as he did, that there are several possible democracies, but the question of whether a classless society is possible is no longer central, essential, and the standards of life, values and ways of life, the culture of a classless society are quickly falling into the realm of myths, utopias. We are no longer in the 1950-1970’s wondering whether Marxism will succeed in eliminating fascism.
Today, recapturing history since the last flourishing humanist period in Europe is about reestablishing humanist culture, its values, its norms and it is up to us to define our new ways of life. We have just made the choice of civilization, the political and economic institutions of the Networks of Life are exposed, the social institutions logically follow from this and define a society without social classes and without Marxism, fascism and any ideology at the service of a system of power.
Leaving the systems of power which essentially include capitalism and its opposite creature, communism, means also abandoning these intellectual constructions in an attempt to justify the domination of peoples by minorities or to search in these systems how peoples could still participate a little more in power in these representative democracies at the hands of the elites who rule the systems of power.
The social organization of the Ancien Régime in France.
So to conclude these comments on this text by Furet, is it a bizarre and folkloric idea to restore meaning to these notions of the Ancien Régime that Tocqueville, according to Furet, mixed without discernment and without understanding what they corresponded to?
Corporations
were trade associations based on skills and expertise to organize activity on the first level, that of work essential to life and survival, but also on the second level of human activity, the creation of works that elevate the standard of living and these works have been transmitted to us through our cathedrals and our most beautiful villages in France, most often built in the medieval period
The orders brought together intellectual, if not spiritual, activity in the production and teaching of knowledge, essential bases for the development of a free city and the realization of works which raise the standard of living and are transmitted to future generations as well as essential bases for the development of political action in a participatory local direct democracy.
We can enter further into the social life of these corporations by taking the example of Strasbourg in Alsace.
document, extracts:
In the winstubs, the taste of Alsace
What distinguishes the winstub from another restaurant is not codified: the criteria required to benefit from it do not appear in any administrative text. Its primary quality is its “heimlich” side, that is to say intimate and Alsatian, which is a necessarily subjective notion. Its most accurate definition is perhaps the most imprecise: the winstub is the cozy soul of Alsace… But how do you characterize a soul? To understand it, you have to align words and ideas like a painter superimposes touches of color…Etymology can be a way of telling the story. From this point of view, a winstub is a wine store. The pitchers were accompanied by small dishes (snacks, onion tarts, mixed salads, etc.), then the menu took on consistency (sauerkraut, Riesling chicken, kidneys, etc.) until it became, loosely in the form of quip the historian Georges Bischoff, this friendly address “where the food is as good as in France and as abundant as in Germany!” »
“Winstub refers to a very ancient sociability, which dates back to the Middle Ages and is linked to corporate stoves,” confirms and explains Georges Bischoff. In the towns of Alsace, these stoves (Trinkstuben) were places for meetings of professional or social groups. Alongside those of the corporations (Zunftstuben), which grouped artisans according to their trades (market gardeners, boatmen, tanners, etc.), there were the stoves of the nobles, the clergy and members of the Magistrate (Herrenstuben), even those of the bourgeois (Bürgertrinkstuben).
For an entrance fee and an annual fee, we went to these communal houses as if we were a second home: to eat, drink, play, entertain… And always, of course, to chat. They were the inns of a clan. We settled our affairs there and indulged in the pleasure of the shared moment, which was already the practice of stammtisch. “We met there every day at noon,” continues Georges Bischoff. It was a sociability of men. In Strasbourg, in the 14th century, between 200 and 300 nobles gathered in these Herrenstuben.” The system of corporations and stoves persisted until the Revolution, after which, very logically, many of these places became restaurants.
Alongside these Ancien Régime stoves there were of course “lots of inns” open to all those who could afford them. In his French and German Colloquies, published in 1627, Daniel Martin, professor of French in what was still a Germanic land, lists more than sixty “taverns” (Au corbeau, Au Boeuf, Au Cerf, Au lion d ‘or, etc.) in the center of Strasbourg alone.
