A French clergyman's compassionate plan to mate man with monkeys to save the Negro race from slave labor.

A old friend of mine was distraught over his separation from his mate. I took him out to a strip club to relieve his pain. After a few drinks and dances, I said to him, "You might fall in love with a gorilla if you live with her long enough." My friend later said that my facetious remark had relieved his emotional distress somewhat. He might have suffered even more if the marriage had produced offspring for a custody battle. Of course intercourse between gorillas and humans cannot produce offspring. However, not everyone knows that, therefore the fact must reiterated time and time again lest people mate with apes for the wrong reason.

A chief theorist of the French Revolution, Abbe' Emanuel Joseph Sieyes, believed that apes and humans were a perfect genetic match. Although the human race is a single species, he mistakenly believed that Negroes were a species inferior to the human race. Both "our race" and Negroes were presumably a perfect match with apes, but Sieyes would have Negroes alone mate with monkeys in order to produce three separate anthropomorphic monkey races - the new breeds would take their place in the animal kingdom between man and the other animals. The wirmonkeys in his utopia would be slaves supervised by Negro overseers. Wealthy and educated whites would of course be in charge - Sieyes apparently did not envision a revolt whereby the wirmonkeys would take over and master the planet. Such an arrangement would be suitable for for future mass production, not yet attained in eighteenth-century France. Sieyes must have felt sorry for Negroes: Wirmonkeys would provide for the exploitation of labor with a clear conscience, not possible with Negroes because they excite human compassion - we note however that man has compassion for animal nature in general, not the abstract mental factor of human nature.

In an unpublished note entitled with the title "Slaves. For another species that would have fewer needs and be less capable of exciting human compassion," Sieyes speculated:

"Because a large nation is necessarily composed of two peoples, the producers, and the human instruments of production; the intelligent, and the workers who have only passive force; educated citizens, and auxiliaries to whom is granted neither the time nor the means of receiving an education; - would it not be desirable, especially in countries that are too warm or too cold, that there be a species between men and animals, a species capable of serving man for consumption and production?

"We have the great and the small orangutan, or the gorilla and the chimpanzee and the ape, three species of monkeys that breed perfectly with ours and with Negroes, species very susceptible to domestication and to improvement. The crossing of these races would furnish: 1. a strong race (six to eight feet tall) for hard labor whether in the country or the city, the gorillas; 2. a middle-sized race (three to four feet tall) for domestic details, the chimpanzees; finally 3. a small race (from twelve to fifteen inches) for petty services and amusement. 4. The Negroes would command, train, and answer for them.... Thenceforth the citizens, the heads of production, would be the whites, the auxiliary instruments of labor would be the Negroes, and the new races of anthropomorphic monkeys would be your slaves.... However extraordinary, however immoral this idea may appear at first glance, I have meditated it for a long time, and you will find no other means, in a large nation especially in very warm and cold countries, to reconcile the directors of work with the simple instruments of labor."

We encounter the usual bourgeois hypocrisy when we compare the abbe's private notes with his public rhetoric, and even his public statements are frequently confused and contradictory. We certainly are not surprised by hypocrisy, by the human crisis between the ideal and real, wherever we find it in the human or thinking race. Sieyes was an intelligent, educated, and enlightened man of his time, but he fell short of the Light just as we are shy of our own ideas of perfection.

Sieyes is counted among the Ideologues - Napoleon's pejorative epithet for the Ideologists - who brought up the scientific tail end of the liberal Enlightenment just prior to the conservative Romantic reaction - the Ideologues were greatly admired by an American child of the French Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson, who promoted their positivist ideology in the United States. Albeit Abbe' Sieyes was a clergyman, he was more interested in the sensationalist ideas of Locke and Locke's French disciple, Abbe' Condillac, than in theology. Sieyes was the principal author of the 1790 redivision of France into 83 departments, in turn subdivided into districts and cantons: "Le principal! mieux que cela, le seul!" he proudly exclaimed of his plan to rid France of its melange of differently sized and shaped corporate bodies by providing it with another form for the exercise of the territorial imperative. "It is only by effacing the boundaries of the provinces that it will be possible to destroy all those local privileges, which were usefully claimed when we were without a constitution, and which will continue to be upheld by the provinces even when they will have become no more than obstacles to the establishment of social unity." Furthermore, Sieyes was one of the architects of Napoleon's coup of 18 Brumaire (1799), which replaced the Directory with the Consulate - he became one of the three consuls. He is better known as the deputy to the 1789 States-General who wrote the popular revolutionary pamphlet, What is the Third Estate?.

As far as Sieyes was publicly concerned, the Third Estate was everything, the nation itself. Therefore its representatives should sit in one chamber and not in two; the house of lords and the senate of a bicameral assembly are vestiges of the monarch's or dictator's court of privileged nobles or senators - ironically, Sieyes himself became a senator some years later, after the Bourbon Restoration. More specifically, the Third Estate was everybody useful, all those engaged in agriculture, industry, commerce, and intellectual labor. The entitled nobility and clergy not so engaged are of course useless parasites, not members of the Third Estate.

