Property Is Theft!

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  The new right, by contrast, is essentially positive. Its object is to afford, with certainty and comprehensiveness, everything that the old right merely allowed to proceed, pending the freedom to do so, but without concern for guarantees or the means so to do, without so much as a hint of approval or disapproval. Henceforth under the new right, defaulting upon a guarantee and [violating] social solidarity; persisting upon the practices of mercantile anarchy, dissembling, monopolising, speculating, is regarded as every bit as reprehensible as any of the swindling, confidence tricks, deceptions and armed robberies with which law has hitherto been almost exclusively concerned. In matters relating to insurance, supply and demand, price-setting and valuation, bona fide business, credit, transport services, etc.,—in short, what we have described as economic institutions or functions—we have expounded sufficiently upon the positive nature of the new Right, the new obligations flowing from it and the freedom and wealth that spring from it and we need not repeat ourselves.

  So how could a group of workers, having belonged to a mutualist federation, turn its back on the positive, material, palpable and recognisable benefits which it bestows? How could it opt instead for a return to the former nothingness, the traditional pauperism, the absence of solidarity and lack of morality? Once having tasted economic order, might they wish to become an exploiter aristocracy and revert to universal wretchedness just for the sordid satisfaction of the few? How, I ask, once the hearts of men have tasted right, could they come out against right and stand exposed to the world as a gang of thieves and pirates?

  Once mutualist economic reform is proclaimed anywhere on earth, confederations become necessities everywhere. For them to exist the federating States need not be all contiguous, clustered together as if in a belt, as we see France, Italy and Spain. Federation can exist between States that are separate, disconnected and remote from one another: they need simply declare their desire to marry their interests and offer one another reciprocal assurances in accordance with the principles of economic Right and mutuality. Once established, the federation is not susceptible to disintegration: because, let me reiterate, one does not renege upon a pact, a profession of faith like the mutualist profession of faith, like the federative pact.

  As we have stated already, the principle of mutuality in matters political as well as in matters economic is therefore most assuredly the sturdiest and subtlest bond that can be forged between men.

  No system of government, no community or association, no religion, no pledge has the power to bring men into such close intimacy while guaranteeing them such freedom.

  We are taken to task for encouraging individualism and tearing down ideals with this elaboration upon right. Slander! Where else could the potential of the collective bring forth such great things? Where could souls feel more in tune with one another? Everywhere else one finds sectional materialism, hypocritical association and the weighty chains of the State. Here alone do we feel true fraternity in a setting of justice. It seeps into us and inspires us: and nobody can complain that it bullies him, imposes a yoke upon him or places the slightest burden upon him. This is love in all its truth and all its candour: love which is perfect only insofar as it has espoused the motto of (I nearly said commerce) mutuality: giving and giving again.

  THIRD PART POLITICAL INCOMPATIBILITIES—

  CONCLUSION

  CHAPTER IV

  On Municipal Liberty: That This Liberty, Essentially Federalist and Incompatible with the Unitary System, Can Neither Be Demanded By the Opposition Nor Granted By the Imperial Government

  ONE OF THE questions on which the Opposition flatters itself the most in receiving the approval of the Country and getting the better of Power, is that of municipal liberties. It is the Parisian population, above all, which the opposition deputies, in their zeal for the independence of communes, like to court, without any care for their oath and their own convictions, or indeed even for logic or facts. For the past twelve years the city of Paris has been administrated by an imperial commission: has this been an improvement? Has it been a turn for the worse? One can support either position. But whether the city of Paris has gained or lost—it misses its municipal counsellors: what an occasion for representatives to work on their popularity!

  The question of municipal liberties is one of the most complicated and vast: it touches essentially on the federal system; I would gladly say that it is the entirety of federation. Also I do not think I have a need to profess my adhesion to such a reform, which I have pronounced myself in favour of for a long time and in many circumstances. What I propose to do today is to show, by some decisive observations, the extent to which those who, by the spirit of opposition or by some other cause entirely, make the most noise about municipal liberties, and who nevertheless remain attached to the system of unitarist centralisation, are in contradiction with themselves; what a triumph they are preparing for their adversaries, and what a deception for the country!