Article taken from the magazine Trésors d’Alsace, dedicated to the heritage of the region and which evokes in its first issue the remarkable restaurants of Alsace, prestigious, historical, picturesque or unusual. Texts Hervé de Chalendar – Edition Céline Walter.
We remember that these “Stuben” or these stoves were shared houses, a second home.
These are meetings of men in Strasbourg. We know that in some cities there were also women’s circles. In English guilds, women could lead corporations. It all depends on the survival of Celtic customs and the practice of matriarchy which represent local particularities during the medieval period, particularly in Scotland and Ireland but also in the Scandinavian regions where the Vikings originated like other peoples. Slavs who left to settle on the great rivers of Russia as far as the Black Sea. The fact remains that Strasbourg was for a long time a republic and a free city in the Holy Roman Empire.
Free cities.
In the case of the free city of Belfort, since the franchise charter of May 1307, it was in 1342 that a collegiate church was founded at the foot of the castle.
« The chapter of canons gives a real stature to the city that had just pushed its ramparts westward, so as to include the new neighborhood with a few dozen new houses. In fact, Belfort remained a very small town, but it was nevertheless the center of the whole region: Twelve canons – eight priests, four clerics – were at the same time twelve scholars and, consequently, twelve property administrators, twelve jurists, twelve professors. »
p 66, Belfort 1307-2007, seven centuries of courage and freedom, Georges Bischoff, Yves Pagnot, Editions Coprur à Strasbourg, 2007.
A city free to develop must have the means to ensure the production of wealth on the first two levels of human activity and a certain frankness towards the powers of the surrounding lords or else depend on an abbey whose monastic order guarantees the communal management of all three levels of human activity.
For Belfort, the intervention of the monks will continue. You have to return to the Middle Ages and a period of great famine to find the origins of the Malsaucy pond. Because this large expanse of water is not natural: it was dug by the monks, on marshy land, at the request of Gaspard de Morimont, Baron de Morimont and Belfort, at the end of the XV E century. A time when monks develop fish techniques. In the Malsaucy, they begin by building a dike allowing to retain the water, between 1490 and 1510. If there was nothing to eat, there would always remain the carp … They are thriving there, in the malsaucy but also in La Véronne, a remarkable natural site located just on the other side.
These major works conducted by the monks develop free cities and ensure quality safety and food populations to avoid periods of famines: storage of milk in cheeses, wines instead of water improper for consumption, salt and smoking meats for their conservation, fish farming for the supply of vitamins and diversification of food.
The monks are also children of peasants who cannot stay on their parents’ land because they are unnecessary mouths. Supported in monasteries and abbeys, they receive an education, know how to read and write and according to their capacities they specialize in an intellectual and manual profession to carry out works intended to raise the standard of living and to be transmitted to future generations. The most learned animate political action in their monastic communities and advise the monarchy and nobility in the conduct of political and diplomatic affairs.
For the ruling nobility, managing to put one of his daughters or one of his sons in the direction of a monastery or an abbey quickly became a guarantee of prosperity for his land.
For a long time, during the medieval period, the nobles and the monarchy which had been educated by the monks, once elderly, returned to live in their monastery or abbey where they had spent their youth, to finish their old days, in all simplicity in work and prayer like other others in their community and spiritual community.
This organization of human activity in three levels corresponds to the practice of Egyptian and Greek civilizations, both drawing their lessons from the temples on the banks of the Nile.
It was Hannah Arendt who described the economic and social horror of industrial society in the fact that the rulers, in order to maximize their private profits, suppressed the level of realization of works with the common goods and their management in common property and confiscated the political action of the citizens to ensure the despotism and tyranny of their political power over the peoples. In power systems, citizens are excluded from political action and condemned to work essential to the interests of their masters. The realization of the works will be removed after 1789 with the private property of the means of production, the heart of industrial and financial capitalism.
Communal assemblies of direct local democracy participating in the medieval period.
Communal assemblies of direct local democracy participating in the medieval period.
