Property Is Theft!

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  A.—A glorious notion of Henri IV’s,608 of which only the Revolution can give the true formula. It is universal federalism, the supreme guarantee of all freedom and rights, and which must, without soldiers or priests, replace Christian and feudal society.

  Q.—Federalism finds little favour in France; couldn’t you render your idea in a different way?

  A.—To change the names of things is to compromise with error. No matter what Jacobin prudence says, the true obstacle to despotism is in the federative union. How did the kings of Macedonia become masters of Greece? By being declared heads of the amphictyonie,609 i.e. in substituting themselves for the confederation of the Hellenic peoples. Why, after the fall of the Roman Empire, did not catholic Europe be reformed into only one State? Because the foremost thought of the invasion was independence, i.e. the negation of unity. Why has Switzerland remained a republic? Because it is, like the United States, a confederation. What was the Convention itself? Its name proves it, a federative assembly. What is true of States, is, by equal reason, true of the cities and districts of the same State: federalism is the political form of humanity.

  Q.—In this federation, where the city is equal to the province, the province equal to the empire, the empire equal to the continent, where all groups are politically equal, what becomes of nationalities?

  A.—Nationalities will be all the better assured in so far as the federative principle will have received a more complete application. In this respect, one can say that for thirty years, public opinion has gone astray.

  The feeling for one’s country is like that for the family, for territorial possession, for the industrial corporation, an indestructible element of the conscience of the people. We might even say, if need be, that the concept of homeland [patrie] implies that of independence and sovereignty, so that the two terms, State and Nation, are adequate one with the other and can be regarded as synonyms. But it is far from the recognition of nationalities to the idea using them for certain restorations [then it] becomes useless, not to say dangerous.

  What is today called the re-establishment of Poland, of Italy, of Hungary, of Ireland, is nothing else, at bottom, than the unitary constitution of vast territories, on the model of the great powers whose centralisation so heavily weighs on the people; it is monarchical imitation to the profit of the democratic ambition; it is not freedom, much less progress. Those who call so loudly for the restoration of these national units have little taste for personal freedoms. Nationalism is the pretext which they use to dodge the economic revolution. They pretend not to see that it is politics that subjugated the nations that they claim today to emancipate. Why, thus, should these nations undergo the same ordeal under the flag of raison d’État? Would the Revolution amuse itself, like the first Emperor Napoléon, by carving and re-carving the Germanic Confederation, altering political agglomerations, making Poland or Italy unitary? The Revolution, in rendering men equal and free by the balance of forces and of services, precludes these immense agglomerations, the objects of potentates’ ambitions, but for the peoples, pledges of an inescapable servitude.

  Q.—Is there any hope of dislodging the dynastic principle?

  A.—Certainly, the world up to now did not believe that freedom and dynasty were incompatible things. The old French monarchy, convening the Estates General, engaged the Revolution; the constitution of 1791, imposed by the French National Assembly, the charter of 1814,610 imposed by the Senate, that of 1830, corrected by the 221,611 testify to the country’s desire to reconcile the monarchical principle with democracy. The nation found in it various advantages: one reconciled, so it seemed, tradition with progress; one satisfied the habits of command, the need for unity; one entreated the danger of presidencies, dictatorships, oligarchies. When, in 1830, Lafayette 612 defined the new order of things as a monarchy surrounded by republican institutions, he conceived what analysis has revealed to us, the identity of the political order and the economic order. The true republic consisting in the balance of forces and services, one was pleased to see a young dynasty maintaining this balance and guaranteeing its accuracy. Finally, the example of England, although equality is unknown there, and that of the new constitutional States, give fresh support to this theory.

  Undoubtedly, in France, the alliance of the dynastic principle with freedom and equality did not yield the fruit that was expected from it; but this was the fault of governmental fatalism!: the error here was shared by the princes and the nation. Moreover, though the dynastic parties had shown themselves unfavourable to the Revolution since 1848, the force of things brings it back; and as France, whatever its fortunes, always liked to give itself a Premier, to mark its unity by a symbol, it would be exaggeration to deny the possibility of a dynastic restoration. How we have heard the republicans say: “He shall be my prince who shall raise the flag of freedom and equality!” And they are neither the least pure nor the least intelligent; it is true that they do not aspire to dictatorship.

  However, it should be recognised that if the dynastic principle can still play some minor part, it is only as an instrument of transition from the political regime to the economic regime. As of now, one could not deny that it is considerably diminished. The constitutional system, the condition sine qua non of modern royalty, destroyed the prestige of monarchy. The crowned head of State is no longer a true king; he is a mediator between parties. What need will there be of one when balance in the State will come of its own accord by virtue of the very fact of the balance of economic forces? The kings themselves are no longer taken seriously: they are no longer the personification of their people. The posterity of kings may return, we know in advance under what conditions, the royalty never. It is no longer even a myth: Non datur regnum aut imperium in œconomia.613

  Q.—And of the parliamentary system what do you forecast?

