Property Is Theft!

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  When the law is audaciously violated; when a fraction of the people is outlawed by society; when the passionate impetus of a party has come to the point of saying: We will never give in; when there are two nations in the nation, one of them weaker and oppressed, the other, more numerous, which oppresses: if the division is admitted on both sides, my opinion is that the minority has the right to consummate this division by declaring it. The social bond being broken, the minority is freed from any political agreement with the majority: this is expressed by the refusal to obey those in power, to pay one’s taxes, to do one’s military service etc. A refusal motivated in this way has been called legal resistance by journalists because the government has gone beyond the bounds of law, and the citizens remind it of that fact by refusing to obey it.

  The law on clubs, the police intervention in electoral meetings, the bombardment of Rome, all of these violated the Constitution and outlawed the democratic party, so to speak, thus motivating the application of the principle of legal resistance, inasmuch as the democratic party was in the minority in the country; if this party gained a majority and then the government persisted the right of insurrection would follow.

  With ministers like the one who pretended that the cry of Long live the democratic and social Republic!—which sums up the whole Constitution—is unconstitutional and seditious, or the other who denounced the democratic socialists as criminals and looters, or a third one who actually had them prosecuted, judged and condemned as such, with a government that understood by the word order nothing but the extermination of republican opinion, and which, not daring to openly attack the Revolution in Paris, went to Rome in order to suppress it, which declared war ON IDEAS, which said aloud: No concessions!—which repeated at every instant, as on June 23rd, There must be an end to this!—the situation was clear, there was nothing to be misunderstood. Open persecution was declared on social democracy, we were denounced in terms of contempt and hate, singled out for public condemnation by the authorities, as was not concealed by the minister responsible for the Bill in question. This may be judged by the following description reported at the time by La Presse, words that I would like to see inscribed on a bronze tablet to the eternal shame of the one who was its hero:

  “There is but one thing more difficult to describe than the treatment inflicted on M. Furet, and that is the letter that was written by M. Léon Faucher when he was the domestic minister to his colleague the Minister of the Navy on the question of the discipline to which the insurgents of June were to be subjected. It was not merely a question of recommending that there should be no distinction made between them and the convicts condemned for murder and theft, no, the refinement of repression was extended to the point of refusing those convicted in June the consolation of being shackled to their fellows and ordering that every insurgent be chained to a murderer or thief! Fortunately, the ministry of the interior’s temporary directive having been entrusted to M. Lacrosse, very different orders were in fact issued.”

  M. Léon Faucher is one of those characters whom one only encounters once every four thousand years. To find his match you have to go back to the mythical period and the Homeric brigand who caused his victims to die by attaching them to corpses. Well! This is the man who, on January 29th, for the love of order!—which translated means for hatred of the revolution, invited the national guard to massacre the socialists; who on March 21st presented the brutal law which failed to bring about the overthrow of those in power; who on May 11 th lied in a telegram in order to suppress the national representation of republican candidates;536 who, thrown out by the ministry and taking curative showers to calm his fever, still accused his successor of undue moderation towards democrats; who of late agitated among the departments, inciting them to rise against the Constitution in the name of order... I will stop here: I would need a book to tell of all the evil that the passage of this fanatic to the ministry has done to the country much more than to socialism. Visit the prisons; have them show you the registers of custody; question the detainees; ask the lawyers; check the secret and apparent reasons for convictions; and then count the number of unfortunates arbitrarily arrested, kept in preventive custody for months at a time, led with a chain round their necks from police station to police station, condemned on the most futile pretexts, all because they were socialists. Then count those who were really guilty of crimes and whose penalties were increased in severity because they were suspected of socialism, because socialism had become an aggravating circumstance for the judges, because it was the intention of the authorities to categorise socialists as criminals: and then you will tell me whether a party counting more than a third of the nation—the elections of May 13th justify that claim—might well consider itself unjustly persecuted, whether the Bill concerning the clubs knowingly violated the Constitution, whether Léon Faucher’s law was not a declaration of social war?

  As for me, I thought it was our duty immediately to organise—not an insurrection, for we were a minority against a majority, one party against a coalition of parties—but legal resistance to whatever extent that concept might provide for.

  I have no intention at this moment to repeat a proposal which remained fruitless. From June 13th on, circumstances have changed; and if I have just given an account of the means that I proposed to employ at that time, it is because, such is at least my fervent hope, the occasion for employing those means has passed, never to return. The Revolution, in its rapid course, can make nothing of this rusty horseshoe of legal resistance any more, so now I can summarise the theory without endangering the public peace. I fought a good, hard war against the government of Louis Bonaparte; more than once, perhaps, things would have turned out differently if I had been believed. But in the socialist army of Grouchy and Bourmont537 there were incompetents and traitors: and it is just because in my opinion taking recourse to legal resistance would be a mistake in the light of the present complications of politics, almost a crime against the Revolution in fact, that I protest against the abuse that could be committed in its name at the same time as I recall here the formalities appropriate to a measure of this kind.