In response to Tocqueville and Furet, and to our citizens who are complacent in ignorance or refusal to learn how our elders organized themselves into communal assemblies or regional confederations, a convincing example is provided by
Francis DUPUIS-DERI in his book:
Democracy Political history of a word, in the United States and in France
Lux Humanités 2013 Canada.
Our elites have been very successful in making history without the participation of the people and calling it democracy.
Document excerpts: On pages 41 to 47:
“Yet in the Middle Ages and during the European Renaissance, thousands of villages had an assembly of inhabitants where decisions about the community were made jointly.
The ‘communities of inhabitants’, which even had a legal status, operated on a self-governing basis for centuries. Kings and nobles were content to manage matters related to war or their private domains, administer justice and mobilize their subjects through chores.
…/… In addition to community assemblies, federal assemblies brought together several communities in the same valley, for example, to deal with common affairs.
…/… In addition to these municipal assemblies, meetings within the guilds of merchants and craftsmen were regularly held to determine the guild’s statutes, labor and production standards, the rights and duties of members, the modalities of mutual assistance and to plan religious ceremonies.
…/… Some professional associations even stipulate in their statutes that women must represent 50% of the jurors of the trade.
…/… Finally, thousands of monasteries were founded in the Middle Ages where the community gathered daily to pray and to participate in deliberative assemblies that could number up to 200 people.
Medieval democracy, alive then, but now so little known, allowed the people to go through long months without direct contact with representatives of the monarchy, an institution that finally offered very few services to its population composed of subjects, and not citizens. In other words: a territory and a population could be subjected to several types of political regimes simultaneously, either authoritarian (monarchy for the kingdom, aristocracy for the region) and egalitarian (local or professional democracy).
…/… The assembly of inhabitants is then a space where resistance is organized in the face of this rise in power of the State
…/… Finally, assemblies of inhabitants are prohibited and the king appoints prefects to head the communities.”
Similarly, to enlighten Tocqueville’s remarks on the comparison between the colonization of Canada and that of the future United States, Francis Dupuis-Déri, in 2013, clearly explains the historical situation.
page 51 – 55 :
“In North America, colonizers of European origin have been in contact with American Indian societies operating according to democratic principles.
In the case of New France, the Wendats (also known as the Hurons) had four levels of government: clan, village, nation and confederation.
…/… The civilian leader looked like a community leader who presided over feasts, dances, games, funerals, and acted as a mediator in internal conflicts and as a diplomat to foreigners.”
Francis DUPUIS-DERI
page 51 – 55:
NOTE: Here we find the use of the Great Law that teaches the nations by the monks soldiers and navigators of the Temple and Viking fleet of Normandy.
Document : extracts of Alexis de Tocqueville, « Regards sur le Bas-Canada », éditions Typo, 2005
Is it true that Amerindians love the French?
– Yes, sir. Extremely. They only agree to speak French. In the most distant deserts, the quality of French is the best recommendation near them.
They always remember our good treatments when we were masters of Canada. Besides, many of us are allied to them and live almost like them. »
Conversation between Alexis de Tocqueville and a Canadian on August 7, 1831 (191 years today) in Mackinac (today Michigan State).
If the trip from Tocqueville to the young United States of America (the country then has only legal existence for forty-eight years) is well known, that which it has achieved in Quebec is less so .
Prior to his visit to Montreal, Quebec and the French hinterland of Canada, Tocqueville Long the American-Canadian border. And more particularly the region of the Great Lakes.
In 1831, the Great Lakes region was a vast territory that has remained wild that Tocqueville called the “desert”. A green desert because it is filled with immense forests as far as the eye can see but empty of men, like the great deserts of Africa.
The men he encounters on this territory are still mainly French in 1831. Or more particularly Franco-American mixedos having French in mother tongue.
The latter are called “wood-brown” themselves because of their skin color characteristic of mixed mestians (see our ephemeris of July 25 on this subject).
