Property Is Theft!

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  Furthermore, if only those who framed this wonderful law known, when looking to popular suffrage expressed on a person-by-person basis, had dealt with the issue appropriately! If they had told the citizenry:

  The labouring class means to have its share of all of the advantages enjoyed by the bourgeois class. Being the more numerous and poorer and thus the stronger class, that class is the master of power. Bourgeois or workers, the point is that, by common consent, they carry through a comprehensive overhaul of the economy. So you should be choosing the men best equipped in terms of their speciality, moderation and commitment to govern the interests of all.

  It is beyond doubt that, had it been posed in those terms, the question put to the electors would have produced a quite different outcome.

  Instead of which, what has the government done?

  For a start, through its declarations, its example, its decrees and its commissioners, it has raised the basis for warfare between the two castes designed to keep the people divided, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

  In view of which the vast majority of citizens has begun to adopt a defensive stance before the redundancy of the bankrupted banker, the jobless artisan and incomeless property-owner. Everybody has become bourgeois and nobody wants to be counted as proletarian. From which point on, the ends to which the elections would be held were foreseeable.

  And there’s more.

  All of a sudden, on April 16th, the provisional government with its lamentable pendulum swings between communist and conservative notions provoked turmoil right across the spectrum of views and once again the issue in the election was between property and community [communauté].

  For social reform, it was a lost cause. The mass of the citizenry, who would readily have embraced it, has just pretty much rejected it under the name of communism.

  Communism shunned, that is the real meaning of the 1848 elections. We no more want community of labour than we do community of women or community of children! The 260,000 votes cast for M. de Lamartine cannot have any other meaning. Or are they an embracing of the illustrious poet’s theories or some epigram? Then along comes the new National Assembly with its equivocal mandate. As for ourselves, we shall see to it that our citizen representatives are reminded of the issue.

  France, we shall tell them, wants no part of community: who can question that? We do not want it any more than you do.

  But has that any bearing on the social question? Is railing against community enough to stamp out poverty?

  Has the privilege of property been abolished?

  Have the bourgeois turned into workers?

  Have the workers turned into bourgeois?

  Has our public debt of six billion, a budget of two billion, for it is going to be two billion, plus another twelve billion in mortgaged funds, been reduced?

  Is the crisis drawing to an end?463

  Has commerce been re-established?

  Has labour been so organised that bread is assured within and without?

  Are we free?

  Are we equals?

  Are we brothers?

  Good folk who fear the dissolution of your marriage bonds, have a second look before you retreat into your shared insignificancy. If you so much as dream that you are here only to lend your backing to a negation, you have not understood your mandate. It only remains for us to act as your guiding lights. Get on with it!

  TO PATRIOTS

  4th May 1848

  Le Représentant du Peuple

  Translation by Paul Sharkey

  TOMORROW SEES THE OPENING OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY.

  How do the elected members from the departments come to us?

  What sort of a reception will the representatives from around France get from the people of Paris?

  The only answers are with distrust and scorn. I search for brothers but all I come across are plotters! Civil war is no longer in prospect: it is upon us. No longer is it feared as the ghastliest of evils: it is accepted as a necessity. In countryside and city alike, people are manufacturing powder, casting bullets and readying weapons. The leaders send out their watchwords and issue their manifestos. No matter where you go all you hear is this deadly message: We must finish it!

  The bourgeois has his mind made up to have done with the proletarian, who, for his part, has his mind made up to have done with the bourgeois. The worker wants to see an end of the capitalist, the wage-earner [an end] of the entrepreneur, the departments with Paris, the peasants with the workers. In every heart anger and hatred reign; in every mouth a threat. And what is the cause of such discord? The elections.

  Universal suffrage has lied to the People.

  The February Revolution was made through every party opposing the outgoing government, through the general disgust with a monarchy crowned by infamy, every mind making its contribution to the idea of a reform both political and social. The February Revolution, the outcome of eighteen months of parliamentary wrangling, reformist protests, economic criticisms, inevitably resulted in a republican organisation, in a closer amalgamation of the different classes in society. People were relying, and were entitled so to do, on the new representatives being an expression of the idea of revolution: instead we have the pandemonium of all counter-revolutionary notions. The whims of an electoral majority would have events reversed: men who under a Republic would never have had the right to vote are calling for a king in the name of the Republic and by virtue of their right of suffrage!…

  The signal for this backsliding came from the provisional government. The files of Le National are there to show that.

  Such was their grasp of revolution, such their fear of the people, these amateur republicans, these gentlemen democrats, that scarcely had they arrived in power than they sent out an appeal to every mediocrity in the land. The country then sent its mediocrities. They have succeeded beyond their hopes and already they are consumed with unease. They sense that their part has been played out. Which faction does not hold them in contempt? They are so small. So tiny, so wrong-headed that even the sharpest eye cannot distinguish between despotism and the Republican. I do not even think anybody hates them; yet they have bound France’s fate in chains!…

  It is to you honest patriots who since February have stayed what you were even before February, it is to you that I address myself. The lives and deaths of ten million men may well hang on whatever determination you make.

