26 The State: Its Historic Role.
This movement which is hardly just beginning to be understood, was for many years travestied by State and ecclesiastical historians.
The absolute liberty of the individual — who must only obey the com- mandments of his conscience — and Communism, were the watchwords of this revolt. And it was only later, when Church and State succeeded in exterminating its most ardent defenders, and juggled with it to their own profit, that this movement, diminished and deprived of its revolutionary character, became Luther's Reformation.
It began by Communist Anarchism preached, and in some places, practised. And if we set aside the religious formulae, which are a tri- bute to that epoch, we find in it the very essence of the current of ideas which we represent to-day: the negation of all law, both State or di- vine; the conscience of each individual thus being his one and only law; the commune — absolute master of its destinies, retaking its Innds from feudal lords, and refusing all personal or monetary service to the State. In fact, Communism and equality put into practice. Moreover when. Denck, one of the philosophers of the Anabaptist movement, was asked if he did not at least recognise the authority of the Bible, he answered that the only obligatory rule of conduct is the one that each individual finds, for himself, in the Bible. And yet these very formulae, so vague, borrowed from ecclesiastical slang, — this authority "of the book " from which it is so easy to borrow arguments for and against Communism, for and against authority, and so uncertain when it comes to clearly define what liberty is, — these very religious tendencies of the revolt, did they not already contain the germ of an unavoidable defeat?
Originating in towns, the movement soon spread to the country. The peasants refused to obey anybody, and planting and old shoe on a pike by way of a flag, they took back the lands which the lords had seized from the village communities; they broke their bonds of serfdom, drove away priest and judge, and constituted themselves into free communes. And it was only by the stake, the wheel, the gibbet — it was only by massacring more than a hundred thousand peasants in a few years, that royal or imperial power, allied to the papal or reformed church", — Luther inciting to massacre peasants more violently even than the Pope, — put an end to these risings that had for a moment threatened the constitution of nascent States.
Born of popular Anabaptism, the Lutheran Reformation, leaning on the State, massacred the people and crushed the movement from which it originally had derived its strength. The survivors of this immense wave of thought took refuge in the communities of the " Moravian Brothers." who, in their turn, were destroyed by Church and State. Those among them who were not exterminated, sought shelter, some in The State: It* Historic R6b. 2T the South-East of Russia, others in Greenland, where to thin day they have been able to live in communities and to refuse all service to th» State.
Henceforth, the State's existence was secure. The lawyer, the priest and the soldier-lord, having constituted a solidary;i!li;mce around th» thrones, they could carry on their work of annihilation.
How many lies have been accumulated by State-paid historians, con- cerning that period I In fact, have we not all learned at school that the State rendered great service in constituting national unions on the ruins of feudal so- ciety; unions made impracticable in earlier times by the rivalry of cities? Wo have all learned it in school and we have all believed it in manhood.
And nevertheless, to-day we learn that in spite of all rivalries, me- dieval cities had already worked during four centuries to constitute these unions by federation, freely consented to, and that they had fully succeeded in that work of consolidation.
The Lombard union, for example, included the cities of Upper Italy and had its federal treasury in safe keeping in Genoa and Venice^ Other federations, such as the Tuscan Union, the Rhenan Union (com- prising sixty towns), the federations of Westphalia, of Bohemia, of Servia, of Poland, and of Russian towns covered Europe. At the same time, the commercial union of the Hansa included Scandinavian, Ger- man, Polish, and Russian towns throughout the basin of the Baltic.
All the elements were there already, as well as the fact itself, of large human agglomerations, freely constituted.
Do you wish for a living proof of these groups? — You have it in Switzerland! There the union asserted itself first between village cominnnes (the old Cantons), in the same way as it was constituted in France in the Laonnais. And as in Switzerland the separation between town and village was never so great as it was for towns carrying on an extensive and distant commerce, the Swiss towns lent a hand to the peasant insurrections of the sixteenth century, and the union encom- passed both towns and villages, and constituted a federation that still exists to-day.
But the State, by its very essence, cannot tolerate free federation;, because the latter represents this nightmare of the legist: " The State- within the State." The State does not recognize a freely adopted union, working within itself. It only deals with siityects. The State alone and its prop, the Church, arrogate to themselves the right of being the connecting link between men.