  A.—In spite of its preceding ambiguities, the seesawing that so long dishonoured it pertained to purely economic causes, its reappearance is inevitable. The Parliament has become a form of French thought: it will survive all the dynasties. The economic revolution, by constituting social power according to true principles, will perhaps modify parliamentary manners; it will not repeal the institution. Languages and the geniuses of languages vary; eloquence clothes itself in forms more or less happy: the word is as irremovable as the thought.

  Q.—What was, until now, the greatest act of the Revolution?

  A.—It was neither the Tennis Court Oath, nor August 4th, nor the Constitution of ’91, nor the jury, nor January 21, nor the Republican calendar, nor the system of weights and measures, nor the Great Book of the Public Debt:614 it was the decree of the Convention of November 10, 1793, instituting the worship of Reason. This decree issued in the senatus-consultum of February 17th, 1810 which, by joining the Papal States to the Empire, tore up the pact of Charlemagne for all of Europe.615

  Q.—What will be the greatest act of the Revolution in the future?

  A.—The demonetisation of silver, the last idol of the Absolute.

  Q.—The Republic once having been organised according to principles of economy and right, do you believe the State secure against all agitation, corruption and catastrophe?

  A.—Undoubtedly, since, thanks to universal balance, it is impossible for a single living soul to appropriate, by violence or by rhetoric, the labour of any [other], the credit and the force of all, the pretext, the cause, and the means lacking for an 18th Brumaire, a December 2nd, the political edifice can no longer deviate from its upright position: it is firmly seated, it has conquered what it lacked before, stability.

  Q.—Humanity is, above all, passionate! How shall it live when it no longer has either a prince to lead it to war, nor priests to assist it in piety, nor great men to maintain it in admiration, nor the corrupt nor the poor to excite its sensibilities, nor prostitutes to appease its lust, nor wandering minstrels to make it laugh with their cacophonies and platitudes?

  A.—It shall do what Genesis says, what the philosopher Marti
n in [Voltaire’s] Candide recommends: it shall cultivate its garden. The tilling of the soil, formerly the role of the slave, becomes the first among arts as it is first among industries, man’s life shall pass in the calm of the senses and the serenity of the spirit.

  Q.—When shall this Utopia be realised?

  A.—As soon as the idea is popularised.

  Q.—But how to popularise the idea if the bourgeoisie remains hostile; if the people, made stupid by servitude, full of prejudices and bad instincts, remain sunken in indifference; if the pulpit, the academy, the press, calumniate you; if the courts prevail; if power silences you? For the nation to become revolutionary, it would have to have been revolutionised already. Shouldn’t we conclude from it, with the old democrats, that the Revolution must start with the government?

  A.—Such is, indeed, the circle in which progress seems to turn and which today serves the purely political reformers as a pretext: “First, make the Revolution,” they say, “after which everything else will be cleared up.” As if the Revolution itself could be made without ideas! But let us be reassured: just as the lack of ideas dooms the most beautiful parties, the war on ideas only serves to postpone the Revolution. Don’t you see already that the mode of authority, inequality, predestination, eternal salvation and raison d’État, becomes every day, for the affluent classes whose conscience and reason it torments, even more unbearable than it is for the plebeians whose stomachs it makes cry out? From whence we will conclude that what is most certain is to keep to the word of the royal jester: What would you do, my lord, if, when you said yes, everyone else said no?616 To midwife this No from the multitude is the task of all good citizens and men of spirit.

  Q.—Do you concede that insurrection is the first among rights, the holiest of duties?

  A.—I concede nothing: I say that it is absurd to place a guarantee which is always lacking at the moment when it is claimed in a political constitution. When the ideas are raised, the paving stones will lift themselves, unless the government does not have enough good sense not to await them.

  Q.—What of tyranny and tyrannicide?

  A.—We will speak of it elsewhere: it is not a matter for the catechism.

  Q.—But what! if so many threatened interests, so many offended convictions, so many kindled hatreds finally had the courage to resolutely will what they will, i.e., the extinction of revolutionary thought, couldn’t it come about that right would be definitively overcome by force?

  A.—Yes, if!… But this if is an impossible condition. For that, it would be necessary to stop the movement of the human spirit. You can find, whenever you like, four rascals willing to act in concert for the purpose of market speculation; I defy you to form an assembly that decrees theft. In the same way you can, by laws concerning the press, forbid such and such a discussion: you will never decree lies.

  Against all the forces of the reaction, against its metaphysics, its Machiavellianism, its religion, its courts, its soldiers, the sheer protest that it carries with it would suffice as a last resort. The same humanity produced, at various times, religious conscience and free conscience. Was it not the emigration that brought back freedom in 1814? All the same, if we fail at our task, the conservatives of today would be the revolutionaries of tomorrow. But let us not be reduced to this; the idea makes its way in the world, and the right of sanction and revenge does not appear close to perishing from among men.

  LETTER TO MILLIET

  Passy, 2nd November 1862

  Translation by Martin Walker

  My dear former colleague,617

  I HAVE RECEIVED YOUR TWO LETTERS, THE FIRST DATED SOME MONTHS AGO, the second of the 29th October, which M. Dentu618 was so kind as to forward to me.