  The means were not new. They were the same ones that MM. Guizot, Thiers and their kind were preparing to employ in 1830 before the legitimist reaction precipitated events which led to their more complete and prompt victory. But if the idea was old its execution was extremely simple and reliable.

  The Mountain had to proclaim legal resistance to the tribune, at first in a commentary form. The democratic press subsequently made it the text of its instructions to the people for one month. The representatives wrote about it to their electorate: everywhere the government was enjoined not to continue on its reactionary course. If those in power persisted in their course despite the warnings that had been given them, committees were formed to block the government in an airtight manner; the citizens and local boroughs agreed to refuse to accept taxation; all governmental rights to financial awards, state control, navigation, registration etc; military service; obedience to the authorities—all at the same time. Public opinion was fomented until resistance spontaneously exploded into life everywhere without any signal. The motivation of the resistance was simple and clear: the law on clubs, the Rome expedition and judicial persecutions were part of a war on the Republic: was it the republicans’ duty to furnish money and soldiers for this purpose?...

  Can you imagine what an organised resistance could have been like in the 37,000 communes of France? The democratic party represented more than a third of the nation: just try to find garnisaires and gendarmes prepared to constrain three million people to make their contributions! The peasants, whatever their political opinion, would no sooner have heard about refusing to pay taxes than they would have declared themselves in favour and started by just not paying any more; their hate of the salt tax, the drinks tax and the 45 cent tax was a sure guarantee of their dispositions. Something would have happened in town and country that happens in banks, stock exchanges and all the fin
ancial and commercial world at the moment of political crises: in the uncertainty surrounding events, and in order not to be duped, everyone postpones his payments as long as he can. Would the government have wished to have implemented strict measures? Any prosecutions would only have fanned the fire. At a single stroke, without any conflict, without bloodshed, our very complicated taxation system would have been overturned and changed from top to bottom as a matter of necessity; military conscription would have been abolished, the system reformed and the credit institutions conquered. The people being called upon to vote on taxes itself, socialism by means of this minority resolution would have become a law of necessity and part of the practice of the State.

  One only needs very little knowledge of the people and of governmental machinery to understand what an irresistible force such a system of opposition would have had, if solemnly announced and energetically maintained, especially after the elections of May 13th. The democratic party was alone in finding it mean-spirited, impracticable, impossible. They spoke of furniture being seized and auctioned off, peasants terrified by the government debt collectors! The most advanced and furiously revolutionary papers were amazed by this inconceivable policy, this procureur tactic, as they claimed. They trembled at the idea of exposing the people to a collective billeting of garnisaires! The most benevolent ones still found the resolution imprudent, hazardous and above all anti-governmental. If the people, they said, refused to pay its taxes once, it would never pay them again and government would become impossible! If the citizens are taught to split themselves up, if the history of the Roman people on the Sacred Mount538 is repeated by way of a parliamentary conflict, very soon the departments and provinces will separate from one another: centralisation will be attacked on all sides, we will fall into federalism: there will be no more Authority! It is always the government which preoccupies the Jacobins. They need a government and with it a budget, secret funds, as many as possible. In short, the counter-revolution was admirably defended by the organs of the revolution: the Jacobins, who detested the Gironde so much because it opposed centralised despotism in the name of local liberties, spoke in favour of doctrinaire politicians. Le Peuple got five years in prison and a fine of 10,000 francs for its initiative and Le Constitutionnel, laughing up its sleeve, only had to keep quiet.

  What a lesson for me! What a pitiable downfall! How badly I had judged my contemporaries, conservatives and friends of order to the core! How little I knew of our so-called revolutionaries, really power-mongers and intriguers whose understanding of the Republic founded in 1792 was limited to Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety and his police force! And these were the reds who enraged Léon Faucher! These were the so-called terrorists that Louis Bonaparte’s government made such a bogey-man of! What calumny!

  Parties are like societies, like man himself. When they get old they return to childhood. The history of Jacobinism, from the 25th of February 1848 to the 13th of June 1849, is nothing but a succession of mistakes. But I have to make another admission, however painful it is to my self-esteem. The Revolution was better served by the incapacity of its agents than by the decisive steps that I proposed. From the 13th of June on we had finished with parties and with government: that is preferable to re-establishing the Montagnards in the place of the doctrinaires and the Jesuits. The power of events leaves us nothing more to do. Il mondo va de se! 539

  CHAPTER XXI

  8 JULY 1849: CONCLUSION

  AND NOW, DEAR reader, whatever your opinion may be, if the facts that I have told you are true and you do not have the means to refute them; if the importance that I have assigned to them is correct, and if it has been sufficient, in order to assure you of this, to relate them to their causes and compare these to one another; if, in the final analysis, their development proved both predictable and ultimately fatal (two terms, which, when applied to humanity, mean exactly the same thing); and if, in order to state the inevitability of this evolution, you only had to observe it as it unfolded from its very source, namely the Reason of humanity itself: if, and I urge you so to do, you permit yourself to believe your eyes, your memory, your judgement, just judge for yourself where the February Revolution has taken us.