  Your anger is righteous, your outrage legitimate. Like you, I have wept with rage at the sight of the perfidious reaction under way, which adds cravenness to massacre. But, citizens, you will not avenge the memory of your brothers by means of bloody reprisals; passion has no place in the decisionmaking of a statesman. For amid the universal anarchy in which we find ourselves, in the absence of regulated authority and acknowledged principle, I can tell you this, citizens, EVERYBODY should think like a statesman.

  But first reflect upon the situation in the land.

  For the past seventy days, France has not worked. Do you know what it means, for a nation not to work! Imagine a man who no longer eats, no longer drinks, no longer digests: in whom the blood has stopped coursing, the heart beating, the lungs inflating, the heat throbbing; a man in whom the vital spark has petered out. That man lives no more; he is dead!

  Behold the portrait of our nation!—No more work, no more production, no more commerce, no more consumption for us. Collective life goes un-renewed; taxes are not returned; the powers that be are no longer heeded; the public forces become demoralised; the bonds of society are loosened; just a few more days in this dire condition and all movement will cease and the body of the people will lapse into dissolution.

  The Poland and Italy that we pledged to defend. Poland and Italy, those two sisters of France, now broken by the arms of their tormentors, in vain do they stretch out a desolated hand to us. We shall ride to the rescue neither of Italy nor of Poland.

  Do you know why? We would need a hundred thousand soldiers, a hundred million francs, and
we haven’t a hundred thousand centimes with which to equip and provision an army. We couldn’t even defend our own selves if a coalition of kings was to swoop upon us just as they did sixty years ago. And do you know the reason why? Because we no longer produce through toil that on which we might subsist until such time as we might have to go down fighting.

  Patriots, irked by the reaction, would you murder your motherland! Would you drive a dagger into your mother?… Yet that’s what you’ll be doing if you revert to barricades. Another seventy years of stagnation and the game is up for the Revolution, the game is up for the people.

  Have pity on France, pity on the proletariat, pity on the bourgeoisie itself, whose tortures you cannot even begin to imagine. Can you not see that it is its ruination that has it infuriated? Ruination, bankruptcy, hideous bankruptcy, followed by shame, and then impoverishment: this is what the exasperated bourgeoisie seeks by spilling the blood of the proletariat.

  So are you willing, to avenge 150 of your brothers,464 to let the angel of death roam through the entire country? The death knell of the motherland! Is this the compensation you have in mind for the relatives of the victims?...

  Your policy should be no such thing, citizens. Killing men is the worst way to combat principles. The only way to score a victory over an idea is with another idea. Now, that idea is something you already carry within yourselves, just as you have it within you to make it a reality.

  What! You know how to be self-reliant, you know how to get yourselves organised for a fight and you do not know how to organise yourselves for the purposes of work?

  What? A hundred thousand of you would join forces for an attack on the government and you couldn’t find it within yourselves, a hundred thousand of you, to join forces for an attack on privilege?

  Destruction is the only thing that holds any charms for you: you lose all enthusiasm the moment creation is at stake!…

  Citizens, the motherland is in danger!

  I propose a provisional committee be set up to orchestrate exchange, credit and commerce between workers;

  That said committee liaise with similar committees set up in the main cities of France;

  That, under the aegis of these committees, a body representative of the proletariat be formed in Paris, imperium in imperio,465 in opposition to the bourgeoisie’s representation.

  That a new society be founded in the heart of the old society;

  That a labour charter be written into the agenda forthwith and its main articles set out with minimal delay;

  That the groundwork for republican government be laid down and special powers delegated to the workers’ representatives.

  Citizens, the republic has its back to the wall: the government can do nothing for you. But you can do everything for yourselves; this I swear in the presence of God and men!

  Until such time as we have exhausted economic means, I will speak out against the use of violence. Let the needless bloodshed be upon the heads of the agitators!

  OPENING SESSION OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY

  5th May 1848

  Le Représentant du Peuple

  Translation by Paul Sharkey

  THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY HAS BEEN FORGED AGAINST A BACKDROP OF CANNON fire, drums and fanfares, wrapped up in all of war’s pomp and circumstance.

  In these ties when the imagination is seduced by the senses and the heart swept along by the imagination and reason overwhelmed by sentiment; when the mind believes itself infinite because it is empty, the soul’s only weakness is for the blandishments of sensibility and the mirages of hope. Considered thought seems to have lost its status and judgement set aside its authority. These are the days of Lamourette kisses,466 the times of treacherous reconciliations.

