their lands to be pillaged by the rich, and to subject them, each individually, to the functionary, the priest and the lord?
VIII.
To annihilate the independence of cities; to plunder merchants and artisans' rich guilds; to centralise the foreign trade of either into its hands and ruin it; to seize the internal administration of guilds, and subject home trade, as well as all manufacture, even in the slightest detail, to a swarm of functionaries; and by these means kill both industry and arts; to seize upon local militias and all municipal administration, to crush the weak by taxation for the benefit of the strong and to ruin countries by war,—such was the nascent State's behaviour towards urban agglomerations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The same tactics were evidently employed towards villages and peasants. As soon as the State felt itself strong enough, it destroyed the village commune, ruined the peasants committed to its mercy and plundered the common lands.
Historians and economists paid by the State have no doubt taught us that the village commune, having become an obsolete form of land-ownership obstructing agricultural progress, was bound to disappear by the action of natural economic forces. Politicians and bourgeois economists do not tire of repeating this even nowadays, and there are revolutionists and socialists (those who pretend to be scientific) who recite this fable learned in school.
Yet a more odious falsehood has never been affirmed by science. A deliberate falsehood, for history swarms with documents amply proving to those who wish to know—for France it would almost suffice to read Dalloz—that the village commune was first of all deprived of its privileges by the State, of its independence, of its juridical and legislative powers; and that later on its lands were, either simply stolen by the rich under State protection, or else confiscated by the State itself.
Plundering began as early as the sixteenth century in France, and grew apace in the following century. As early as 1659 the State took the communes under its superior protection and we need only read Louis XIV's edict of 1667 to learn what plundering of communal lands took place at that period.—"Men have taken possession of lands when it suited them.… lands have been divided, … in order to plunder the communes fictitious debts have been devised,"—said the "Sun-King" in this edict.… and two years later he confiscated for his own benefit