Consequently the State must perforce annihilate cities based on direct M The State: Its Historic Role.
union between citizens. It must abolish all union in the cit the city itself, abolish all direct union between cities. To the federative principle it must substitute the principle of submission and discipline, Submission is its substance. Without this principle it leaves ot.; the State: it becomes a federation.
And the sixteenth century — century of carnage and wars — is entirely summed up in this war waged by the growing States against tlb and their federations. The towns are besieged, taken by assault, pil- laged; their inhabitants are decimated or transported. The State is victorious all along the line. And the consequences are these.
In the fifteenth century, Europe w,as covered by rich cities. \ artisans, masons, weavers and carvers, produced marvels of art, universities laid the foundations of science, whose caravan.-* travelled over continents, and whose vessels ploughed rivers and seas.
What was left of them two centuries later? — Towns that had num- bered fifty and a hundred thousand inhabitants and that had po- (it was so in Florence) more schools, and, in the communal hospitals, more beds per inhabitant than are possessed to-day by the towns best endowed in this respect, had become rotten boroughs. Their inhabit- ants having been massacred or transported, the State and Church were seizing tli «r riches. Industry was fading under the minute tutt-: State officials. Commerce was dead. The very roads that formerly united the cities, had become absolutely impracticable in the seventieth century The State spelt warfare, and wars were devastating Europe and completing the ruin of those towns, which the State had not yet ruined direct. But — had not the villages, at least, gained by State centralisa- tion? — Certainly not! — Read what historians tell us about the style of living in the rural districts of Scotland. Tuscany, and Germany in the fourteenth century, and compare their descriptions of that time with the misery in England at the beginning of 1648, in France under the "sun -king " Louis XIV, in Germany, in Italy, everywhere after hun- dred years of State domination.
Misery everywhere. All unanimously recognize it and point it out. Wherever serfdom had been abolished, it was reconstituted in a hun- dred different forms; wherever it had not yet been destroyed, it was shaped, under State protection, into a ferocious institution, bearing all the characteristics of antique slavery, or even worse.
And could anything else evolve out of this State-produced misery, as the State's <.,hief anxiety was to annihilate the village community after the town, to destroy all bonds existing between peasants, to give up The State: r 'fo.
land- to be pillaged by the rich, and to tmbject them, \ III.
t lie indi: ch guilds; t" and i din it: I 6 ilj'on local mill! •ixh tlu- \veak liy taxation fur tin - ••ations in the The • ntly t-iiii pinii'i- '"iiimoii lands.
••niaiis and economic- paid by li that the village coinnr.iiM1, having become an -licultural }>\ lion of natural economic forces. Politicians and 1 do not tire of repeating this even nowadays, and ' .nd socialists (those who pretend to ;i-;«riH'<l in school.
lions falsehood has never been athi i. A deliberate falseho* d, for history -warms with docun -i wish to know-.for France it would ahm»' Palloz — that the village commune was first of all deprr. -..i-iviy the State, of its independence, of its juridical -,; nnd that later on its lands were, either Minply ri,-}i uiKler ^tate I'i'.tvctioii. or el.-;ted by ti '••. trly as the sixteenth <• grew apace in the following century. A- • the communes under its superior protection and Louis XI V s edict of 1667 to learn what plundering of « took place at that period. — *' Men have taken posse- it suited them...lands have been divided...in order to unes fictitious debts have been devised," — said th« in this edict...and two years later he confiscated for lr 30 The State: Its Historic R61*.
all the revenues of the communes. — This is what is called a " natural death " in so-called scientific language.
In the following century it is estimated that at least half the com- munal lands were simply appropriated by the aristocracy and the clergy under State patronage. And yet communes continued to exist till 1787. The village council met under the elm, granted lands, appointed taxes —the documents relating to this are to be fouud in Babeau (Le village •sous I'ancien regime). Turgot, in the province of which he was govern- or, found however the village councils " too noisy " and abolished them during his governorship, substituting for them assemblies elected ^mong the well-to-do of the village. In 1787, on the eve of the Revo- lution, the State made this measure general in its application. The mir was abolished and thus communal affairs fell into the hands of a few -syndics, elected by the richest bourgeois and peasants. The " Consti- tuante " sanctioned this law in December 1789. and the bourgeois, sub- stituting themselves for the nobles, plundered what remained of com- munal lands. Many a peasant revolt was necessary to force the " Con- vention" in 1792 to sanction what the rebellious peasants had accom- plished in the Eastern part of France. That is to say, the Convention •ordered the restitution of communal lands to the peasants. This only •took place there, when the land had already been retaken by revolutionary means. It is the fate of all revolutionary laws to be put into action when they are already an accomplished fact.