During his exchange with a Canadian dated August 7, 1831, the latter recalls the three fundamental traits that characterize relations between French and Amerindians.
This, since the foundation of New France in 1534 (for more than three hundred years when Tocqueville visits Canada).
First, respect for the Amerindians towards the French. The Amerindians indeed call the king of France “onontio goa”. The expression means according to the tribes “the most grandfather on earth” or “the largest mountain on earth” (in reference to France in this last meaning). Pontiac declared himself “the son of Louis” (Louis XV in this case).
Secondly the alliance between France and the Native American nations present of the mouth of the St. Lawrence River in the North, to the Ohio Valley in the South.
The first commercial and military alliance dates from 1603 and is concluded by Samuel de Champlain in the name of Henri IV. On the side of the Amerindians, several chiefs including the famous Anadabijou, chief of the Montagnais, are signatories of the treaty.
Third characteristic of Franco-American civilization: the mixture between French and Amerindian, both on the matrimonial level and in terms of customs.
Very quickly the French living in Canada start to live in the Amerindian. A phenomenon attested in 1616 by the missionaries of the Company of Jesus through their collection “Jesuit relationship”.
Three characteristic features which persisted in 1831, despite the conquest of New France by Great Britain in 1763.
ILLUSTRATION: The governor of New France Frontenac on the way to Cataraqui (currently in Ontario) in 1690. Painting dated 1897-1930. Source: John Henry de Rinzy / Library and Archives Canada.
Tocqueville has understood social, cultural ties between Amerindians and French because The French were able to live in the Amerindian way of life. He also understands relations between the English colonists and the Amerindian and French colonized, especially the French of Quebec who must now bend to the English government.
the greatest misfortune
At the end of his visit to the Quebec court, August 26, 1831, Tocqueville writes: “ I was never more convinced that by leaving [this court] that the greatest and most irremediable misfortune for a people is to be conquered. “On August 29, he believes possible a” awakening “of this people; However, everything will be lost if the upper classes do not play their role and surrender to “English movement”. Three months later, on November 26, his concern for the future of the North American Francophonie and the Bas-Canada reaffirms: “I just saw in Canada a million brave, intelligent French, made to form a day A great French nation in America, who live in a way as foreigners in their country. The conquering people hold trade, jobs, wealth, power. It forms the high classes and dominates the whole society. The conquered people, wherever they do not have the immense numerical superiority, gradually loses their customs, their language and their character. »
To go further: Alexis de Tocqueville, “Regards sur le Bas-Canada”, Typo editions, 2005.
Document :
“…/… For his part, the Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf testified in 1638 in his Relations des Jésuites that political power was in fact held by the assembly, a democratic practice
…/… Such egalitarian and democratic communities inevitably attracted deserters from the navy or the army, fleeing slaves and women fleeing an abusive husband. So the colonial authorities forbade contact between slaves, for example, and Amerindian communities.
…/… As anthropologist David Graeber and economist Amartya Sen also point out, the practice of coming together to deliberate on common affairs has existed almost everywhere, including in Europe in the Middle Ages and in the centuries since, and in the territories that Europe conquered and colonized. …/… Anthropologist Pierre Clastre notes that the European authorities were far from being seduced by this democracy, and instead deduced that “these people were not polished, that they were not real societies: of the savages” without faith, law, or king”.
…/… In fact, the first settlers who managed to establish and maintain themselves in North America without being decimated by disease or massacred by the Aboriginal people were known as “Puritans”. They fled religious repression in Europe in search of freedom, but did not call themselves democrats.
For most of them, democracy had a major flaw: It was not a type of diet mentioned in the Bible. John Cotton, an influential Puritan reverend, said in 1636: I do not think that God ever ordained democracy as a desirable government for the Church or society.” Similarly John Winthrop, another puritan, explained in 1643 that if “pure democracy” is to be adopted, there will be no justification for it in the Scriptures: there is no such government in Israel.”
…/… Despite these highly critical words, this era also offers what seem to be the first positive official references of democracy.