  I had put the first aside in order to reply at a convenient time on the subject of both family matters, in which respect it is superfluous to remark that we are in complete agreement, and of the background of my ideas, with which you are only acquainted in a very erroneous and imperfect way. What has happened to me recently shows you that the agitation of my life is still far from settling down; this will suffice as an excuse for my over-long delay. So I will immediately come to your last letter.

  I see from your congratulations that my last brochure on Italian unity was unexpected by you; accustomed as you are to conservative thinking and consequently to encountering the democratic crowds along your way, you were far from supposing that a man situated on the extremist frontiers of revolutionary thought would suddenly declare his opposition to the idea of Mazzini and the political tendencies of Le Siècle, La Presse and others.619 You would have been of a completely different opinion regarding my person if you had followed the development of my thought for twenty years and if you had grasped the overall structure and coherence of it. Apart from the political, strategic and religious questions which prohibit the French emperor from acceding to the wishes of the Italians, there are for me considerations of political economy, international law, progress and liberty which are unsuspected by our ignorant democracy but have been the objects of my study for twenty-five years now.

  So much for the most recent question. The situation is the same with all the others; and some day you will be astounded, after all you have heard said and assumed yourself about my opinions, to learn that I am one of the greatest proponents of order, one of the most moderate progressives and one of the least utopian and most practical reformers in existence. All the mystery of my publications consists in my view that we must on no account flinch from any of the conclusions of critical thought, wherever they may lead us, if we wish to make advances in the science of social affairs, for if a part of the truth may sometimes horrify us the whole truth will reassure and delight us. If I may cite one example of this method: I would like to point out to you that if I began in 1840 with anarchy , which was the logical conclusion of my critique of the governmental idea, then I finished with federation, the necessary basis of right among the European peoples and, later, of the organisation of all States. In all of this it is easy to see that logic, right and liberty have been the dominant factors; thus, as public order rests directly on the liberty and the conscience of the citizen, anarchy, being the absence of all constraints—of police, authority, magistracy, regulations, etc—is found to be the correlative of the highest social virtue and following from that the ideal of human government. We are not there yet, no doubt, and centuries will pass before this ideal is attained; but our LAW is to march in this direction, to approach this goal unceasingly; once again, it is for this reason that I support the principle of federation. My thought has been reproached for agreeing with that of the Empire and the episcopacy; but this congruence is of a purely material nature, totally circumstantial—and in any case, far from complaining about it I congratulate myself on it. I am not of the hypocrite sort who will strike out at people who, guided by principles diametrically opposed to mine, accidentally turn up on my terrain. I regard it as more tasteful, more wisely done and politically saner to offer them a hospitable hand.

  In a few days you will read the response I am preparing to the jeremiads of the press, as you suggest and as Dentu came to exhort me to do. You will see there that the babble of so-called democratic opinion leaves me just as cold today as it did in 1848. I know where I’m going, while my unfortunate co-religionists are clueless. To say democracy is to say coterie and intrigue; this is true at all times, today more than ever. To break up those coteries and unmask the intrigues is the hardest task of a sincere democrat.

  I write to you amongst the chaos of moving house; my two daughters, one twelve years old and the other nine, are ill; their mother is exhausted and I am distracted. No books, my papers are stuffed into trunks; I eat on a stool; on my right is the heating engineer, on my left the carpenter. This house moving has now been going on for a month. It would be enough to bewilder a more resilient man than me.

  My dear old colleague, no more than you have I forgotten our life in the printer’s workshop thirty-two or even thirty-five y
ears ago; and when I think back to that distant time I cannot help thinking that if the origins of our present social dissolution already existed, at least the contagion was still far from having caused such ravages, and that yesterday’s generation was better than today’s. We lived more simply, more morally; there was less ambitious speculation and parasitism; in general, existence was easier, healthier and better. With one hundred francs a month, which was what I ended up earning in 1834, I was able to offer my family an affluent existence, while today I need three or four times as much! ...How can one not regret [the passing of] such a comfortable age and life-style? If all the signs did not show me that society has entered into a crisis of regeneration, which will be long and perhaps terrible, I would believe in the irrevocable decadence and imminent end of civilisation. But we will come out of it, one must believe that, precisely because our contemporaries are more dissolute and less intelligent than we were. The movement of history is accomplished in oscillations, and it depends on us to mitigate their severity. Let us work on self-improvement and right-thinking; let us endeavour to be frugal and avoid idleness. By doing that we will mitigate the trials we must undergo and be reborn superior to our fathers.

  I am writing to you, dear Monsieur Milliet, my old printing shop boss, in all friendship and untrammelled openness of heart. Treat me in the same way and do not let these friendly confidences, not meant for publication, wander into your journal’s copy. I am sick of publicity; what I need is the fortifying joys of intimate friendship. We will talk journalism and politics another time; for today I wish only to shake your hand.