Property Is Theft!

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  At this point I would like to claim my readers’ full attention, for if we do not learn a lesson from all this it is useless to continue bothering ourselves with public affairs. Let the nations blunder on: each of us should buy a rifle, a dagger, pistols—and barricade his door. Society is but a vain utopia: man’s natural state, the legal state, is war.

  The government of work!... Ah! That would be a government with initiative, no doubt, a government of progress and intelligence!... But what is the government of work? Can labour turn into government? Can labour govern or be governed? What do labour and power have in common?

  Nobody had foreseen such a question; no matter. Seduced by their prejudice in favour of government, the people had nothing more urgent to do but straight away form a new government. Power having fallen into their labouring hands, they made haste to pass it over to a certain number of men of their choice, whom they charged with founding the Republic and resolving the social problem, that of the proletariat, at the same time as the political problem.—We give you three months, they told them, and still sublimely naive, still tenderly heroic, they added: We have to endure three months of misery in the service of the Republic! Neither classical antiquity nor the revolution of ’92 had anything comparable to this cry from the very innards of the people of February.

  The men chosen by the people and installed at the Town Hall were called the Provisional Government, which one must translate as the government without any idea or goal. Those who had been impatiently observing the development of socialist ideas for 18 years and repeating in every possible register: The social revolution is the end, the political revolution is the means, were, God knows, embarrassed when, once in the possession of the means, they had to achieve the goal and get down to the task at hand. They thought about it, I do not doubt, and soon they had to recognise what M. Thiers revealed somewhat later, what President Sauzet had said before him, namely that the government was not made in order to give the worker work and that the surest way for them was to continue the status quo of Louis-Philippe and resist any innovation, as long as the people would not impose it on authority.

  Yet they did not lack intelligence, these conspirators for thirty years who had combated every despotism, criticised every minister and written the history of every revolution; every one of them had a socio-political theory in his briefcase. They asked for nothing better than to take the initiative, any initiative, these adventurers of progress; their advisors did not fail them either. How then did they remain for three months without producing the tiniest act of reform, without advancing the revolution by a single step forward? How, after having guaranteed the right to work by decree, did they seem, during all the time they were on the job, to be occupied solely with the means of not fulfilling their promise? Why not the tiniest attempt at effecting agricultural or industrial organisation? Why did they deprive themselves of the one decisive argument against utopia, i.e. experience?...

  How? Why? Do I have to say it? Do I, a socialist, have to justify the Provisional Government? It is, you see, because they were the government; it is because in the question of revolution any initiative conflicts with the State, just as labour conflicts with capital; it is because the government and labour are incompatible like reason and faith.496 That is the key to all the things that have taken place in France and Europe since February and which might well go on taking place for a long time yet.

  Here is the place to expose the juridical reason for the revolutionary incapacity of all governments.

  What makes the government immobilistic, conservative, resistant to any initiative, let us even say counter-revolutionary, is that a revolution is an organic thing, a matter of creation, while governmental power is mechanical, a matter of enforcement [d’exécution]. I will explain.

  I do not call the laws organic, since they are purely conventional things touching the most general elements of administration and power like municipal and departmental laws, the law concerning recruitment, the law concerning public education, etc. The word organic used in this sense is an abuse of language and M. Odilon Barrot was quite right to say that such laws have nothing at all organic about them. This supposed organism, invented by Bonaparte, is nothing but governmental machinery. By organic I understand what goes to make up the inmost and secular constitution of society, above any political system or constitution of the state.

  We say, for example, that marriage is an organic thing. It is up to the legislative power to take the initiative in any law governing the relations of public or domestic interest and order which are occasioned by conjugal society: it does not have a brief to modify the essence of that society. Is marriage an institution of absolute or doubtful morality, a progressive or decadent institution? One may dispute this point as much as one will: no government or assembly of legislators will ever have the right to take the initiative in this. It is for the spontaneous development of customs and morals, for general civilisation, for what I call human Providence to modify what can be modified, to introduce reforms which time alone can reveal. And that is, to mention it in passing, what has prevented the establishment of divorce in France. After long and serious discussions and after the experience of several years the legislator had to recognise that a question of such delicacy and gravity was not within his remit, that the time had passed when divorce could have become part of our institutions without any danger for the family and without offending public morals, and that in wishing to cut this knot the government risked degrading precisely what it wanted to ennoble.497

