Property Is Theft!

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  442 The voice of the people, the voice of God. (Translator)

  443 Henri Lacordaire (1802–61), together with Lamennais, was one of the leading lights of nineteenth-century Catholic liberalism. (Editor)

  444 A reference to Catholicism and leading Saint-Simonian Pierre Leroux’s philosophy. (Editor)

  445 This is a slight misquotation of Molière’s The Bourgeois Gentleman (Act II, Scene IV) in which Monsieur Jourdain (the would-be “bourgeois gentilhomme” of the title) is being advised on his prose style by a “master of philosophy.” (Editor)

  446 Le Père Duchêne (“Old Man Duchesne”) was the title of a newspaper which appeared during revolutionary periods of the nineteenth century including during the Revolution of 1848. It borrowed its title from the Père Duchesne published by Jacques Hébert during the French Revolution. (Editor)

  447 Joseph Barra (1779–1793) and Joseph Agricol Viala (1780–1793), said to have died fighting for the French Republic against the Royalists at the age of thirteen, were posthumously honoured as Revolutionary martyrs. Joseph Fouché (1759–1820) was Minister of Police during the reign of Napoléon I. Jacques-René Hébert (1757–1794), editor of the far-left Le Père Duchesne, was among those who helped usher in the Terror with the slogan, “hunt down the traitors.” (Editor)

  448 This is effectively what the Conservative dominated National Assembly did on May 31st, 1850. (Editor)

  449 Comices were the legislative or elective formal assemblies of the people in Ancient Rome. (Editor)

  450 Politicians François Arago (1786–1853) and Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) were, respectively, a scientist and a poet of renown. (Editor)

  451 That is, limited suffrage based on ownership of a minimum amount of property. (Editor)

  452 In Des Principes du gouvernement représentatif et de leurs applications (1838), Prosper Duvergier de Hauranne (1789–1881) coined the famous phrase: “The king reigns but does not govern.” (Editor)

  453 Proudhon names several well-known political figures here: songwriter Pierre Jean de Béranger (1780–1857), Romantic poet François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), and Catholic liberal Félicité Robert de Lamennais (1782–1854). (Editor)

  454 The daguerreotype was the first publicly announced photographic process, developed by Louis Daguerre. The image is exposed directly onto a mirror-polished surface of silver. The daguerreotype is a negative image, but the mirrored surface of the metal plate reflects the image and makes it appear positive in the proper light. (Editor)

  455 The crisis was that of March 1848 which enabled Proudhon to epitomise the Social Problem and point the way out in the exact terms of the moment. (Translator)

  456 Referring to the utopian scheme of Charles Fourier, who proposed the “phalanstery” as an ideal living arrangement. (Editor)

  457 La Démocratie Pacifique was a Fourierist journal founded by Victor Considérant, Proudhon frequently excoriates Fourierist notions of “fraternity” as naïve and incipiently authoritarian. (Editor)

  458 Proudhon subscribed to the (false) position that wages and prices were directly proportional, meaning that a cut in wages would lead to a cut in prices. He is, therefore, arguing that while a cut in wages would be bad for the workers in question, society would benefit from the lower prices. (Editor)

  459 Père Jean-Nicolas Loriquet (1767–1845), a Jesuit priest whose Histoire de France, a l’usage de la jeunesse (1820) delicately attempted to write Napoléon Bonaparte out of French history as much as possible. (Editor)

  460 François Antoine de Boissy d’Anglas (1756–1828), a politician who successfully steered his career in power from the Revolution of 1789 through the rise and fall of Napoléon. (Editor)

  461 Meaning “one man at a time.” (Translator)

  462 Felicité Robert de Lamennais (1782–1854), a Catholic liberal elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1848. (Editor)

  463 France, at this time, was still in the throes of a dire economic crisis resulting from the collapse of a speculative bubble in 1847. (Editor)

  464 A reference to events in Rouen. Following the general election and the defeat of the popular candidate, M. E. Deschamps, a protest demonstration was brutally repressed. (Editor).