Nevertheless the Convention tainted this law with bourgeois gall. It decreed that lands retaken from nobles should be divided into equal parts among " active citizens " only — that is to say among the village bourgeois. By one stroke of the pen it thus dispossessed " passive citi- zens," that is to say the mass of impoverished peasants, who had most need of these communal lands. Upon which, fortunately, the peasants ^again revolted and in 1793 the Convention passed a new law decreeing the division of communal lands among all inhabitants. This was tever ,put into practice and only served as an excuse for new thefts of com- munal lands.
Would not such measures suffice to bring about what these gentlemen •call " the natural death " of communes? Yet communes still existed. On August 24th 1794, the reaction, being in power, struck the final blow. The State confiscated all communal lands and made of them a .guarantee fund for the public debt, putting them up to auction and selling them to its creatures the " Thermidorians."
This law was happily repealed on Prairal 2nd, in the year V, after being in force for three years. But at the same time, communes were ^abolished, and replaced by cantonal councils in order that the State The State: It* Hitturic R<>1'. 31 might the more easily fill them with its creatures. This lasted till 1801 when village communes wers revived; but then the government took it upon itself to appoint mayors and syndics in each of the 36,000 com- ittunrs! And this absurdity lasted till the revolution of July 1830, after which the law of 1789 was again put into force. And in the in- terval 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 oy no means the end. Every new regime 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 Napo- leon 1 1 1 laws were promulgated tojorce 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 peas- ants 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, Ger- many, 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 des- criptions of this form of landed property at the beginning of the centu- ry 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 fif- ties in this century. Peasants have only kept scraps of their common lands. This is the way in which the mutual assurance of lord, priest.
32 The State: Its Historic Rok.
soldier and judge — the State — has behaved towards peasants in ordei to despoil them of their last guarantee against misery and economic servitude.
But while organising and sanctioning this pluuder, could the State respect the institution of the commune as an organ of local life?
— Evidently not.
To allow citizens to constitute a federation among themselves in order to appropriate some functions of the State would have been a contra- diction oF principle' The State demands personal and direct submis- sion vi its subjects without intermediate agents; it requires equality in servitude; it cannot allow the State within the State.
Therefore as soon as the State began to constitute itself in the six- teenth i.'onUiry it set to work to destroy all bonds of union that existed among citizens, both in towns and villages. If under the name of mu- nicipal institutions it tolerated any vestiges of autonomy — never of in- dependenoe, — it was only with a fiscal aim. to lighten the central bud- get-as far as possible; or else to allow the provincial well-to-do to enrich themselves at the people's expense, as was the case in England up till now, and is so still in institutions and in customs.
Tli 5s is -.usily understood. Customary law is naturally pertaining to local li't- -,\\.\ Roman law to centralisation of power. The two cannot live;•>><!•• '•;> side and the one must kill the other.
Thai I,* • hy under French rule in Algeria, when a Kabyle djemmah — a vili.-igf commune — wants to plead for its lands, every inhabitant of th«- ontmiune must bring his isolated action before the judge, vrlio will h-Mi ii! i,v or two hundred isolated actions sooner than hear the col- lect! • " siur of the djemmah. The Jacobin code of the Convention (known;:i"ier the name of Code Napoleon) does not recognize custom- ary IJMV. j; «>nly recognizes Roman law, or rather Byzantine law.
Tlutt is \viiy in France when the wind blows down a tree on the Na- tion:.! highway, or a peasant prefers giving a stonebreaker two or three franct, r.» rio unpleasant task of repairing the communal road himself, it is n-'.-r^.ii-y for twelve or fifteen employees of the home office and treasury fro be put in motion, and for more than fifty documents to be exchange* 1 ^tween these austere functionaries, before the tree can be sold, or ili- peasant receives permission to deposit two or three francs into th» c(0: munal treasury.
Should;. vii have any doubts about it you will find these fifty docu- ments v« -Capitulated and duly numbered by M. Tricoche in the Journal des Htcoiwmiti&s.
This under the third Republic, be it understood, for I do not speak of the barbarous methods of the ancient regime that limited itself to • , - st apply in tlu- >H<:ular way Thus till l.^S.'J it u-;is yrv«Mvly forbidden tu the. vi.
re it only to buy rheiim-a! iiiiinur- - only in 56 i-liat the ilepiibh the law on ui.-icjiK, ban atnl (>1»(;K'1«'.