  I say therefore that municipal liberty is by nature incompatible with governmental unity, which has been the goal and definition of all our successive constitutions. I add that this incompatibility is greater still in Paris, due to its status as capital, than in any other city in France.

  Let us make this proposition still more explicit, if that is possible. As has been said earlier (2nd part, Chapter IX), two principles are taken into account in the bourgeois world, as that accomplished by the Revolution, as the two pillars of society and state: these are, on the one hand, the principle of political centralisation, and on the other, that of economic lack of solidarity, in other words mercantile and industrial anarchy, which serving as a counterweight to the former leads necessarily to the feudalism of capital. Now, according to the laws of historic evolution which direct all governments, these two principles must in time produce their consequences, and since municipal liberty poses an obstacle for them, it results that municipal life must, as the weakest, progressively subordinate itself to the action of the centre; and if the superior authority, the central Power, has established its seat in a city, this city in becoming the capital must lose its municipal character, to a greater extent and more quickly than any other city.

  Such is the proposition, self-evident to anyone who can comprehend the terms of which it is composed, that I oppose to the Parisian municipalists, and that reduces their claims to nothing.

  For those of my readers who do not have the habit of grasping in one stroke all that a formula contains, I believe it necessary to bring to their attention certain facts which will make the matter at hand completely palpable.

  I. Decadence of municipal liberties.—The unity of France is the authentic product of our history. It begins with the Roman conquest, continues under those of the Franks; then, disrupted, or rather transformed by the feudal system, it begins again, with the accession of the Capetian dynasty,688 by the action of the kings. National unity, as we see it today, being formed therefore by successive annexations, one conceives that the provinces and communes being progressively engulfed had to, for a certain period of time, conserve their customs, franchises, etc. But little by little royal administration and jurisdiction prevail. After Richelieu,689 the government of the provinces, entrusted to intendants, the Prince’s men, returns exclusively to the Crown, and becomes a little more uniform. The reformers of ’89, taking up again the work of the monarchy, erect this regime of unity into the doctrine of the State, to the prolonged cheers of all the people until this day.

  However, the communes still conserved some remainders of life for a long time after the consummation of this grand unification. The province, ill-defined, extensive, had for generations been ground down and absorbed, a fate which the commune, with its local spirit, with its density of life, still resisted. It was directly impacted by the Constitutions of Year I and Year II, which made the administration of municipalities a mere subdivision of the central administration, then by the institution of the prefects, on February 17th, 1800, which replaced the central commissar
s of the Republic, and assisted by the council of the prefecture. One can say that the harm done in this period was irreparable. Fifteen years later, at the fall of the Empire, the commune had had its day, and it was in vain that liberalism would try to revive it.

  I said earlier (2nd part, chapter XII), how the bourgeoisie, horrified by the exorbitance of the central power and of the example given by Napoléon the First, has tried to subjugate the Government by giving it a triple counterweight: 1st, the constitutional system, representative and parliamentary; 2nd, a municipal and departmental organisation; 3rd, economic anarchy. It is about the second of these counterweights, a renewal of the ancient communes, that I now propose to say a few words.

