The really communistic element in this" [late 18th century thru the early 19th century] period of French speculation is to be found in very inferior writers. Mably is perhaps the most conspicuous. With that gross ignorance of human nature which characterises the writers of his school, he maintains that the faculties and characters of men are naturally but little different, and that all men are born virtuous. ' I am persuaded,' he says, ' that if men are wicked, it is the fault of the laws.' Inequalities of fortune and condition are the root of all evil. They produce ambition and avarice, two passions which he imagines that it is in the power of the legislator to banish from human nature. The true remedy would be the abolition of private property and the establishment of community of goods. Mably, however, with a gleam of unwonted good sense, perceived that in the France of the eighteenth century this was impossible, and he contented himself, accordingly, with urging that the State should enormously increase its power over successions, should appropriate the succession of all but near relations, and should especially very strictly limit the amount of land possessed by each citizen. 'Good legislation should be continually decomposing and dividing the fortunes which avarice and ambition are continually labouring to accumulate.' If the result is diminished production, this signifies little, ' provided there are no longer patricians and plebeians in the State.' The State must act as a general and highly coercive providence. There must be a system of universal, common, and obligatory education, imitated from that of Sparta. Art should be proscribed, for statues, pictures, and vases are very useless things. They are of the nature of luxuries, and have been the source of great evils in the world. The State must also strictly regulate religion, tolerating existing creeds, but not permitting the introduction of any new religions, and punishing atheists, Epicureans, and materialists with imprisonment for life.

Doctrines of substantially the same kind were maintained by Morelly, who desired all private property to be abolished, every citizen to be reduced to the position of a functionary in the State, and all the affairs of private and domestic life to be minutely .regulated by law; and also by Warville de Brissot, whose special title to remembrance is that he is the true author of the saying, 'Property is robbery,' which Proudhon afterwards made so popular. Very consistently with this principle he defended stealing, as correcting the injustice of the institution of property.

These doctrines, however, did not play any considerable part in the Revolution, and in the first stages of that great explosion they were altogether repudiated. There is a distinction to be drawn between the confiscation of great masses of property and the establishment of principles essentially inconsistent with the existence of property. There was much confiscation in the abolition of feudal rights, and gigantic confiscations followed the political proscriptions and the emigrations ; but it was the object of the legislator to divide the confiscated land as much as possible, and the abolition of the feudal laws gave to the greatly increased number of small proprietors, both in fact and in law, an unrestricted and undivided ownership. In this way the Revolution multiplied a class who clung with extreme tenacity to the idea of private property in land. At the same time, in the spheres of industry its great work was the abolition of the monopolies, privileges, and restrictions which still existed in the mediaeval system of corporations. Before the Revolution, in nearly every town all the more important trades were concentrated in the hands of closely organised corporations, with exclusive rights of making and selling particular articles. Free competition was unknown. Every man who desired to practise a trade or industry was obliged to enter as an apprentice into one of these corporations, to pass through its grades, to submit to its rules. It is a form of industry curiously like that which would again exist if the supremacy of trade unions became complete. The abolition of this system and the establishment of complete freedom of labour had long been one of the chief objects of the party of innovation in France. The ' Essay on the Liberty of Commerce and Industry,' by the President Bigot de Sainte-Croix, and the famous introduction by Turgot to his law for the suppression of 'jurandes' and 'communautes,' state in the fullest and clearest terms the evils of the system.

The subject was one in which Turgot took a keen interest, and perhaps the most memorable act of his memorable ministry was the abolition of these corporations, which had existed for probably at least 1,000 years, and the re-establishment of freedom of labour. It was a cause in which all the philosophical party, all the men whom we should now call ' advanced thinkers,' were fully agreed. In the words of the admirable biographer of Turgot, 'an odious and ridiculous slavery was abolished. The inhabitants of the towns acquired at last the right of disposing as they pleased of their own arms and their own labour. It was a right which at that time was enjoyed in no nation, not even in those which boasted most loudly of their liberty. This right, one of the first which Nature has given us, and which may be deemed a necessary consequence of the right to live, seemed blotted out of the- memory and the heart of man. It is one of the title-deeds of humanity which had been lost in the night of the ages of barbarism, and which it has been the glory of our century to rediscover.' [Condorcet]