  465 A “state within the state.” (Editor)

  466 A reference to a famous episode of the French Revolution: in 1792, the Abbé Lamourette, lamenting the bitter factionalism dividing the Legislative Assembly, implored the representatives to put aside their differences and kiss one another—which they did, in a display of ostentatious fraternity that was forgotten the next day. (Editor)

  467 This refers to a scandal typical of the corruption of Louis-Philippe’s reign when it was discovered that all the members of the majority, including a number of ministers, had been shareholders in the very railway companies the legislators had awarded construction contracts to. (Editor)

  468 A reference to a famous pensée of Blaise Pascal: “Force and not opinion is the queen of the world; but it is opinion that uses the force.” (“La force est la reine du monde, et non pas l’opinion; mais l’opinion est celle qui use de la force.”) (Translator)

  469 The treaties signed after the second and final defeat of Napoléon Bonaparte. (Editor)

  470 A Latin expression meaning the justification for an act of war. (Editor)

  471 Viaticum is a Latin word meaning “provisions for a journey.” Within the Catholic Church, it means the communion given to a person who is dying or who faces the possibility of death. (Editor)

  472 The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and Adversities is an anonymous Spanish novella noted for of its heretical content and criticism of the Church and Aristocracy. It is credited with founding a literary genre, the picaresque novel (so called from the Spanish pícaro meaning “rogue” or “rascal”) whose hero’s adventures expose injustice while amusing the reader. (Editor)

  473 This was when quarter day fell, the traditional day for settling bills and paying rents. (Editor)

  474 Reference to state repression of two popular revolts in Paris under the Monarchy, the first on 5–6 June 1832 with the last of the insurgents fighting heroically around the cloisters of Saint-Merri (at least 150 killed) and the second on 14 April 1834 with a massacre in the Rue Transnonain. (Editor)

  475 A reference to the bloody repression of the barricades raised on June 23rd to protest the disbanding of the National Workshops by the government. (Editor)

  476 The term “les rentiers de l’État” refers to finance capitalists who are owners of government bonds and other lenders to the State and the interest payments they receive in return for owning such government debt. (Editor)

  477 Proudhon uses the term rente. This can be translated as annuity—i.e., income from a capital investment paid in a series of regular payments. As he opposed all forms of non-labour income (rent, profit, interest, etc.) and so refers to all forms of revenue generated by ownship. (Editor)

  478 Charenton was a lunatic asylum, founded in 1645 by the Frères de la Charité in Charenton-Saint-Maurice, now Saint-Maurice, Val-de-Marne, France. (Editor)

  479 Tucker supplies a slightly different version of this passage, having translated Proudhon’s quotation of Joseph Garnier’s French translation of Malthus back into English. This passage, which Malthus struck from subsequent editions of his Essay on the Principle of Population, appears in the 1803 edition. (Editor)

  480 1 Kings 21:19. (Editor)

  481 Abbé Henri Lacordaire (1802–1861), who, together with Lamennais, was one of the leading lights of nineteenth-century Catholic liberalism. (Editor)

  482 Loose quotation of the Latin version of the famous phrase repeated, with variations, in Matthew 26:11, Mark 14:7, John 12:8. (Editor)

  483 Proudhon’s paper was suppressed by the state in August 1848 due to its continued criticism of the government’s repressive and reactionary policies. (Editor)

  484 Rue Transnonain was the scene of a massacre of workers in 1830. (Translator)

/>   485 “la fille de Rampsinith”: Rhampsinith was an Egyptian prince mentioned by Herodotus who had a great stone tower built to store his treasures. Rhampsinitus is the ancient Greek name for Rameses III. (Translator)

  486 François-Vincent Raspail (1794–1878) was a French chemist, naturalist, physiologist, and socialist politician. Stood as the Socialist candidate in the Presidential elections of 10th December 1848 but came in fourth (with 0.49% of the vote). (Editor)

  487 Cours forcé (forced rate/price) refers to inconvertible money, which is legal tender by government declaration and not backed by, nor convertible into, gold or silver. (Editor)