In 1636, Roger Williams was banished from Massachusetts and went to found Rhode Island, whose 1641 Constitution appeared to be the first European democratic document in North America. The state is defined as “a democracy or popular government, (…) it is in the power of the corps of free men, in good order assembled or, for the majority of them, to make and constitute the just laws, by which they will be governed”.
end of document.
These excerpts from Francis Dupuis-Déri’s book are, in our opinion, sufficient to show that conflicts between power systems and organizations in networks of life have not ceased throughout humanity, in antiquity as in contemporary history. Historians will scarcely test their analysis to the core of property rights. They are most often at the level of conflicts between supporters of theocracies and their religious dogmas and supporters of a civil or military government or supporters of a new form of theocracy such as that evoked by Anglo-Saxon Puritans in relation to the Catholic and Protestant religions in Europe.
We invite our readers to read the whole book “Democracy Political History of a Word in the United States and in France” by François Dupuis-Déri.
The Peace Treaty of 1701 between the French and the Amerindian peoples with our comments is presented in our article on the great law that links. This Confederation of the five Iroquois nations served as a model for the first constitution of the United States of North America and its forgetfulness or its ignorance by Parisian bourgeois revolutionaries in 1789-1790 represents the fundamental error of the Revolution of 1789.
The comparison between the English colonization of Canada and the development of the USA clearly shows that a colonized people by a system of power loses their direct participatory local democracy while a English colony that is released uses the example of Amerindian democracy, Especially the great law which links the 5 Iroquois nations, to write its federal constitution of the United States of North America.
Not colonizing a people begins by adopting their lifestyles and social norms. This was the case for the French who came to the St. Lawrence region, as was the case two or three centuries earlier for the sailors of the Templar fleet and the Vikings who came to stopover in the Gulf of St. Lawrence before going down towards the coasts of Mexico and the mouths of the great rivers of South America to cross this continent and reach the Andes of Tiahuanaco.
This example remains relevant today when it comes to decolonization from the world government of the Anglo-Saxon financial oligarchy. In the 18th century, after the Independence of the USA, the English who remained faithful to the monarchy of London withdrew to Canada, destroying the political, economic and social relations developed during Neuve-France between Native Americans and French. Then the Anglo-Saxon bankers of London regained power in the USA by setting up a new private central bank. This story is described in our Part 5 and Our Dear Enemies File.
Today we leave a system of capitalist power with its autocratic and tyrannical political regime in its neoliberal form, to develop our life networks with the political regime of participative local direct democracy.
We have shown their political and economic institutions whose use explains their social institutions that we will now present.
To complete this presentation of the perception in France of the democratic life of the Amerindians and explain why the political and economic choice was not to keep the new France in North America, let us quote this sentence of Voltaire:
Document:
“I am like the public. I like peace much better than Canada and I think France can be happy without Quebec. »Letter from Voltaire, September 6, 1762.
In 1762, the seven -year war which started in 1756 was about to end. Quebec and Montreal, the two main cities in New France, have been under British occupation for almost two years.
In France, some intellectuals take a position for a sale of Canada to the United Kingdom in exchange for peace. These intellectuals then prevail the economic interests of France in the short term.
To know how to keep the Islands of the Antilles supplies with sugar, a commodity of the time as precious as oil today. A depends on long -term interests: continue the settlement of French America to weigh on the destiny of the world.
Louis XV, who has already missed the negotiation of the Austrian Succession War (1740-1748) by keeping any territorial achievements, will miss out again. He will once again miss the closing negotiations of the seven years war. In its discharge, France comes out losing this war. Unlike the Austrian War of Austria in 1748, it was not in a position of force to negotiate in 1763.
Voltaire died in 1778, convinced that the sale of Canada to the British remained a good operation for France.
Also in his discharge, at that time the thirteen British colonies in America barely began their war for independence. At that time, no one imagines in the West that they will be able to become the world’s leading power.
source : Histoires de France 2.0 07/06/2022
Putting history in the direction of the Networks of Life without the influence of the systems of power
It is also a way we take here to show the evolution of our knowledge since Tocqueville and Furet.