  But enthusiasm soon abates; sentiment evaporates like a caress; and in place of empathetic feelings, reason returns to pose here formidable questions.

  Well then, what is this National Assembly, so laboriously nurtured and so impatiently awaited and upon which so many contradictory hopes are staked going to do? Are our deputies out-and-out republicans? Are they socialists? Are they firmly resolved to overhaul the old edifice of society from top to toe? And the provisional government which has just handed its powers back to them, has it the credibility to transform these in the light of revolution?

  Why not have them take an oath?

  Would you like to know what the National Assembly is going to do?

  For a start, it will verify its powers, appoint its speaker, fill its offices, answer a speech by the crown with an address, lay blame, endorse, upbraid and recriminate! Being unable to rescind across the board, at a stroke and without exception, every one of the acts of the provisional government and turn things back to where they were on February 25th! That would be the surest, simplest, most expeditious, most rational course of action and the only useful one. But the censure coming from the National Assembly will not be so forceful.

  And then the National Assembly will turn its attention to the Constitution.

  It will talk about presidency, veto, accountability, separation of powers, centralisation, municipalities, etc. It may even be disposed to vote, after a reading, without debate or amendment, as one man, resoundingly and enthusiastically for the first constitution put before it. If such a constitution is to last and if it is to be good value for the money the National Assembly could not proceed too quickly. These representatives cost twenty-five francs a day and the people are not working!

  After that, the National Assembly will talk business.

  That is to say, in the name of political economy, it will deal with domestic economics, the application of huckster economics to the State, the way they have been doing in England, in France and everywhere else for the past forty years. It will distribute the land in Algeria and elsewhere: it will set up agricultural banks; it will legislate about manufacturers’ labels; it will overhaul taxation, insurance, the mines, etc., etc: it will deliver itself up to all manner of dark, entangled, scabrous and squalid speculations.—May the Republic’s representatives skip over these discussions as they would over a fire! Matters of business have a deadly impact on the conscience of the deputy: think back to the railways!467

  And finally the National Assembly will turn its mind to philanthropy. Crèches, towers, asylums, hospitals, people’s convalescent homes, poor relief, savings funds, rewards for virtue, sponsorship for artists, model farms, prison systems, lending banks for workers, industrial, trade, business and agricultural schools will come in for the most respectable attentions. And to prove its entire goodwill to the people, it will even advance Monsieur Considérant four million and a plot of land for an experimental phalanstery. How happy it would be if only the Republic could rid itself of socialism at that price!

  But the social question!—you will say—The real social question! Might it be in the minds of the revolution’s representatives to dodge the issue? What have a phalanstery and the social question got to do with each other?

  The social question!

  My advice to you is to write if off from the outset. The social question is not going to make it on to the agenda of the National Assembly.

  And is that assembly likely to stare privilege in the face?

  Has it the strength and the calibre to lay hands on that sacred cow?

  Has it the gumption to do away with the last remnant of royalty, the mere abolition of which will make dynasties impossible, namely, the royalty of gold?

  Is the National Assembly likely to pronounce a death sentence upon the old society?

  Might it, in the wake of its immense political, economic and philanthropic undertakings, grasp that social reform spells the abolition of politics? That political economy is the very opposite of domestic economics? That philanthropy is a corollary of poverty?

  No, the National Assembly can do nothing, seeks nothing and knows nothing!

  It can only turn into something and do the work of the revolution insofar as it will be so invited, provoked or compelled
by some power outside of itself that seizes the initiative and sets things rolling.

  A legislative assembly lays down statutes about things: it does not bring them about. In other words, the organisation of labour must not emanate from the powers that be; it ought to be SPONTANEOUS. Which is why we are repeating here the proposal that we put yesterday:

  “That a provisional committee be set up to orchestrate exchange, credit and commerce between workers;

  “That said committee liaise with similar committees set up in the main cities of France.

  “That, under the aegis of these committees, a body representative of the proletariat be formed in Paris, imperium in imperio, in opposition to the bourgeoisie’s representation.

  “That a new society be founded in the heart of the old society.

  “That a labour charter be written into the agenda forthwith and its main articles set out with minimal delay.

  “That the groundwork for republican government be laid down and special powers delegated to the workers’ representatives.”

  That is the only way that we are going to be able to stand firm against the reaction: and to ensure the wellbeing of the Republic and the emancipation of the proletariat.

  OUTLINE OF THE SOCIAL QUESTION

  METHOD OF SOLUTION—EQUIVALENCE OF THE POLITICAL QUESTION AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION

  9th May 1848

  Le Représentant du Peuple

  Translation by Barry Marshall

  PRIVILEGE PROTECTS ITSELF TO THE DEATH. IT THREATENS US FROM THE north and south, east and west. It demands revenge on us from the four points of the compass. We cried like prophets that there is a time for mercy and there will be a time for punishment.