  The July Monarchy, having carried out the dissolution of all the old principles, left itself a double task to achieve. These were, on the one side, the dissolution of the Parties as a result of the dissolution of ideas; and on the other, the bankruptcy of power, reduced through the successive elimination of all its principles to the worthless corpse of authority, to the blunt instrument of force.

  On June 13th, 1849, Jacobinism was the first to fall, itself having been resurrected in 1830 with the reappearance of a monarchy and then only managing to revive the revolutionary idea of 1789. This last expression of governmental democracy or demagogy, agitator without cause, ambitious without intelligence, violent without heroism, not even having four people to call upon nor a system to implement, then perished from consumption and inanity as had dogmatism, its precursor and antagonist.

  In the same way, Socialism, mystical, theogonical and transcendental, vanished like a ghost, relinquishing its place to traditional, practicable, positive social philosophy. The day when Louis Blanc demanded his Ministry of Progress540 and proposed to shake up and uproot the whole country, when Considérant managed to solicit an advance of four million francs and an extensive acreage upon which to build his model community, when Cabet, on abandoning France as an accursed land, thus abandoning his school and his memory to his slanderers, left for the United States to (if I may avail myself of the expression) drop his babies; on this day, judgement was passed on this governmental, phalansterian and icarian Utopia; it admitted its guilt.

  Along with Socialism, Absolutism lies also on the verge of disappearing. Forced right back into a final corner by its own indefatigable contradictions, Absolutism has betrayed itself: it has revealed to the world every aspect of its hatred for liberty. Forced to revert back to tradition, as Socialism is forced to rush headlong into Utopianism, it absents itself from the present, removing itself from any sense of historical or social truth.

  There are no longer any parties in French society endowed with any kind of vital force; and until new principles, springing from the inexhaustible sources of human practice, other interests, other mores, a new philosophy, transforming the old world without breaking with it, and regenerating it, have opened Opinion to new solutions; there no such parties shall be left among us. In the absence of the first idea, the diversity of opinions that would unfold from that idea is impossible.

  For this very same reason there no longer exists a Government, and there never will be one. Since it creates nothing in the real world which is not as a result of something else, neither does it defend a principle nor an idea which has not been already expressed: a Government that has neither opinion nor a Party to represent expresses nothing, is nothing.

  The men we see still carrying the old Party banners, who solicit and galvanise power, who tug at the Revolution’s strings from both Left and Right are not even alive: they are dead. They neither govern nor represent opposition to the government: they celebrate, by means of a symbolic dance, their own funerals.

  The Socialists, not daring to seize power when power was at its most audacious, lost three months involving themselves in Club intrigues, in gossip from factions and sects, in chaotic demonstrations; later, they tried to give themselves official consecration by having the “right to work” inscribed on the Constitution, without demonstrating any means by which to guarantee it; they, not knowing what to do with themselves, continue to press for ridiculous and untrustworthy schemes: the Socialists, don’t they have designs on governing the world? They are dead; they have swallowed their tongues (as a French peasant would say!) Let them sleep their sleep, as they wait for a scientific answer, which is not and never has been theirs, to call them.

  And the Democratic-Governmentalist Jacobins having spent eighteen years conspiring among themselves, with
no concept of a single aspect of social economy, then exerted control for four months during the dictatorship 541 and failed to harvest any more fruit than a succession of reactionary actions, followed by a terrible civil war; they, at the last moment, speaking always of liberty, continue to dream of dictatorship: would it also be unfair to speak of them as dead, and to claim that their tomb has already been sealed? When the people have rebuilt a philosophy and a faith, when society knows whence it has emerged and where it is heading, what it is capable of and what it wants, only then will these demagogues be able to return, not to govern the people, but to re-ignite their passion.

  The Doctrinaires are dead too: the men of the insipid juste-milieu, the partisans of the so-called constitutional regime, breathed their last at the session on October 20th, after having, at the one on April 16th, made a Republican Assembly decree the institution of a doctrinaire Papacy. Do you think we would let them govern us again? They have already revealed themselves. In politics no less than in philosophy, there are more than two ways to achieve a genuine eclecticism: the Charter of 1830 and the Acts of Government of Louis Bonaparte have managed to extinguish the potential creativity of the juste-milieu.

  The Absolutist Party, first in logic, first in history, won’t be far behind all the others in expiring amid convulsions of blood-spattered agony and liberticide. In the wake of the victories of Radetzki, of Oudinot, of Haynau,542 the principle of authority, both spiritually and temporally, is destroyed. It is no longer by means of government that Absolutism is imposed: it is by means of murder. What looms over Europe now is nothing but the shadow of tyranny: soon the sunshine of Liberty will rise, only to set when humankind’s time is over. Like Christ eighteen centuries ago, Liberty triumphs: it reigns, it governs. Its name is on everyone’s lips and thus in everyone’s heart. As for Absolutism, in order that it will not rise again, it is no longer sufficient to silence its advocates; it is necessary instead, as Montalembert wanted, to conduct a war of ideas. Losing the souls along with the bodies—essentially the function of the expedition of Rome, and thus also the function of ecclesiastical government—there came a realisation, too late for their common salvation, that it was also necessary to incorporate an element of secularism.