It implies that the current selection of the academic knowledge taught to defend the ideological foundations of the liberal capitalist system of power, or that of other systems of power and theocracies, is to be rejected when these systems of power are abandoned.
The Life Networks are not obliged to seek new knowledge hitherto ignored, which would certainly make this venture risky. No, this knowledge of how organizations function in networks of life has existed and has been used more or less by the leaders in power or by their opponents. We have a mission to update this knowledge, this knowledge declared taboo, this prohibited law and we know the methods to be used again, mainly the alliance of opposites and subsidiarity.
In the present system of democracies under the capitalist system of power, republican myths and the idea of freedom are transmitted through the school and university system. Similarly, health services are subject to the doxa of liberal doctrine: there is no company, there are only markets.
The exclusive use of private property, especially in the means of production, has the consequence of limiting the political power of governments by the leaders of the capitalist system: the gendarme state is going back on the social achievements of the welfare state used to rebuild the country after 1945 and the tax system necessary for a certain distribution of wealth in order to avoid the political explosion or implosion of the liberal capitalist system no longer seeks to develop a middle class but to impoverish it so that the maximum wealth produced serves the private interests of the leaders of the system and their shareholders.
Life Networks develop differently, we know. We can now address their social institutions.
Social Institutions in Life Networks.
Their mission and objectives are to help economic and political institutions develop a flourishing humanist civilization and its way of life.
Their function and structure contribute to the success of political action in managing human activity.
Their functioning is identical to the other life project teams, only their mission and their purposes distinguish them from other life project teams.
They relate to a local political institution such as a free or confederal city.
They are evaluated according to their participation in the COS, Cost of Obtaining Solidarity, Extension of the COQ, Cost of Obtaining Quality.
In short, it is no longer public or privatized administrations that are financed mainly by the tax system for the distribution of wealth produced by the work of all, as in the liberal capitalist system or other systems of power.
On the other hand, in the Networks of Life, the use of our two sources of knowledge creates social institutions capable of developing the individual initiatory approach alongside the educational and training institutions that develop the source of intellectual and rational knowledge. So there are going to be more education and training institutions than there are in power systems. They will contribute to the production of wealth by promoting the raising of the level of skills with the aim of developing new synergies among human activity.
The following chapters will clarify these social institutions.
In conclusion of this introduction on the social institutions of Life Networks,
We have just seen that in the Middle Ages, the absence of means of communication allowed local communities to live most often in direct participatory local democracy before these means of communication promoted the centralization of power and the rise of the state.
Today, after the abandonment of power systems, the use of communication and telecommunications means allows the development of life networks with new assets. The Internet in the global village organized in networks of life is far from representing a utopia but a feasible objective with human resources and technologies favorable to group work and exchanges in real time as well as in discontinuous time.
This diversity and these exchanges are the basis for sharing the optimal solution obtained through the practice of subsidiarity and this sharing is at the heart of Solidarity between the life networks. The Internet is a common good for everything, for the production of material wealth and for the production of knowledge and knowledge.
Society without social classes
is revealed by coming out of the shadows cast on it by the leaders of the power systems. It is not a chimera or a mirage but the promise that what has lived for centuries at the local level will become reality at the national, confederal, global level to manage all human activity in a civilization that is again humanist.
We will start with the social institutions of education and training and then we will see those whose missions are the personal services. Finally, we will present the social institution of Political Action to clarify its organization and functioning.
- « Démocratie Histoire politique d’un mot, aux États-Unis et en France »
- Tocqueville est-il un historien de la Révolution française ?
- La Grande Loi qui lie les nations iroquoises
- Les erreurs de 1789
- Les conflits contre l’absolutisme royal en France
- Les villes libres
- Les Biens Communs, définition et gestion de hier à aujourd’hui
- Les organisations monastiques fondent la culture médiévale