An«l \vo with our farultit-s blunted by Si the idea that this riirht of union of « : >r ceuturies bflon^ed to them witho- I ery man — free or serf.
f (l«?uiocracy.'' This is tlie pitch of stupidity we hav.
education, and by our own ^ — " If you have ai :urch and rl;. g inuirt re« -. - mid masons, will Jiencefoi-L :"eafc oi the towns,iii 1 ipui i. ve bpofeen was comploi ':«*!,;uid.:nni '.'Jtn.
showing every step of that annihilation. Little by little the State laid hands on all guilds and fraternities. It pressed them closely, abolished their leagues, their festivals, their aldermen and replaced them by its own functionaries and tribunals, and at the beginning of the fifteenth century, under Henry VIII, the State simply confiscated everything possessed by the guilds without further ado. The heir to the great protestant king finished his father's work.1 It was robbery carried on in open daylight, " without excuse " as Thorold ]><6j&rs has so well put it. And it is this robbery which the so-called '"Scientific ' economists represent as the " natural " death of the -guilds under the influence of economic laws!
In truth, wai it possible for the State to tolerate a guild or corpor- ation of a trade, with its tribunal, its militia, its treasury, its sworn organisation? It was for the statesmen " a State within the State " 1 The State was to destroy the guild, and it destroyed it everywhere: in England, in France, in Germany, in Bohemia, preserving only the semblance of the guild as an instrument of the exchequer, as a part of the vast administrative machine.
And — should we be astonished that guilds, trade-unions and warden - ships, deprived of everything that was formerly their life and placed under royal functionaries, became in the eighteenth century nought but encumbrances and obstacles to the development of industry, after having been the very life of progress four centuries before? The State liad killed them.
In fact it did not content if self with destroying the autonomous organ- isation which was necessary i'oi- the very life of the guilds and impeded the encroachments of the State; it did not content itself with confiscat- ing all riches and property of the guilds: it appropriated for itself all their economical functions as well.
In a city of the Middle Ages, when interests conflicted in a trade, or when two guilds disagreed, there was no other appeal than to the city. They were forced to settle matters, to find some compromise, .as all guilds were mutually allied in the city. And a compromise was always arrived at — by calling in another city to artitrate, if necessary.
Henceforth the only arbitrator was the State. All local disputes, .sometimes of the most insignificant kind, in the smallest town of a few hundred inhabitants, had to be piled up in the shape of useless docu- ments in the offices of king arid parliament. We see the English parlia- ment literally inundated with these thousands; of petty local squabbles. It ithen became necessary to have thousands of f unctionaries in the capital 1 Re*' Toulimn Smith's work on Guilds.
Tht State: IU Hittaric Hole. 35 (venal for the greater part) to classify, read, judge all these documents, to pass judgment on every detail; to regulate the way to forge a horse's hoof, bleach linen, salt herrings, make a barrel, and so on ad infinitum...and the tide still rose!
But this was not all. Soon the State laid hands on exportation. It saw in this commerce a means of enrichment, — and seized upon it. Formerly, when a dispute arose between two towns about the value of exported cloth, the purity of woo^jic the capacity of barrels of herrings, the two towns made remon6tranoeB*l»e*ofc other. If the dk -<ite lasted long, they addressed themselves to a third town to step in asTtrbitrator (this happened constantly); or else a congress of guilds of weavers and coopers was convened to regulate internationally the quality and value of cloth or the capacity of barrels.
Now, however, the State had stepped in and taken upon itself to re- gulate all these contentions from the centre, in Paris or in London. Through its functionaries it regulated the capacity of barrels, specified the quality of cloth, ordered the number of threads and their thickness in the warp and the woof and interfered in the smallest details of each industry.
You know the result. Industry under this control was dying out in the eighteenth century.
What had in fact become of Benvenuto Cellini's art under State tutel- age?— Vanished. — And the architecture of those guilds of masons and carpenters whose works of art we still admire? — Only look at the hideous monuments of the State period, and at one glance you will know that architecture was dead, so dead that up till now it has not been able to recover from the blow dealt it by the State.
