I. Morality and religion. – Contempt of democracies for morality. – Ethical preoccupations of the new school.

II. Renan's uneasiness about the future of the world. – His conjectures. – The need of the sublime.

III. Nietzsche's ethics. – The role of the family in the genesis of morality; Proudhon's theory of morality. – The ethics of Aristotle.

IV. Kautsky's hypotheses. – Analogies between the spirit of the general strike and that of the wars of Liberty. – Fear inspired in the parliamentarians by this spirit.

V. The worker employed in the factory of advanced production, the artist and the soldier in the wars of Liberty: desire to surpass previous models; care for exactitude; abandonment of the idea of exact recompense.

Fifty years ago Proudhon pointed out the necessity of giving the people a morality that would fit new needs. The first chapter of the preliminary discourses placed at the beginning of De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans l'Eglise is entitled: ‘The state of morals in the nineteenth century. Invasion of moral scepticism; society in danger. What is the remedy?’ There one reads these striking sentences: ‘France has lost its morals. Not that, as a matter of fact, the men of our generation are worse than their fathers … When I say that France has lost its morals I mean something very different, that it has ceased to believe in her own principles. She no longer has either moral intelligence or conscience, she has almost lost the idea of morals itself. As a result of continual criticism we have come to this sad conclusion: that right and wrong, between which we formerly thought we were able to distinguish, are now vague and indeterminate conventional terms; that all these words, Right, Duty, Morality, Virtue, etc., of which the pulpit and the school talk so much, serve to cover nothing but pure hypotheses, vain utopias and unprovable prejudices; thus that social life, governed by some sort of human respect or by convention, is in reality arbitrary.’