  Nobody will suspect me of superstitious weakness and religious prejudices of any sort, yet I will say that religion, like marriage, is not a matter of statutory procedure [réglementaire] and pure discipline but an organic affair and consequently immune to the direct action of State power. Part of the function of the ancient legislative, at least that is my opinion, by virtue of the distinction of the spiritual and the temporal customary for a long time in the Gallican Church, was to regulate the temporal affairs of the clergy and redefine episcopal districts, but I deny that the National Assembly had the right to close the churches. I recognise the power of the communal authority and the Jacobin society to establish a new cult even less when I consider that the steps taken in this direction could only end in strengthening the old one. Religion was an organic thing in France when the Revolution burst on the scene; it is true that by means of the progress of philosophy it was then possible to proclaim the right to abstain from it, and that one may now in fact predict the imminent extinction or transformation of Catholicism, but there was no authority at that time to abolish it. The Concordat of 1802498 was not at all, whatever some may have said, simply a matter of consular reaction; it was a simple reparation demanded by the vast majority of the people following the vain parades of Hébert and Robespierre.—I still believe, correspondingly, that it was right for the parliament of 1830 to assure all faiths of their right to freedom, respect and incomes, but I would not agree that it was permissible, in maintaining the monarchical principle, for it to state that the Catholic religion was nothing but a majority religion. Certainly I would not today give my support to a revision, in the sense that I have suggested, of Article 7 of the Constitution of 1848: what has been done, whatever it may have cost, is done, and I consider it irrevocable. One could do better and more for the emancipation of human consciousness; but I would not have voted for article 6 of the Charter of 1830.

  These examples suffice to explain my thought. A revolution is an explosion of organic force, an evolution of society expressing what was already within it; it is only legitimate if it is spontaneous, peaceful and traditional. There is equal tyranny in repressing it as in doing violence to it.

  The organisation of labour which the provisional government was instructed to take steps to carry out after the events of February affected property first of all, and then the institution of marriage and the family; the terms it was expressed in even implied an abolition (or redemption, if that term is preferred) of proper
ty. The socialists who opinionatedly insist on denying it after all the study devoted to the matter, or who deplore that other socialists have said this, have not even the sad excuse of ignorance; they are quite simply speaking in bad faith.

  Before acting or deliberating on the matter the provisional government should have made a preliminary distinction of the organic question from the executive question, in other words, what was the field of competence of governmental power and what was not. Then, having made this distinction, its sole duty and its sole right was to invite the citizens themselves to produce, by the full exercise of their liberty, the new facts which it, the government, would then later be called upon either to exercise some control over or give a direction to in case of need.

  It is probable that the provisional government was not led by such lofty considerations; it is even to be supposed that such scruples would never had held it back. It only desired to revolutionise, but it did not know how to go about it. It was a mixture of conservatives, doctrinaire thinkers, Jacobins, socialists, each talking a different language. It would have been a miracle, considering what trouble they had agreeing on the slightest point regarding policy, if they had succeeded in reaching an understanding about something like a revolution. It was the discord reigning in the government camp, much more than the prudence of the generals, that preserved the country from the utopias of the provisional government: the disagreements that agitated it were its substitute for philosophy.

  The mistake of the provisional government, its great mistake, was not to have been unable to build; it was to have been unable to demolish.

  For instance, it would have been necessary to abolish the oppressive laws concerning individual freedom, put a stop to the scandal of arbitrary arrests, fix the limits of prevention... All they thought of was to defend the prerogatives of the magistracy, and the citizens’ liberty was more than ever at the arbitrary mercy of the public prosecutor. It pleases the high police to convert a restaurant into a mousetrap; two hundred citizens gathered for a dinner are torn from their wives and children, beaten, thrown in prison, accused of conspiracy and then released after the investigative magistrate, who does not know himself what the police is accusing them of, has convinced himself at length that there is no charge to press against them.

  It would have been necessary to disarm the powers that be, discharge half of the army, abolish military conscription, organise a citizens’ army, remove the troops from the capital, and declare that the executive power could never under any circumstance and under any pretext dissolve and disarm the national guard.—Instead of that, the government busied itself with the formation of those twenty-four mobile battalions concerning whose utility and patriotism we were later, in June, instructed. As they were suspicious of the national guard they were far from declaring it inviolable: the successors to the provisional government have also not neglected to dissolve it.

  It would have been necessary to guarantee the freedom of assembly, first by abolishing the law of 1790 and all such laws which might carry ambiguous implications, then by organising the political clubs around the representatives of the people, giving them entrance into parliamentary life. The organisation of popular societies was the pivot of democracy, the cornerstone of republican order. In place of organisation the provisional government had nothing to offer the clubs but tolerance and espionage, in the expectation that public indifference and the forces of reaction would cause them to vanish.

  It would have been necessary to rip the nails and teeth off state power and hand over the government’s public force to the citizens, not only in order to prevent the government from taking steps against liberty but to deprive governmental utopias of their last hope. Did they not prove the power of the State against the enterprises of minorities on the 16th of April and the 15th of May? Well, there would have been neither a 16th of April nor a 15th of May if the government, with its power of irresistible force, had not been an irresistible temptation to the impatience of democrats.