  488 As in “The voice of the people is the voice of God” (“Vox populi, vox dei”). (Editor)

  489 The Biblical Latin quote is from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians 11:19 and means “it is inevitable that there will be heresies.” (Translator)

  490 “All authority comes from God.” (Translator)

  491 Under the July Monarchy (1830–1848) the law forbade parties to define themselves as “Republican” and so “Radical” was used as an alternative. The radicals considered themselves as the heirs of the Jacobins from the Great Revolution. They advocated universal suffrage within a centralised and indivisible republic, freedom of the press, right of assembly, and so on as a vehicle of social progress. Alexandre Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc were part of its left-wing. (Editor)

  492 Louis IX (1214–70) was King of France from 1226 until his death. He established the Parliament of Paris which gradually acquired the habit of refusing to register legislation with which it disagreed until the king held a lit de justice or sent a lettre de cachet to force them to act. He was the only king of France to be canonised (in 1297 by Pope Boniface VIII). (Editor)

  493 Also called Holy Communion, this is a Christian sacrament or ordinance, generally considered to be a commemoration of the Last Supper. (Editor)

  494 System of Economic Contradictions, Chapter 1: “economic science is to me the objective form and realisation of metaphysics; it is metaphysics in action…” (Editor)

  495 A reference to the Provisional Government created by the February Revolution having state socialists Louis Blanc and Albert within it and that decreed the “right to work” and the creation of National Workshops for the unemployed. (Editor)

  496 Vide General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, in which the contradiction between the political regime and the economic regime is demonstrated.—Paris, Garnier frères, 1851. (Note to the 1851 edition)

  497 On the question of divorce the best solution is still that of the Church. In principle the Church does not accept that a marriage contracted in a regular way may be dissolved, but through a casuistical fiction it declares that in certain cases the marriage does not actually exist or has ceased to exist. Clandestinity, impotence, crime that entails civil death, erroneous identification of person(s), etc., are for the Church, like death itself, so many occasions for dissolving the marriage. Perhaps it might be possible to equally satisfy the needs of society, the requirements of morality and the respect due to families by perfecting this theory without going as far as divorce, by means of which the marriage contract is really no more than a contract of concubinage.

  498 The Concordat of 1801 was an agreement between Napoléon Bonaparte and Pope Pius VII that re-established the Roman Catholic Church in France and ended the breach caused by the church reforms of the French Revolution. The Roman Catholic faith was acknowledged as the religion of the majority of the French people but was not proclaimed as the established religion of the state. Napoléon gained the right to nominate bishops, but their offices were conferred by the pope. The state paid the clergy. To implement the concordat Napoléon issued in 1802 the so-called Organic Articles; these restated the traditional liberties of the Gallican church including resistance to papal authority. (Editor)

  499 The Tennis Court Oath (serment du Jeu de Paume) was a pivotal event of the French Revolution. The meeting of the Estates-General of 20 June 1789 saw the members of the Third Estate and a few members of the First Estate pledge to continue to meet until a constitution had been written, despite royal prohibition. It was both revolutionary act and an assertion that political authority derived from the people rather than from the monarch. (Editor)

  500 The Château de Saint-Cloud was the site of the coup d’état led by Napoléon Bonaparte that overthrew the French Directory in 1799. (Editor)

  501 The sceptical philosophy of Pyrrho, a Greek philosopher, who asserted that since all perceptions tend to be faulty, the wise man will consider the external circumstances of life to be unimportant and thus preserve tranquillity. In short, extreme or absolute scepticism. (Editor)

  502 The Scholastic theologians and philosophers of the middle ages. (Editor)

  503 Referring to the findings of a government commission, published as Rapport de la commission d’enquête sur l’insurrection qui a éclaté dans la journée du 23 juin et sur les événements du 15 mai (Paris: Imprimerie de l’Assemblée Nationale, 1848). (Editor.)

