might the more easily fill them with its creatures. This lasted till 1801 when village communes were revived; but then the government took it upon itself to appoint mayors and syndics in each of tho 36,000 communes! And this absurdity lasted till the revolution of July 1830, after which the law of 1789 was again put into force. And in the interval communal lands were again wholly confiscated by the State in 1813 and plundered anew during three years. What remained of them was only returned to the communes in 1816.
This was by no means the end. Every new régime saw in communal lands a source of reward for its supporters. Therefore at three different intervals since 1830—the first time in 1837 and the last under Napoleon III—laws were promulgated to force peasants to divide what they possessed of forests and common pasture-lands, and three times the government was compelled to abrogate this law on account of the peasants resistance. All the same Napoleon the third was able to profit by it and bag several large estates for his favorites.
These are facts, and this is what, in scientific language, these gentlemen call the "natural death" of the communal landed property under the influence of economic laws? As well call the massacre of a hundred thousand soldiers on a battlefield "natural death."
What happened in France happened also in Belgium, England, Germany, Austria; in fact everywhere in Europe, Slav countries excepted.
Strange that the periods of plundering communes should correspond in all Western Europe. The methods alone vary. Thus in England they did not dare to enact sweeping measures; they preferred passing several thousands of separate enclosure acts by which, in each special case, parliament sanctioned the confiscation of land—it does so still—and gave to the squire the right of keeping common lands he had fenced in. And notwithstanding that nature has up till now respected the narrow furrows by which communal fields were temporarily divided among families in the villages of England, and that we have clear descriptions of this form of landed property at the beginning of the century in the books of a certain Marshall, scientific men (such as Seebohm, worthy emulator of Fustel de Coulanges) are not wanting to maintain and teach that communes have never existed in England save in the form of serfdom!
We find the same thing going on in Belgium, Germany, Italy and Spain. And in one way or another personal appropriation of lands formerly communal was almost brought to completion towards the fifties in this century. Peasants have only kept scraps of their common lands. This is the way in which the mutual assurance of lord, priest,