  A great deal of effort was put, under the reign of Louis-Philippe, into this Municipal and Departmental Organisation; this was, like the Crédit foncier690 and so many other things, one of the mirages of the bourgeois rule. This was discussed under the Restoration; Napoléon the First himself appeared to be interested in it; it was talked about more than ever during the reign of his heir. The people of the juste-milieu, always the most numerous and least intelligent in our country, are those who insisted on this point with the most force. It seemed to them that in restoring to the commune a certain initiative, the result would be a stable equilibrium with the central power; that they would thus remove from centralisation that which made it atrocious, above all that they would escape from federalism, which was as odious to them in 1864 as it was (but for different reasons) to the patriots of ’93. These brave men readily admired Swiss and American liberty; they regaled us about it in their books; they made it serve as a mirror to disgrace our adorations; but for nothing in the world would they touch this beautiful unity [in France] which, according to them, was responsible for our glory, and which the nations, they assured us, envied us for. From the heights of their academic self-importance, they treated as exaggerations the writers who, mindful of logic and history, faithful to pure notions of right and liberty, did not believe at all in political resurrections, and tired of eclecticism, wanted to free themselves once and for all from doctrinaire jugglings.

  M. Édouard LABOULAYE691 is one of these soggy geniuses, very capable of grasping the truth and showing it to others, but for whom wisdom consists in cutting short principles by means of impossible conciliations; who asks for nothing better than to impose limits on the State, but on the condition that one also permits it to impose these on liberty; who would be happy to trim the nails on the first so long as the wings are clipped on the second; with whom reason, finally, trembling before all this majestic and powerful synthesis, is happy to paddle around in amphigory.692 M. Laboulaye, whom the Democracy nearly named as its representative in place of M. Thiers, is a part of a group of men who, while proclaiming against imperial autocracy the so-called guarantees of the 14th of July, have given themselves the mission of refuting the aspirations of socialism and federalism. It was he who wrote this beautiful thought, that I for a moment had the idea of taking for an epigraph: “When political life is concentrated in a tribune, the country splits itself in two, Opposition and Government.” Well! That M. Laboulaye and his friends, so zealous for the municipal franchises, deign to respond to a question, just one.

  The commune is by essence, like man, like the family, like every individual and collective which is intelligent, moral, and free, a sovereign being. In this quality the commune has the right to govern itself, to administer itself, to impose its own taxes, to dispose of its properties and revenues, to create schools for its youth, to install professors in these schools, to police itself, to have its own gendarmes and civic guard, to name its judges, to have its own newspapers, assemblies, special societies, warehouses, its own bank, etc. The commune, consequently, makes arrests, creates ordinances: what prevents it from going all the way to making its own laws? It has its church, its religion, its freely chosen clergy, even its ritual and saints; it discusses publicly, in its newspapers and circles, everything that happens inside and around it, which touches on its interests and agitates its opinion. This is what a commune is: since this is collective life, political life. Now, life is one, whole, indivisible; it repels every hindrance, knows no limit but itself; all external coercion is antipathetic to it, and, if it cannot overcome it, mortal to it. That M. Laboulaye and his political co-religionists say to us therefore how they intend to bring together this communal life with their unitary reservations; how they will escape from conflicts; how they think to maintain side by side the local franchise with central prerogative, to restrain the former and stop the latter; to affirm at the same time, and in the same system, the independence of the parts and the authority of the Whole? Let them make themselves clear so that we may know and judge them.

  There is no middle term: the commune will be sovereign or a subsidiary, all or nothing. Favour it as much as you like; from the instant when it no longer falls under its own law, when it must recognise a higher law, when the larger unit of which it is a part is declared its superior, and not the expression of its federal relationships, it is inevitable that one day or another that the commune will find itself in contradiction with this larger State, and that conflict will break out. Now, since there will be conflict, logic and force would dictate that it would be the central Power which prevails, and this without discussion, without judgement, without negotiation, any debate between superior and subordinate being scandalous and inadmissible. Therefore we always come back, after a period of agitation more or less long, to the negation of parochialism, to absorption by the centre, to autocracy. The idea of a limitation of the State by the groups within it, effected at the point where the principle of the subordination and centralisation of these very groups themselves reigns, is incoherent at best and a contradiction at worst. There are no limits on the State besides those which it voluntarily imposes on itself, abandoning to municipal and individual initiative certain things with which it for the moment cannot be bothered. But when the day comes when it believes that it must reclaim, as a part of its domain, the things that it had earlier put aside (and this day will arrive sooner or later, since the development of the State is indefinite), not only will the State win its case before the courts, it will be logically correct in its claims.