  Everything was done in a topsy-turvy manner on the day after the February Revolution. The government wanted to do what was not within its rights to do, and for that purpose it preserved and indeed even augmented the power which it had taken from the July monarchy. It failed to do what it should have done, and for that purpose the revolution was repressed on the 17th of March, in the name of power, by those very persons who appeared to be the most energetic representatives of that revolution. Instead of rendering to the people its fecundity of initiative by subordinating power to its will, they attempted by means of power to resolve those problems on the subject of which time had not yet illuminated the masses; in order to ensure the so-called revolution, they performed a vanishing trick on liberty! Nothing appeared to be an option to these reformers in the way of what had been seen in the great revolutionary epochs: no impulses from below, no indication of popular opinion, not a single principle or discovery which might have received the people’s sanction. And they alarmed the rational attitude of this same people by decrees which they themselves condemned. Being unable to justify them by any principles they pretended to excuse these decrees in the name of necessity! It was no longer, as it had been only recently, the antagonism of liberty and power; it was the infernal mock-marriage of the two.

  Reread history, then, and you will see how revolutions emerge and are effected.

  Before Luther, Descartes and the Encyclopédists, the State, that faithful expression of society, hands over heretics and philosophers to the executioners. Jan Hus, the precursor of Protestantism, is burned at Constance by the secular arm of the state after being condemned by the Council. But little by little rational thought insinuates itself into the hearts of the masses: soon the State pardons the innovators, it takes them as guides and consecrates their right. The Revolution of ’89 derives from the same source: it was already formed in public opinion when it was declared by State power. In a totally different context of ideas, when has the State ever bothered about canals and railways? When has it wanted to have a steam-powered navy? Only after a multitude of experimental attempts and the publicly recognised success of the first entrepreneurs.

  It has been the privilege of our epoch to attempt a revolution by the means of State power, something never seen heretofore, and then to have it rejected by the nation. Socialism existed and had been propagating itself for 18 years under the protection of the Charter, which recognised the right of all French people to publish their opinions and have them printed. When they dragged socialism to power the demagogues of February possessed the secret of stirring up intolerance of it and of causing it and even its ideas to be suppressed. It was they who by their fatal reversal of principles caused the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the people to break out, an antagonism which had not manifested itself at all during the three days of 1848 or those of 1830, an antagonism which did not derive from the revolutionary idea and which was to result in the bloodiest catastrophe and the most ridiculous debacle.

  While the provisional government, bereft of the genius of revolutions, separating itself both from the bourgeoisie and from the people at the same time, lost days and weeks in sterile and tentative actions, in agitations and circulars, a governmental socialism of God knows what sort caused heated public debate, put on dictatorial airs and,—something that amazes anybody who has not studied the mechanics of these contradictions,—itself gave the signal for resistance, in contravention of its own theory.

  CHAPTER X

  23–26 JUNE: THE CAVAIGNAC REACTION

  IF, HOWEVER, YOU persist in telling me, the provisional government had been comprised of more homogenous elements and more energetic men, if Barbès and Blanqui had been able to agree instead of opposing each other, if the elections had taken place a month sooner, if the socialists had hidden their theories for a while, if, if, if, etc.: you assert that things would have happened in a completely different way. The provisional government would have achieved the revolution in fifteen days. The national assembly, comple
tely comprised of republicans, would have united and developed its work. We would not have had a March 17th, April 16th or May 15th, and you, clever historian, would not be so clever for theorising power’s impotence and the government’s revolutionary incapacity.

  Let us think about this then, and since facts abound, let us cite them. March 17th, April 16th and May 15th have not convinced you, so I am going to tell you a story that will cause you to reflect, but before that, let us learn a little about what history is.

  There are two ways of studying history: one I will call the providential method and the other one the philosophical method.

  The first method is related to the cause of events, in which a superior will, God, that is, directs the course of things from on high, or a human will momentarily placed in a way to act on events through its free will, like God. This method does not exclude absolutely any design or systematic premeditation in history, but it has nothing of the necessary and could be revoked any time its author wants; it depends entirely on the determination of dignitaries and God’s sovereign will. Furthermore, according to the theologians, God could have created an infinite number of worlds that are different from the current one, and providence could have directed the course of events of infinity in other ways. If, for example, Alexander the Great, instead of dying at the age of 32, had lived until he was 60, if Caesar had been defeated at Pharsala, if Constantine had not gone to establish himself in Byzantium, if Charlemagne had not founded and consolidated the temporal power of the popes, if the Bastille had not been taken on July 14th or a detachment of grenadiers had chased the people’s representatives away from the Jeu de Paume499 as Bonaparte’s did in St. Cloud,500 isn’t it true, the providential historian asks, that civilisation could have gone in another direction, that Catholicism would not have the same character and that Henry V or Louis XVII would be king?