The real Sieyes was not a democrat: "We have no intention whatever of subjecting the national government nor even the tiniest municipal governments, to the democractic regime," he said. He believed that citizens should be morally and intellectually competent in order to vote. According to him, all Frenchmen should have some civil rights, but only "active citizens" should elect deputies; active citizens or electors according to his plan were resident Frenchmen of legal age who paid taxes, who were not in a "servile" position, and who paid a "voluntary contribution" for the privilege of voting. Women, noted Sieyes, are by a "bizarre contradiction" normally excluded from voting, as are vagrants and beggars. Beginning with a population of twenty-six million French souls, he reduced the population to an electorate of about one-sixth of that number, or four million, four hundred thousand souls. Property alone he did not consider as a sufficient qualification for being a "true " citizen and elector:

"Electors would not be so easy to corrupt if they were all truly citizens. What should one expect from freeholders whose speculations extend only to knowing how to make a living, who have little talent for increasing their fortune, and know only how to use for that sole purpose the political instrument that you have the imprudence to place in their hnads. They know nothing of its importance or its use.... But, someone will say, do you beleive that enlightened citizens cannot have a depraved soul and sell their votes? Without doubt passions corrupt a portion of men, but ignorance animates passions all the more, leading astray the entire mass of the state."

As for the representatives elected, only those wealthy men who pay a substantial amount in direct taxes and whose wealth purchases enough leisure time to devote to the public weal should be eligible to represent the people. Of course they must truly be citizens as well; Sieyes observed that the progress of wealth resulted in "false pleasures", the enjoyment of luxuries, which subjected the poor to dehumanizing "forced labor." Perchance the wirmonkeys would work to remedy that disparity and injustice.

The contradiction is obvious: although Sieye's Third Estate consists of workers howsoever the labor is divided, wealthy non-workers are to rule; however, his publicly stated emphasis was on competence and service and not on wealth in itself as a qualification for leadership: honorific titles should be the consequence of virtuous service and not the condition of holding public office. If we turn to his unpublished notes, we get a better view of our revolutionary's prejudices. We find two nations instead of one in his notes. Or rather the producers are divided into "heads of production" and "working companions." The former are the true citizens or respectable men and the working companies are elsewhere referred to as instruments of labor, moral and intellectual nullities, working machines, auxiliaries, biped instruments, and human beasts. Sieyes would leave a door open between the inferior and superior 'races', for there is always the chance that the children might rise or fall from one race to another. He equates poverty with ignorance, hence a moral and intellectual education might eventually raise the human beasts to active citizenship. Notwithstanding technological advancements, we might suppose that his wirmonkeys would free up labor for schooling. We do not doubt that educated Negroes would qualify for citizenship, for during a debate on colonial affairs, we know Sieyes supported civil rights for people of color. He wrote the following unpublished note at about the same time he penned his popular pamphlet, What is the Third Estate:

"In vain do we dream of the general good of the human species, it will always be divided into two parts essentially distinguished by the difference of education and labor. If in a small space you wish to retain equality, you condemn the nation to a simplicity of industry and of happiness which could be sustained only with the degradation of the faculties of imagination and will. We would have to roll back the human species. That is not possible. One must return to the distinction between respectable men and instruments of labor. It is no longer equal men who are united, it is the heads of production. Union is founded on the perfection of morals, and those morals belong to only a portion of the people; the rest are only admitted into society as auxiliaries."

If only we all had the leisure to perfect our moral and intellectual faculties and to lead productive lives! We might all be respectable heads of production if someone else could do the hard work. Wirmonkeys will not work. The real difference between biological races is superficial - humans are one race. A race of machines run by computers is called for, then we could all be heads of production. Humans would be liberated from work and could turn to leading artistic lives or recreational lives of leisure. I was waxing enthusiastic about that very possibility over drinks with a friend at Lincoln Center in 1989 - incidentally, he was a black radical in 1969, then became an insurance salesman.

"Computer technology is setting us all free!" I tipsily declared.

"Nonsense," said my friend, "People are not being freed by technology, they are turning into technological niggers."

I did not care for his privileged use of the N-word, but I thought his point was well taken. Instead of being relieved of work by computers, many of us spend much of our time attending to computers. Intead of wirmonkeys overseen by Negroes, we have machines overseen by computers, and computers overseen by technicians and computer friends, with the heads of production and other power elite governing. And instead of being freed up to monkey around most of the day, we labor away to produce mountains of garbage, junk and trash. Perchance we are by nature compulsive laborers. Who, then, is the slavemaster?

Sources quoted:

A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution by William H. Sewell, Jr., Durham: Duke University 1994

Reason and Revolution - The Political Thought of the Abbe' Sieyes by Murray Forsyth, New York: Leicester University Press 1987