What became of the fabrics of Bruges, of the cloth from Holland? What became of those blacksmiths, so skilled in manipulating iron, and who, in each European borough, knew how to turn this ungrateful metal into the most exquisite decorations? What became or those turners, those clock-makers, those fitters. who had made Nuremberg one of the glories of the Middle Ages by their instruments of precision? Speak of them to James Watt who for his steam engine, looked in vain during thirty years for a man who could make a fairly round cylinder, and whose machine remained thirty years a rough model for want of workmen to construct it!
Such was the result of State interference in the domain of industry. All that the State managed to do was to tighten the screw on the worker, depopulate the land, sow misery in the towns, reduce thousands of beings to the state of starvelings and impose industrial slavery.
And it is these miserable wrecks of «m.u»nt guilds, those organisms^ 36 Tlie State: Its Historic Rule.
mangled and oppressed by the State tha-t " scientific" economists the ignorance to confound with the guilds of the Middle Ages! What the great Revolution swept away as harmful to industry was not the guild, nor even the trade-union; it was a piece of machinery both less and harmful.
But what the Revolution took good care not to sweep away — was the power of the State over industry and over the'factory-serf.
Do you remember the discussion, which took place at the Convention — at the terrible Convention — about a strike? To the grievances of the strikers the Convention answered (I quote from memory): •' The State alone has a right to watch over the interests of all citizens. In striking, you are organising a coalition, you are creating a State within the 5 Therefore— death! " In this answer we see the bourgeois character of the French Revolu- tion. But — has that answer not a still deeper meaning? Does it not summarize the attitude of the State that found its most complete and logical expression towards the whole of society in the Jacobinism of 1 793?
'• If you have a grievance, complain to the State! It alone L. right to redress its subjects' grievances. As to combining to protect yourselves — never!" It was in this sense that the Republic called it- self one and indivisible.
Does not the modern Jacobin-Socialist think the same?.1 las nut the Convention expressed the depth of his th"M<j-',:, with the severe logic peculiar to it?
In this answer of the Convention is summed up the attitude of all States towards all combinations and all private societies, whatever be cheii aim.
As to a strike it is even now in Russia considered a crime of high treason against the State. In a great measure too in Germany, where young William said the other day: "Appeal to me; but if yo" allow yourselves to take action on your own behalf, you will ma - acquaintance of my soldiers' bayonets! " It is still almost always the case in France. And even in England, it is only after struggling a hundred years by means of secret societies, dagger thrusts for traitors and masters, explosive powder under machinery (not further back than I860), emery thrown into axle-boxes, and so forth, that English work- men have begun to conquer the right to strike; aiid they will soon have it entirely, if they do not fall into the traps that the State is already laying for them in trying to impose its obligatory arbitration '•bang"} for an eight-horn- r.uv.
5fore than a ceiftnry of r./MTible gt: A.?:<1 what sufle Its ///*/</, How many men have died jr. pii-on-, bo^ ive been * ustralia, shot nhd: bo n-ciin.jii.M- tin- ri^lit of c freely. lu'fore the State had laid it,s heav\ hand ui.
.
Hut was it the workman only who was treated in thi> fa>hi Think of the,-t rii^ul'1- the bourgeoisie itself had to c.'
ite in order to conquer the right of constituting ' commercial societies; a right which the State only conci-d-d I ed in it au ea-v method of < of it.- cr-Miuie.- and to re till ny. And M right to write, to speak. 01.-imply to t hink ditl»-rent!v fr -m \\ i orders through its academies, univei - for the ri«rht to teach, be it only reserves to itself without making u» even to obtain the right of amusing oneself in < wars which would still have to be fought for conquering th to c hoose one's judge or one s law (a thing which \\.> _io\\t;.
of the State of daily occurenee), or the strugirle> tl the day when they will burn the book of infamous pM.ii-hment-, invent ed by the spirit of the inquisition and of the de-potic empire- of the East, and known under the name of penal code!
Then look at taxation, an institution of purely State origin, that for- midunle weapon which the State makes use of in Europe a.s wel young societies in the United States to keep the m:is.-es under it- to favour friends, to ruin the greater number t» the advantage of th«>>e who govern, and to uphold the old divisions and c.->- Then take the wars, without which St.-r -;itute themselves nor stand — wars that become fatal, inevitaM. a> wadmit tliat a certain region (because it is a State) c in have in' opposed to those of its neighbours Think of pa.-t wars ainl of tho.-» we are threatened with before the conquered races will be admr breathe freely; of wars for commercial market>; of war* to onial empires. And in Fi-ance we only know too well what servitude each war, whether victoriou> or not, brings in its train.