We acknowledge no constitution as binding that came into being by God's providence, that is passed down from one generation to another as a higher binding norm, that is improved only in part. Instead, we want to create the entire constitution anew, so that it is our work, our conscious, deliberate deed. From now on we shall set up only the state, the municipality and the royal power, as if there had been nothing before us, as if everything might exist without the help of God and nature and merely be the creation of our reason. We also do not bind ourselves to rights that have already been established; rather, the one [right] to which we now give favor, we give favor to, and we will take it and give it to the people.
Finally, we do not accept the division of states as God provided. We do not want to admit that He unites and divides the peoples, and makes one people subject to another according to his [divine] council and retribution. Instead we all want to abolish these acts of providence and break open the seal of justice under which He has decided on them, and [we] want to return all the nations [peoples] of the world to their original condition, that all of this will be as it was from the beginning by way of our power and our wisdom.
This is the core of all the demands of revolution. Its final measure is therefore necessarily the abolition of property, communism. For what is property if not that man recognizes the advantage in possession that God's providence has allotted and granted to one person over another, by birth and inheritance, by prior seizure, by more successful labor, by more fortunate utilization; and what is the sanctity of property if not awe and submission to God's providence? If man does not everywhere recognize God's providence as binding, does not recognize governing authority and the constitution and the professional placement that God has decreed, why then should he acknowledge the advantages of possession? — and if man undertakes to create everything anew, the state, local government, the distribution of the peoples [nations] and states in Europe, — why not also a new distribution of goods?
I now repeat my definition of revolution, and I believe it has been confirmed: Revolution is the establishment of the entire public condition on the will of man rather than on God's order and providence. Revolution is therefore, as the word already says, an upheaval; it consists in placing uppermost what should be lowermost according to eternal laws, and vice versa. It makes human beings into the source and center of the moral world order; it makes subjects into lords of their governing authority; it proclaims human rights without human duties and vocations; it lets the entire sinful muck of popular passion, which the power of governing authority is supposed to hold down in the depths, rise up to the heights of power. — That is revolution. — —
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