¹ Italics mine.

² Xenophon, Memorials, bk. II, ch. II.

³ This reaction appears notably in the custom of freeing all slaves every seventh, sabbatical, year, as well as in the extension of the rule of sabbatical rest to the slave.

⁴ This would not, incidentally, have been his only error, at least in my opinion.

⁵ I am by no means unaware of the complex character of historical causation- the result of the action of multiple factors whose effects intertwine and react upon one another in such a way that what appears as the result of a given transformation can also be considered from a different point of view as one of its partial causes. Nevertheless, it is often possible to distinguish between the dominant causes, in whose absence the effect would not have occurred, and the secondary causes whose absence would have decreased or retarded the effect under con sideration, but would still have made it occur. Now the historical connection between the disappearance of slavery and the coming of the machine allows us to disentangle the action of precisely such a dominant cause: All other conditions (with the exception of the disappearance of slavery) which have contributed to the coming of the machine in Europe were fully developed at one time or another in other civilizations on other continents, but did not there culminate in a technical revolution. A single factor which was present in Europe was lacking elsewhere, and this was the disappearance of slavery. In India, slavery was not legally abolished till 1843, and then by a decree of the Governor General, Lord Ellenborough. In China, slavery persisted till the beginning of this century. According to the principles of scientific analysis, the abolition of slavery should therefore be considered as the dominant cause of the coming of the machine.

⁶ Cf. Marc Bloch, "Avènement et conquêtes du moulin à eau," in Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, Nov. 1935, p. 541.

⁷ Cf. P. M. Schuhl, Machinisme et philosophie, Paris, PUF, 2nd ed., 1947, pp. 7-8.

⁸ The same was true of the Egyptian world. Cf. P. Jaccard, L'histoire sociale du travail, Paris, Payot, 1960, p. 31: "Egypt dreamt no more than Greece or Rome of dedicating monuments to labor or to the workingman… The fellahs and the artisans were never, except incidentally, represented on the frescoes of the tombs, on bas-reliefs or common pottery."

⁹ This is certainly an unnatural vision, a kind of magical illusion, which can only arise because of the distance in time which separates us from these ancient societies. This is why the advocates of classical education do not accord the same formative value to the study of modern literature.

¹⁰ G. Glotz, Le travail dans la Grèce ancienne, Paris, 1920, p. 194.

¹¹ Politics, IV, 3.

¹² Republic, VI, 495 E, VII, 522 B, IX, 590 C.

¹³ Letter to Lucilius, 88 and 90.

¹⁴ Cf. P. Jaccard, loc. cit., p. 27.

¹⁵ An exception must be made for elephants who, though slow, are little vulnerable because of their size and the thickness of their skins.

¹⁶ I think it necessary at this point to draw a very sharp distinction between the historical role of the Church as such and that of the Christian faith. In the course of the centuries, the established church has too often made itself the servant of the state and of the ruling classes and has, for this reason, been an instrument of political reaction, ready to justify the actions of the established authorities while preaching to the masses the acceptance of a miserable fate in this world. But the spirit "bloweth where it listeth," and it is generally outside the constituted churches (no matter incidentally what these may be) that the true faith and the creative religious spirit find their expression. In Europe, the true spirit of Christianity (an outgrowth of the Jewish faith) manifested itself in the monasteries on the one hand and in the urban religious fraternities on the other. And I am thinking especially of the latter when I speak here of the emancipatory social action of Christianity, which was to lead in the end to the triumph of the principles of the French Revolution.

¹⁷ Chivalry affirmed its Christianity only through the crusades, which is to say, through acts of war, and it will perhaps be conceded that this is not the most profound expression of the spirit of Christ. In fact, feudal society had remained impregnated, on the social plane, with the pagan spirit. This is also shown by its attitude towards labor: "In a certain sense," observes H. Pirenne, "the ancient idea that labor was below the dignity of a free man survived among the chivalry." (Histoire de L'Europe, Paris, 1936, p. 113).

¹⁸ The contrast between the town, the oasis of free labor, and the country, where servitude persisted, became only more pronounced with time. It is well known that there were still serfs in France on the eve of August 4, 1789, and all peasants remained, according to the hallowed phrase, corvéables et taillables à merci (liable to forced labor and taxable at discretion), which, from the economic point of view at any rate, hardly differed from servitude. These facts force one to make the strongest reservations in connection with Commander Lefebvre de Noëttes's widely known thesis that it was the invention of the shoulder collar which, by increasing the force of traction of the horse, became the principal cause of the disappearance of slavery. For the question then arises why human servitude should have disappeared so soon in the towns—where relatively little use was made of the horse and where the introduction of the shoulder collar could therefore have had only a very limited influence-whereas it was to persist for centuries still, in a scarcely attenuated form, in the countryside where the use of the horse was yet a universal and everyday practice. Besides, as Jérôme Carcopino noted quite correctly in his preface to the second edition of Commander Lefebvre des Noëttes's work (L'attelage et le cheval de selle à travers les âges, A. Picard edition, Paris, 1931, p. iv), there were "emancipations of serfs on a more or less massive scale within the domains of the last Carolingian and the first Capetian kings before the harness had been improved. And conversely, do we not know of countries, like the United States and Brazil, where slavery continued after the improvement of the harness?" But the essential question from the point of view which I am here adopting is whether technical progress, be it a matter of harnessing or of more advanced expedients, was the cause or the effect of the liberation of the workingman. If all that was necessary to deliver the enslaved portion of mankind was to perfect the collar of the horse, one ought to raise the question why the Romans who, like all the ancients, were great experts in physical culture and for whom the play of muscles held no secrets, should have failed to notice that the force of traction resided in the shoulders of the horse and not in his neck. Could such "inadvertence" on the part of the ancients be the reason why hundreds of millions of men suffered the martyrdom of slavery for thousands of years? The true cause that prevented the ancients from perfecting the harness was the same as that which led the Romans to neglect the practical applications of steam power (though they were acquainted with it) or that which kept the ancient Mexicans from making use of the wheel (though they, too, knew it) for traction: It was complete indifference to the misery of the masses of men. What allowed the harness to be perfected, as it made all the other inventions of European technology possible, was the change in attitude towards the workingman, in a Europe more or less converted to Christian principles. The movement of human liberation had to precede invention, in the countryside as well as in the towns. Invention is in fact the birthright of the free man; for it is the daughter of hope, and hope is not given to the slave, who is well aware that if his labor were to become easier as the result of a technical improvement, he would be transferred to harder tasks of which there is never a scarcity. As to the "vile slaves" to whom Seneca attributed certain technical inventions of his time, these were cultivated slaves, as the mention of stenography shows-slaves who constituted the thin upper, privileged, layer of the enslaved world and who were therefore by no means representative of their class as a whole.

¹⁹ Cf. Schuhl, loc. cit., p. 47.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ P. Jaccard, Histoire sociale du travail, Paris, Payot, 1960, p. 175. The same observation is to be found in Schuhl (loc. cit., p. 44). Compare this with Seneca's remark, cited above, about the technical inventions which were "the work of the vilest of slaves."

²² Loc. cit., p. 44.

²³ Henceforth there is nothing visionary about this vision. Thanks to the development of the machine, observes Schuhl, "the philosopher's dream would at last come true; the state would no longer comprise any but free men in the full sense of the word; all would have all the time they needed for cultivation, instruction, meditation and also for the practice of sports" (loc. cit., p. 106). And the author concludes that "it is up to the men of our time to restore the notion of leisure to its full value."

²⁴ In La révolution originelle, Paris, Vrin, 1958.