The edict abolishing these corporations was issued in February 1776. It was natural that so great a change should not have been effected without producing a profound convulsion, and it gave a new force and a rallying-cry to the many reactionary influences which were directed against Turgot. The Parliament of Paris, supported by a large number of provincial Parliaments, took a leading part in opposing it. A very remarkable memoir was published, entitled Memoire a consulter sur 1'existence actuelle des six corps et la conservation de leurs privileges, in which the case of the corporations was argued with much skill. Two points in it may be especially noted. One is the .prediction that, if the restrictions which the corporate system introduced into industry were abolished, there would be a dangerous and excessive migration of labour from the country to the towns. The other is a very strong assertion that the mass of the working classes preferred the corporate system, which gives industry a stability it could not otherwise have, to the system of unlimited liberty and uncontrolled competition.

The opponents of Turgot triumphed. The great minister fell, and a few months, later the old system of industrial corporations was, with some slight modifications, restored. But the whole force of the philosophical and innovating spirit in France was running against them. What we should now call Radical opinion at the close of the eighteenth century flowed as strongly against the monopolies and restrictions of corporate industry, and in favour of a complete freedom of individual industry, as it is now flowing in the opposite direction. The words which Turgot had introduced into his famous law were often repeated. ' The right to labour is the property of every man, and this property is the first, the most sacred, the most inalienable of all.' The Constitution of 1791 asserted it in the clearest terms, sweeping away the whole system of 'jurandes' and 'maltrises,' apprenticeships and industrial corporations, and proclaiming the lull right of all Frenchmen to practise, with a few specified exceptions, any form of art, or profession, or industry, on the sole condition of purchasing a license from the State.

No portion of the work of the French Revolution has been more lasting or more widely followed than this emancipation of industry, which enabled every man to carry his labour whither he pleased, to make his own terms, and enjoy the full fruits of his own industry. The Declaration of the Bights of Man and the Constitution of 1791 asserted and guaranteed in the clearest terms the rights of acquired property. 'Property is an inviolable and sacred right. No one may be deprived of it unless public necessity, legally established, evidently requires it, and then only on the condition of a just indemnity paid beforehand.' The same principle descended through succeeding codes. Even the Convention decreed the pain of death against any one who proposed a law 'subverting territorial, commercial, or industrial properties.' 'Property,' according to the Constitution of the year III., 'is the right of a man to enjoy and to dispose of his goods, his revenues, the fruit of his labour and industry.' The Code Napoleon described it as ' the right of enjoying and disposing of possessions in the most absolute manner, provided only that the owner does not make a use of them prohibited by law.'

Extreme jealousy of all corporations and combinations within the State was one of the most marked characteristics of the French Revolution. A decree of June 17,1791, contains the following remarkable article: 'The annihilation of all kinds of corporations of citizens of the same station or profession being one of the fundamental bases of the French Constitution, it is forbidden to re-establish them under any pretext or in any form. Citizens of the same station or profession, contractors, shopkeepers, workmen or apprentices in any art, are forbidden, if they come together, to elect a president, or a secretary, or a syndic to keep registers, to pass any resolutions or to form any rules about their pretended common interests.' It would be impossible to show more clearly how emphatically the spirit of the French Revolution is opposed to the organisation of labour, which is an indispensable ingredient of modern Socialism, and in no legislation were the rights of property more clearly denned or the obligations of contract more strictly enforced than in that which grew out of the Revolution.

There was, it is true, one short period in the movement when Socialist theories seemed for a time to prevail. During the Reign of Terror, in 1793, the Convention was in the hands of the most extreme party, and, in the desperate circumstances in which France then found herself through the utter disorganisation of industry and property, and through the pressure of a gigantic war, these theories were acted on with a feverish energy. War was openly declared against the rich. No one, Robespierre said, should have more than 3,000 livres of revenue.2 Vast sums, raised chiefly by confiscation, were voted for the relief of the poor. The price of all articles was strictly regulated by law. It was made death for any merchant to withhold earn or other articles of first necessity from the market, for any private person to keep more corn in his house than was required for his subsistence.8 The rich were crushed by requisitions ordering them to give up all precious metals and jewellery; by an enormously graduated taxation; by a forced loan imposed exclusively upon them ; by the forced circulation of depreciated paper. At the same time the Convention formally recognised the right of all members of society to obtain work from the State, or, if unable to labour, assured means of subsistence.

The state of society that at this time existed in France could not possibly last, and this tyranny-the most odious that modern Europe has known-soon passed away. …