  Because one claims to be liberal, and because it is so daring to speak of limits on the State, all the while allowing its suzerainty, one still speaks of what will be the limit of individual, corporate, regional, and social liberty, the limit of all liberties. Let one explain, since one believes oneself to be a philosopher, what it is to be a limited, dominated, liberty, kept in custody; a liberty to which one has said, while chaining it to the stake: You will graze just over here, you will not go very far! ...

  The facts have confirmed all of this critique. During the 36 years of the parliamentary regime which followed the fall of the first Empire, municipal and departmental liberties did not cease to wane, without even the governments taking the trouble to attack them. The movement accomplished this for itself, by the nature of the unitary principle alone. Finally, after a series of invasions, of which the details would be superfluous, the commune was definitively subjugated to the State by the law of May 5th, 1855, which gave to the Emperor, or to prefects, his missi dominici, the right to name mayors and their adjuncts. By the law of May 5th, 1855 the commune therefore became that which since 1789, 1793, and 1795 the logic of unity had decided it would be, a mere subsidiary of the central authority.

  I say that the result was inevitable, that in it one can see nothing but the product of public reason turning down the path of the monarchy and of unity; that which the imperial Government had done in 1855 was the consequence, imposed by events, of everything that had previously been done by its predecessors; and that to oppose this necessary development as a means of opposition while also declaring oneself a partisan of unity is one of two things: an act of ignorance or one of bad faith. The municipal regime, such as it still existed under Louis-Phillipe, while singularly demeaned, constituted, in reg
ard to the prefecture, a double government, imperium in imperio;693 unless one only said that it was the prefecture which held a position duplicated by that of the commune and province; which comes to exactly the same thing.

  In creating the law of May 5th, 1855 the government of Napoléon III had done nothing else but to put a stop to history, to exercise its right, and, dare I say it, fulfil its imperial mandate. This is the monarchical, unified, and centralised destiny of France that is being pursued: it is not that of a semidynastic, constitutional, bourgeois, unitary, and duly deputised Opposition, nor of its texts of protest and reproach.

  II. Paris: capital and municipality.—As for the city of Paris, and that of Lyon, whose municipal counsellors are named by the Emperor, in other words, transformed into commissions, while everywhere else citizens participate in the administration of their localities through the election of their councils, there is even less room to blame the Government. The two capitals of the Empire are treated, I would not say according to their merits, which one could take for malicious irony, but as befits their dignity being what they are. Paris cannot at the same time enjoy the honours of being the capital and the prerogatives, however weak, which are left to the municipalities. One is incompatible with the other; it is necessary to make a choice.

  Paris is the seat of the Government, the ministries, the imperial family, the Court, the Senate, the legislative Body, the Council of State, the Court of Appeal, and the provincial aristocracy themselves and their vast households. It is to Paris that all the ambassadors of foreign powers go, and it is to Paris that all the travellers flock, sometimes as many as 100,000 or 150,000, speculators, scientists and artists, from all over the world. It is the heart and the head of the State, surrounded by 15 fortresses and forty-five kilometres of ramparts, guarded by a garrison which is a quarter of the effective army of the country, which must be defended and preserved no matter what. Obviously, all of this exceeds by far the attributions of a municipality, and the whole Country would rise up, if, by the fact of a municipal constitution, Paris were to become so to speak the equal of the Empire; if the Hôtel-de-ville were to claim itself as rivalling the Luxembourg Palace, the Bourbon Palace and the Tuileries; if a municipal order could countermand an imperial decree; if, in case of invasion, the Parisian national guard, capitulating to the victorious foreigners, purported to compel, by the influence of its example, the army at the front to throw down its arms.