  504 At the June 22nd session of the National Assembly, deputy Charles de Montalembert (1810–1870) had read this passage aloud as evidence of the danger that nationalising the railroads would set a socialistic precedent. He was careful to point out that this very passage from La République had been “reproduced with praise in another journal, Le Représentant du Peuple, directed, if I am not mistaken, by one of our most celebrated colleagues, the honourable M. Proudhon.” (Editor.)

  505 Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus (244–311), commonly known as Diocletian, was a Roman Emperor. He issued a series of edicts rescinding the legal rights of Christians and demanding that they comply with traditional religious practices. The Diocletianic Persecution was the last and most severe persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire. The edicts were unsuccessful and strengthened the resolve of the Christians. Diocletian also issued an imperial edict fixing a maximum price for provisions and other articles of commerce, and a maximum rate of wages. (Editor)

  506 Reference to state repression of a popular revolt in Paris under the Monarchy on 5–6 June 1832 with at least 150 killed. (Editor)

  507 Proudhon, System of Economic Contradictions or the Philosophy of Poverty, 1846.

  508 Five months after the June days, a cabal formed within the party of so-called decent and moderate Republicans tried to place upon General Cavaignac the sole responsibility for the civil war. If, they argued, the General, heeding the warnings and entreaties of the Executive Committee, had called more troops than he had been asked to, and earlier, and if he had launched his soldiers against the barricades from the first day instead of allowing the insurgency to develop freely, events would have taken place differently, and Paris would not have been delivered, for four days, into the horrors of civil war.

  It was quietly concluded that the riot had been favoured, the massacre prepared, organised, by General Cavaignac, in connivance with MM. Senard and Marrast, in order for the three of them to capture the government and form a triumvirate.

  These rumours gave rise, on November 25 th, 1848, to a solemn discussion in the Constituent Assembly, which, on the motion of Dupont (from the Eure district), declared that General Cavaignac had deserved well of his country. But the blow had been struck; the extreme left, which should have been on its guard against such gossip in view of the circumstances in which the charges had been made, the memory of the facts, and the loyalty with which General Cavaignac returned his powers, received them greedily, and General Cavaignac, whose explanations were not as conclusive as could have been expected, since in his position any recrimination was forbidden, General Cavaignac, victor of June, remained the scapegoat.

  We, with no coterie interests, no personal grievances, animated by no rivalries or ambition, we can tell the truth.

  Yes, there was provocation, machination, conspiracy against the Republic, in June 1848: the facts we have recounted, all of which are genuine, prove it. The national
workshops were the pretext, the dissolution of these workshops was the signal.

  But in this plot, everyone’s hands were dirty, directly or indirectly, with or without premeditation: First, the Legitimists, the Orleanists, the Bonapartists, whose orators led the Assembly and opinion while their agents inflamed the riot; secondly, the Republican moderates, including MM. Arago, Garnier-Pages, Duclerc, Pagnerre, etc., all of whom played an active role in the repression; and finally, the Mountain, whose inertia in these deplorable times has earned them history’s harshest reprimand.

  Without doubt, General Cavaignac had his share in the intrigues within the Assembly, within and under the Executive Committee. But to make him the leader of the conspiracy, and moreover out of ambition—he, who only thought to get rid of the competition of Louis Bonaparte while he could—that would be to gratuitously attribute to him before the fact notions of ascendancy that he did not even conceive afterward.

  General Cavaignac was the tool of an anonymous and virtually leaderless reaction against the socialist Republic that had formed out of the hostility of some, the inertia of others, and the fear and madness of all. As to the General’s strategic arrangements, so strongly criticised, I will say, without setting myself up as judge, that it does not belong to the reds to criticize; that to reproach Cavaignac for having lacked energy and speed in suppressing the riot is to join, from another point of view, in provocation, in approving the recall of the troops which the People protested against: Finally, if the non-bloody victories of General Changarnier on January 29th and June 13th, 1849 appear to cast doubt on General Cavaignac’s abilities, then one must not place such value on the strength and courage of the rebels in June 1848. To acknowledge the strength of General Cavaignac, we end up slandering the insurgency and pouring contempt on all the great days of popular action, from July 14th, 1789 to February 1848.