From opposition to slavery in the nineteenth century to the fight against the ransacking of the planet today, civil disobedience has frequently been brandished by activists. But the concept meets specific criteria.
by Anne chemin
History of a notion. Soup jet on a Van Gogh table, blocking of motorways, extinction of light signs at night: in the name of the fight against climate change, more and more environmental activists commit acts of civil disobedience. By deliberately breaking the law in order to arouse the consciences of their fellow citizens, they walk in the footsteps of voluntary reaper, who tear the plantations of GMOs in the open field, unbolters, who macume advertising panels from paint … but also predecessors More distant – and more illustrious -, like the philosopher Henry David Thoreau, the Mahatma Gandhi or the American pastor Martin Luther King.
The notion of civil disobedience appeared for the first time in 1866, in the title of a pamphlet of Thoreau (1817-1862) published a few years after his death. Arrested, in 1846, for having refused for six years to pay his taxes to the State of Massachusetts because of his links with the slave states in the southern United States, the American philosopher justifies himself by affirming that this payment would make him an accomplice of a policy he condemns. This experience inspires him a theory of civil disobedience: for Henry David Thoreau as for his friend the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), the only citizen’s guide must be his conscience. By blindly serving an unjust state, it would turn into “automaton”.
For decades, Thoreau’s advocacy in favor of civil disobedience remains confidential, but, in the 1900s, he inspired an Indian activist that his fight against British colonialism will soon make famous. “According to legend, Gandhi discovered Thoreau’s pamphlet in the prison library where he was locked in 1908, because of his first civil disobedience campaign, says Christian Mellon in civil disobedience (Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2008 ). Others think he would have heard of Thoreau when he was a student in England. Anyway, Gandhi used to read and reread Thoreau. “
Citizen’s moral integrity
If Gandhi subscribes, like Thoreau, to the idea that the citizen has the duty to rebel against unjust laws, the civil disobedience he advocates presents two “notorious differences” with that of the American writer, underlines The philosopher Manuel Cervera-Marzal. “It must be collective, even massive, and it must be based on Ahimsa, non-violence,” said the author of new disobedients. Citizens or outlaws? (The water edge, 2016). With Thoreau, civil disobedience was an individual act guaranteeing the moral integrity of the citizen: with the Mahatma Gandhi, it turns into a collective mobilization intended to change the world.
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